“There aren’t always answers to mysteries,” Dr Stein told his friend. The dead should stay dead. Yes. He knew now that his daughter had died. He had released her memory when he had released the poor girl that Dr Pretorious had called back from the dead. Tears stood in his eyes, and Gorrall clumsily tried to comfort him, mistaking them for tears of grief.
1995
Queen of Knives
Neil Gaiman
FOR THE SEVENTH VOLUME of The Best New Horror, Luis Rey contributed, in my opinion, his finest cover to the series, ably showcased by Robinson’s classy design.
Once again issued under the soon-to-be-defunct Raven Books imprint, the Introduction leapt to forty-three pages while the Necrology crept up to nineteen. I also added a section of “Useful Addresses”, which I thought might function as a helpful reference source for readers and authors alike. At almost 600 pages, this was one of the biggest volumes we have ever published in the series.
This time I got to sound off about a personal irritation at avaricious writers and others who actively solicit awards in our genre. Not only is it debasing to them and their work, but it also dilutes the worth of any prize that is cynically canvassed for in this way. Unfortunately, many of today’s awards in the field continue to be diminished by active campaigning and manipulation by those desperate to win them at any price.
Volume Seven contained twenty-six stories, including a posthumously published tale by the great pulp writer Manly Wade Wellman (who died in 1986), and another belated contribution by writer Jane Rice, who regularly appeared in John W. Campbell’s pulp magazine Unknown in the 1940s.
Brian Stableford’s genre-bending novella “The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires” was certainly the longest contribution in the book, but this time I’ve selected one of the shortest – Neil Gaiman’s “Queen of Knives”.
Neil has never been scared to take chances with his fiction, and this creepy prose poem is another example of one of our most creative writers once again pushing the boundaries of the genre. A view of the adult world as seen through the perspective of a child, like Christopher Fowler’s story earlier in this volume, it also stands as a tribute to another almost-forgotten British comedian – Harry Worth.
“The re-appearance of the lady is a matter of individual taste.”
– Will Goldston, Tricks and Illusions
WHEN I WAS A BOY, from time to time,
I stayed with my grandparents
(old people: I knew they were old –
chocolates in their house
remained uneaten until I came to stay,
this, then, was ageing).
My grandfather always made breakfast at sun-up:
A pot of tea, for her and him and me,
some toast and marmalade
(the Silver Shred and the Gold). Lunch and dinner,
those were my grandmother’s to make, the kitchen
was again her domain, all the pans and spoons,
the mincer, all the whisks and knives, her loyal subjects.
She would prepare the food with them, singing her little songs:
Daisy Daisy give me your answer do,
or sometimes,
You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it,
I didn’t want to do it.
She had no voice, not one to speak of.
Business was very slow.
My grandfather spent his days at the top of the house,
in his tiny darkroom where I was not permitted to go,
bringing out paper faces from the darkness,
the cheerless smiles of other people’s holidays.
My grandmother would take me for grey walks along the promenade.
Mostly I would explore
the small wet grassy space behind the house,
the blackberry brambles and the garden shed.
It was a hard week for my grandparents
forced to entertain a wide-eyed boy-child, so
one night they took me to the King’s Theatre. The King’s . . .
Variety!
The lights went down, red curtains rose.
A popular comedian of the day,
came on, stammered out his name (his catchphrase),
pulled out a sheet of glass, and stood half-behind it,
raising the arm and leg that we could see;
reflected
he seemed to fly – it was his trademark,
so we all laughed and cheered. He told a joke or two,
quite badly. His haplessness, his awkwardness,
these were what we had come to see.
Bemused and balding and bespectacled,
he reminded me a little of my grandfather.
And then the comedian was done.
Some ladies danced all legs across the stage.
A singer sang a song I didn’t know.
The audience were old people,
like my grandparents, tired and retired,
all of them laughing and applauding.
In the interval my grandfather
queued for a choc-ice and a couple of tubs.
We ate our ices as the lights went down.
The “SAFETY CURTAIN” rose, and then the real curtain.
The ladies danced across the stage again,
and then the thunder rolled, the smoke went puff,
a conjurer appeared and bowed. We clapped.
The lady walked on, smiling from the wings:
glittered. Shimmered. Smiled.
We looked at her, and in that moment flowers grew,
and silks and pennants tumbled from his fingertips.
The flags of all nations, said my grandfather, nudging me.
They were up his sleeve.
Since he was a young man,
(I could not imagine him as a child)
my grandfather had been, by his own admission,
one of the people who knew how things worked.
He had built his own television,
my grandmother told me, when they were first married,
it was enormous, though the screen was small.
This was in the days before television programmes;
they watched it, though,
unsure whether it was people or ghosts they were seeing.
He had a patent, too, for something he invented,
but it was never manufactured.
Stood for the local council, but he came in third.
He could repair a shaver or a wireless,
develop your film, or build a house for dolls.
(The doll’s house was my mother’s. We still had it at my house,
shabby and old it sat out in the grass, all rained-on and forgot.)
The glitter lady wheeled on a box.
The box was tall: grown-up-person-sized, and black.
She opened up the front.
They turned it round and banged upon the back.
The lady stepped inside, still smiling,
The magician closed the door on her.
When it was opened she had gone.
He bowed.
Mirrors, explained my grandfather. She’s really still inside.
At a gesture, the box collapsed to matchwood.
A trapdoor, assured my grandfather;
Grandma hissed him silent.
The magician smiled, his teeth were small and crowded;
he walked, slowly, out into the audience.
He pointed to my grandmother, he bowed,
a Middle-European bow,
and invited her to join him on the stage.
The other people clapped and cheered.
My grandmother demurred. I was so close
to the magician, that I could smell his aftershave,
and whispered “Me, oh, me . . .” But still,
he reached his long fingers for my grandmother.
Pearl, go on up, said my grandfather. Go with the man.
My grandmother must have been, what? Sixty, then?
She had jus
t stopped smoking,
was trying to lose some weight. She was proudest
of her teeth, which, though tobacco-stained were all her own.
My grandfather had lost his, as a youth,
riding his bicycle; he had the bright idea
to hold on to a bus to pick up speed.
The bus had turned,
and Grandpa kissed the road.
She chewed hard liquorice, watching TV at night,
or sucked hard caramels, perhaps to make him wrong.
She stood up, then, a little slowly.
Put down the paper tub half-full of ice cream,
the little wooden spoon—
went down the aisle, and up the steps.
And on the stage.
The conjurer applauded her once more—
A good sport. That was what she was. A sport.
Another glittering woman came from the wings,
bringing another box—
this one was red.
That’s her, nodded my grandfather, the one
who vanished off before. You see? That’s her.
Perhaps it was. All I could see
was a woman who sparkled, standing next to my grandmother,
(who fiddled with her pearls, and looked embarrassed.)
The lady smiled and faced us, then she froze,
a statue, or a window mannequin.
The magician pulled the box,
with ease,
down to the front of stage, where my grandmother waited.
A moment or so of chitchat:
where she was from, her name, that kind of thing.
They’d never met before? She shook her head.
The magician opened the door,
my grandmother stepped in.
Perhaps it’s not the same one, admitted my grandfather,
on reflection,
I think she had darker hair, the other girl.
I didn’t know.
I was proud of my grandmother, but also embarrassed,
hoping she’d do nothing to make me squirm,
that she wouldn’t sing one of her songs.
She walked into the box. They shut the door.
He opened a compartment at the top, a little door. We saw
my grandmother’s face. Pearl? Are you all right Pearl?
My grandmother smiled and nodded.
The magician closed the door.
The lady gave him a long thin case,
so he opened it. Took out a sword
and rammed it through the box.
And then another, and another
And my grandfather chuckled and explained
The blade slides in the hilt, and then a fake
slides out the other side.
Then he produced a sheet of metal, which
he slid into the box half the way up.
It cut the thing in half. The two of them,
the woman and the man, lifted the top
half of the box up and off, and put it on the stage,
with half my grandma in.
The top half.
He opened up the little door again, for a moment,
My grandmother’s face beamed at us, trustingly.
When he closed the door before,
she went down a trapdoor,
And now she’s standing halfway up,
my grandfather confided.
She’ll tell us how it’s done, when it’s all over.
I wanted him to stop talking: I needed the magic.
Two knives now, through the half-a-box,
at neck-height.
Are you there, Pearl? asked the magician. Let us know
– do you know any songs?
My grandmother sang Daisy Daisy.
He picked up the part of the box,
with the little door in it – the head part –
and he walked about, and she sang
Daisy Daisy first at one side of the stage,
and at the other.
That’s him, said my grandfather, and he’s throwing his voice.
It sounds like Grandma, I said.
Of course it does, he said. Of course it does.
He’s good, he said. He’s good. He’s very good.
The conjuror opened up the box again,
now hatbox-sized. My grandmother had finished Daisy Daisy,
and was on a song which went
My my here we go the driver’s drunk and the horse won’t go
now we’re going back now we’re going back
back back back to London Town.
She had been born in London. Told me ominous tales
from time to time to time
of her childhood. Of the children who ran into her father’s shop
shouting shonky shonky sheeny, running away;
she would not let me wear a black shirt because,
she said, she remembered the marches through the East End.
Mosley’s black-shirts. Her sister got an eye blackened.
The conjurer took a kitchen knife,
pushed it slowly through the red hatbox.
And then the singing stopped.
He put the boxes back together,
pulled out the knives and swords, one by one by one.
He opened the compartment in the top: my grandmother smiled,
embarrassed, at us, displaying her own old teeth.
He closed the compartment, hiding her from view.
Pulled out the last knife.
Opened the main door again,
and she was gone.
A gesture, and the red box vanished too.
It’s up his sleeve, my grandfather explained, but seemed unsure.
The conjurer made two doves fly from a burning plate.
A puff of smoke, and he was gone as well.
She’ll be under the stage now, or back-stage,
said my grandfather,
having a cup of tea. She’ll come back to us with flowers,
or with chocolates. I hoped for chocolates.
The dancing girls again.
The comedian, for the last time.
And all of them came on together at the end.
The grand finale, said my grandfather. Look sharp,
perhaps she’ll be back on now.
But no. They sang
when you’re riding along
on the crest of the wave
and the sun is in the sky.
The curtain went down, and we shuffled out into the lobby.
We loitered for a while.
Then we went down to the stage door,
and waited for my grandmother to come out.
The conjurer came out in street clothes;
the glitter woman looked so different in a mac.
My grandfather went to speak to him. He shrugged,
told us he spoke no English and produced
a half-a-crown from behind my ear,
and vanished off into the dark and rain.
I never saw my grandmother again.
We went back to their house, and carried on.
My grandfather now had to cook for us.
And so for breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea
we had golden toast, and silver marmalade
and cups of tea.
Till I went home.
He got so old after that night
as if the years took him all in a rush.
Daisy Daisy, he’d sing, give me your answer do.
If you were the only girl in the world and I were the only boy.
My old man said follow the van.
My grandfather had the voice in the family,
they said he could have been a cantor,
but there were snapshots to develop,
radios and razors to repair . . .
his brothers were a singing duo: the Nightingales,
had been on television in the early days.
He bore it well. Although, quite late one night,
I w
oke, remembering the liquorice sticks in the pantry,
I walked downstairs:
my grandfather stood there in his bare feet.
And, in the kitchen, all alone,
I saw him stab a knife into a box.
You made me love you.
I didn’t want to do it.
1996
The Break
Terry Lamsley
LUIS REY’S “EYEBALLS” PAINTING may not have been quite as effective as his previous three contributions, but it ended his association with the series and rounded out a run of four covers that, so far as I am concerned, represent the indisputable high point of Best New Horror’s design and packaging.
With an Introduction running to forty-eight pages and a twenty-one page Necrology, the non-fiction elements of the book were finally becoming as important as the fiction. This time I looked at the decline in horror publishing during the second half of the 1990s, and predicted a resurgence in the genre with the new millennium.
In retrospect, horror never did return to the dizzy heights of popularity it achieved in the 1980s, but after the boom-and-bust years it did finally re-establish itself as a viable publishing niche before the next cycle began to decay again.
The twenty-four stories included a final contribution by the late Karl Edward Wagner (“Final Cut”) and marked the first of two appearances to date of literary writer Iain Sinclair (“Hardball”). Volume Eight was one of those rare occasions in the series where I didn’t use a story by Ramsey Campbell, so the book was – belatedly – dedicated to him instead.
Until then I had succeeded in limiting the contributions (except for collaborations) to one story per author in each volume. However, the publication of Terry Lamsley’s second remarkable collection of short stories, Conference with the Dead: Tales of Supernatural Terror, forced me to break my own rule and finally accept two stories by a single author. His darkly humorous “Walking the Dog” opened the book, while the even more disturbing story that follows memorably closed the eighth edition of The Best New Horror . . .
INSTEAD OF GETTING UNDRESSED straight away, as Gran had told him to, Danny pulled aside one of the curtains she had drawn together and peered out again at the jetty, on the edge of the harbour to the right of him, to see what the men on the boat were doing. The little craft, a fishing smack, had docked five minutes earlier, and he had watched with admiration as the men aboard had manoeuvred it into place as easily as if they were parking a car. The sky was getting darker and the sea was flat, black and shiny, except for the white lace of tiny waves tacked along the edge of the beach. He could no longer make out the shape of the hull of the vessel, but the jetty was built of pale, slightly yellow stone against which he could see, in silhouette, the top of the boat and the activities of the two sailors on board.
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