“I yelled to him to stay away. He didn’t listen to me. I suppose he thought if he got close enough he could maybe catch hold of her arm. But the corpse came at him, still waving its hands, still shooing, and when Walter wouldn’t be shooed the thing simply knocked him down. I saw him flail for a moment, and then try to get back up. But the dead – or pieces of the dead – were everywhere in the grass around his feet. And once he was down, they were upon him.
“I told the Englishman to come with me, and I started off across the yard to help Walter. There was only one ball in the musket, so I didn’t want to waste it firing from a distance, and maybe missing my target. Besides I wasn’t sure what I was going to fire at. The closer I got to the circle in which Elise was crawling around – still being clawed and petted – the more of Skal’s unholy handiwork I saw. Whatever spells he’d cast here, they seemed to have raised every last dead thing in the place. The ground was crawling with bits of this and that; fingers, pieces of dried up flesh with locks of hair attached; wormy fragments that were beyond recognition.
“By the time we reached Walter, he’d already lost the fight. The horrors he’d paid to have resurrected – ungrateful things – had torn him open in a hundred places. One of his eyes had been thumbed out, there was a gaping hole in his chest.
“His murderers were still working on him. I batted a few limbs off him with the musket, but there were so many it was only a matter of time, I knew, before they came after me. I turned around to Skal, intending to order him again to bring this abomination to a halt, but he was springing off between the graves. In a sudden surge of rage, I raised the musket and I fired. The felon went down, howling in the grass. I went to him. He was badly wounded, and in great pain, but I was in no mood to help him. He was responsible for all this. Wolfram dead, and Elise still crouching amongst her rotted admirers; all of this was Skal’s fault. I had no sympathy for the man.
“‘What does it take to make this stop?’ I asked him. ‘What are the words?’
“His teeth were chattering. It was hard to make out what he was saying. Finally I understood.
“‘When . . . the . . . sun . . . comes up . . .’ he said to me.
“‘You can’t stop it any other way?’
“‘No,’ he said. ‘No . . . other . . . way . . .’
“Then he died. You can imagine my despair. I could do nothing. There was no way to get to Elise without suffering the same fate as Walter. And anyway, she wouldn’t have come. It was an hour from dawn, at least. All I could do was what I did: climb over the wall, and wait. The sounds were horrible. In some ways, worse than the sight. She must have been exhausted by now, but she kept going. Sighing sometimes, sobbing sometimes, moaning sometimes. Not – let me make it perfectly clear – the despairing moan of a woman who understands that she is in the grip of the dead. This was the moan of a deeply pleasured woman; a woman in bliss.
“Just a few minutes before dawn, the sounds subsided. Only when they had died away completely did I look back over the wall. Elise had gone. Her lovers lay around in the ground, exhausted as perhaps only the dead can be. The clouds were lightening in the East. I suppose resurrected flesh has a fear of the light, because as the last stars crept away so did the dead. They crawled back into the earth, and covered themselves with the dirt that had been shovelled down upon their coffins . . .”
Haeckel’s voice had become a whisper in these last minutes, and now it trailed away completely. We sat around not looking at one another, each of us deep in thought. If any of us had entertained the notion that Haeckel’s tale was some invention, the force of his telling – the whiteness of his skin, the tears that had now and then appeared in his eyes – had thrust such doubts from us, at least for now.
It was Purrucker who spoke first, inevitably. “So you killed a man,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
Haeckel looked up at him. “I haven’t finished my story,” he said.
“Jesus . . .” I murmured, “. . . what else is there to tell?”
“If you remember, I’d left all my books, and some gifts I’d brought from Wittenberg for my father, at Herr Wolfram’s house. So I made my way back there. I was in a kind of terrified trance, my mind still barely able to grasp what I’d seen.
“When I got to the house I heard somebody singing. A sweet lilting voice it was. I went to the door. My belongings were sitting there on the table where I’d left them. The room was empty. Praying that I’d go unheard, I entered. As I picked up my philosophy books and my father’s gift the singing stopped.
“I retreated to the door but before I could reach the threshold Elise appeared, with her infant in her arms. The woman looked the worse for her philanderings, no question about that. There were scratches all over her face, and her arms, and on the plump breast at which the baby now sucked. But marked as she was, there was nothing but happiness in her eyes. She was sweetly content with her life at that moment.
“I thought perhaps she had no memory of what had happened to her. Maybe the necromancer had put her into some kind of trance, I reasoned; and now she’d woken from it the past was all forgotten.
“I started to explain to her. ‘Walter . . .’ I said.
“‘Yes, I know—’ she replied. ‘He’s dead.’ She smiled at me; a May morning smile. ‘He was old,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘But he was always kind to me. Old men are the best husbands. As long as you don’t want children.’
“My gaze must have gone from her radiant face to the baby at her nipple, because she said:
“‘Oh, this isn’t Walter’s boy.’
“As she spoke she tenderly teased the infant from her breast, and it looked my way. There it was: life-in-death, perfected. Its face was shiny pink, and its limbs fat from its mother’s milk, but its sockets were deep as the grave, and its mouth wide, so that its teeth, which were not an infant’s teeth, were bared in a perpetual grimace.
“The dead, it seemed, had given her more than pleasure.
“I dropped the books, and the gift for my father there on the doorstep. I stumbled back out into the daylight, and I ran – oh God in Heaven, I ran! – afraid to the very depths of my soul. I kept on running until I reached the road. Though I had no desire to venture past the graveyard again, I had no choice: it was the only route I knew, and I did not want to get lost, I wanted to be home. I wanted a church, an altar, piety, prayers.
“It was not a busy thoroughfare by any means, and if anyone had passed along it since day-break they’d decided to leave the necromancer’s body where it lay beside the wall. But the crows were at his face, and foxes at his hands and feet. I crept by without disturbing their feast.”
Again, Haeckel halted. This time, he expelled a long, long sigh. “And that, gentlemen, is why I advise you to be careful in your judgments of this man Montesquino.”
He rose as he spoke, and went to the door. Of course we all had questions, but none of us spoke then, not then. We let him go. And for my part, gladly. I’d enough of these horrors for one night.
Make of all this what you will. I don’t know to this day whether I believe the story or not (though I can’t see any reason why Haeckel would have invented it. Just as he’d predicted, he was treated very differently after that night; kept at arm’s length). The point is that the thing still haunts me; in part, I suppose, because I never made up my mind whether I thought it was a falsehood or not. I’ve sometimes wondered what part it played in the shaping of my life: if perhaps my cleaving to empiricism – my devotion to Helmholtz’s methodologies – was not in some way the consequence of this hour spent in the company of Haeckel’s account.
Nor do I think I was alone in my preoccupation with what I heard.
Though I saw less and less of the other members of the group as the years went by, on those occasions when we did meet up the conversation would often drift round to that story, and our voices would drop to near-whispers, as though we were embarrassed to be confessing that we even remembered what Haeckel had said.
<
br /> A couple of members of the group went to some lengths to pluck holes in what they’d heard, I remember; to expose it as nonsense. I think Eisentrout actually claimed he’d retraced Haeckel’s journey from Wittenberg to Luneburg, and claimed there was no necropolis along the route. As for Haeckel himself, he treated these attacks upon his veracity with indifference. We had asked him to tell us what he thought of necromancers, and he’d told us. There was nothing more to say on the matter.
And in a way he was right. It was just a story told on a hot night, long ago, when I was still dreaming of what I would become.
And yet now, sitting here at the window, knowing I will never again be strong enough to step outside, and that soon I must join Purrucker and the others in the earth, I find the terror coming back to me; the terror of some convulsive place where death has a beautiful woman in its teeth, and she gives voice to bliss. I have, if you will, fled Haeckel’s story over the years; hidden my head under the covers of reason. But here, at the end, I see that there is no asylum to be had from it; or rather, from the terrible suspicion that it contains a clue to the ruling principle of the world.
2006
Devil’s Smile
Glen Hirshberg
LES EDWARDS’ COVER PAINTING for volume eighteen could easily depict one of the characters from Clive Barker’s preceding tale. It was designed by Mike and myself on the understanding that only some of the cover would be reproduced in the foil technique, to give greater impact to the image.
Unfortunately, a mistake in the printing process resulted in the entire cover – including the spine and back cover, along with all the lettering – being rendered in the process. Although it did not quite work as envisaged, if you hold the book under a direct light source you can still get a sense of the subtle shades of Les’ original work.
The Introduction was down again, to only seventy-two pages, and even the Necrology came in at a respectable sixty-two. This time I brought attention to the refusal of the judges of the 2006 International Horror Guild Award to nominate any anthology for an award that year. It was not that they decided to simply not to name a winner, but that they felt that there was not one single volume published in that year that was worthy of even a nomination. When I became involved in an open letter to the administrators condemning their decision, I started receiving threatening and insulting e-mails. My editor asked me to cut the piece, even though it would have made no difference to the overall length of the book.
As it turns out, the IHG Awards no longer exist, but at the time they did themselves – and the field they supposedly represented – a major disservice by their actions, and the whole episode was a disheartening one for me personally.
After seventeen years, this was also the final American edition under the Carroll & Graf imprint. After the departure of its eponymous founders, successive publishing corporations had acquired the once-independent imprint until it was finally phased out in 2007.
The anthology once again won the British Fantasy Award, and the twenty-four stories featured the now usual mixture of old and new names, including young adult author John Gordon, science fiction writer Michael Bishop, and Geoff Ryman with a World Fantasy Award-nominated novella that involved Cambodian ghosts.
I was first introduced to Glen Hirshberg by Ellen Datlow at the 2001 World Fantasy Convention in Montreal, Canada. At her urging, I looked at his published fiction and quickly realized that he was a major new talent in our genre. His first story in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror appeared in the thirteenth volume (with the infamous glowing skull on the cover). Since then, he has been represented by a remarkable six stories over a further seven volumes. He really is that good.
I could have chosen any one of them to appear in this book, but in the end I went for “Devil’s Smile” – simply because it is the creepiest of all of them . . .
“In hollows of the liquid hills
Where the long Blue Ridges run
The flatter of no echo thrills
For echo the seas have none;
Nor aught that gives man back man’s strain–
The hope of his heart, the dream in his brain.”
—Herman Melville, “Pebbles”
TURNING IN HIS SADDLE, Selkirk peered behind him through the flurrying snow, trying to determine which piece of debris had lamed his horse. All along what had been the carriage road, bits of driftwood, splintered sections of hull and harpoon handle, discarded household goods – pans, candlesticks, broken-backed books, empty lanterns – and at least one section of long, bleached-white jaw lay half-buried in the sand. The jaw still had baleen attached, and bits of blown snow had stuck in it, which made it look more recently alive than it should have.
Selkirk rubbed his tired eyes against the grey December morning and hunched deeper into his inadequate long coat as the wind whistled off the whitecaps and sliced between the dunes. The straw hat he wore more out of habit than hope of protection did nothing to warm him, and stray blond curls kept whipping across his eyes. Easing himself from the horse, Selkirk dropped to the sand.
He should have conducted his business here months ago. His surveying route for the still-fledgling United States Lighthouse Service had taken him in a criss-crossing loop from the tip of the Cape all the way up into Maine and back. He’d passed within fifty miles of Cape Roby Light and its singular keeper twice this fall, and both times had continued on. Why? Because Amalia had told him the keeper’s tale on the night he’d imagined she loved him? Or maybe he just hated coming back here even more than he thought he would. For all he knew, the keeper had long since moved on, dragging her memories behind her. She might even have died. So many did, around here. Setting his teeth against the wind, Selkirk wrapped his frozen fingers in his horse’s bridle and led her the last down-sloping mile and a half into Winsett.
Entering from the east, he saw a scatter of stone and clapboard homes and boarding houses hunched against the dunes, their windows dark. None of them looked familiar. Like so many of the little whaling communities he’d visited during his survey, the town he’d known had simply drained away into the burgeoning, bloody industry centres at New Bedford and Nantuckett.
Selkirk had spent one miserable fall and winter here fourteen years ago, sent by his drunken father to learn candle-making from his drunken uncle. He’d accepted the nightly open-fisted beatings without comment, skulking afterward down to the Blubber Pike tavern to watch the whalers: the Portuguese swearing loudly at each other and the Negroes – so many Negroes, most of them recently freed, more than a few newly-escaped – clinging in clumps to the shadowy back tables and stealing fearful glances at every passing face, as though they expected at any moment to be spirited away.
Of course, there’d been his cousin, Amalia, for all the good that had ever done him. She’d just turned eighteen at the time, two years his senior. Despite her blond hair and startling fullness, the Winsett whalers had already learned to steer clear, but for some reason, she’d liked Selkirk. At least, she’d liked needling him about his outsized ears, his floppy hair, the crack in his voice he could not outgrow. Whatever the reason, she’d lured him away from the pub on several occasions to stare at the moon and drink beside him. And once, in a driving sleet, she’d led him on a midnight walk to Cape Roby Point. There, lurking uncomfortably close but never touching him, standing on the rocks with her dark eyes cocked like rifle sites at the rain, she’d told him the lighthouse keeper’s story. At the end, without any explanation, she’d turned, opened her heavy coat and pulled him to her. He’d had no idea what she wanted him to do, and had wound up simply setting his ear against her slicked skin, all but tasting the water that rushed into the valley between her breasts, listening to her heart banging way down inside her.
After that, she’d stopped speaking to him entirely. He’d knocked on her door, chased her half out of the shop one morning and been stopped by a chop to the throat from his uncle, left notes he hoped she’d find peeking out from under the rug in the upstairs h
allway. She’d responded to none of it, and hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye when he left. And Selkirk had steered clear of all women for more than a decade afterward, except for the very occasional company he paid for near the docks where he slung cargo, until the Lighthouse Service offered him an unexpected escape.
Now, half-dragging his horse down the empty main street, Selkirk found he couldn’t even remember which grim room the Blubber Pike had been. He passed no one. But at the western edge of the frozen, cracking main thoroughfare, less than a block from where his uncle had kept his establishment, he found a traveller’s stable and entered.
The barn was lit by banks of horseshoe-shaped wall sconces – apparently, local whale oil or no, candles remained in ready supply – and a coal fire glowed in the open iron stove at the rear of the barn. A dark-haired stable lad with a clam-shaped birthmark covering his left cheek and part of his forehead appeared from one of the stables in the back, tsked over Selkirk’s injured mount and said he’d send for the horse doctor as soon as he’d got the animal dried and warmed and fed.
“Still a horse doctor here?” Selkirk asked.
The boy nodded. He was almost as tall as Selkirk, and spoke with a Scottish burr. “Still good business. Got to keep the means of getting out healthy.”
“Not many staying in town anymore, then?”
“Just the dead ones. Lot of those.”
Selkirk paid the boy and thanked him, then wandered toward the stove and stood with his hands extended to the heat, which turned them purplish red. If he got about doing what should have been done years ago, he’d be gone by nightfall, providing his horse could take him. From his memory of the midnight walk with Amalia, Cape Roby Point couldn’t be more than three miles away. Once at the lighthouse, if its long-time occupant did indeed still live there, he’d brook no romantic nonsense – neither his own, nor the keeper’s. The property did not belong to her, was barely suitable for habitation, and its lack of both updated equipment and experienced, capable attendant posed an undue and unacceptable threat to any ship unlucky enough to hazard past. Not that many bothered anymore with this particular stretch of abandoned, storm-battered coast.
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