Stone sat for a moment, all of him concentrating on the silence, the blind darkness. Then he began to kick frantically at the nose of the car. The car shook a little with his attack, but stayed where it was. By the time it decided to move forward, the pressure of his blood seemed to be turning the darkness red.
When the car nosed its way around the next curve, slowing as if sniffing the track ahead, Stone heard a muted thud and creak of wood above the noise of the wheels. It came from in front of him. The sort of thing you hear in a house at night, he thought. Soon be out now.
Without warning a face came rushing towards him out of the darkness a few feet ahead. It jerked forward as he did. Of course it would, he thought with a grimace, sinking back and watching his face sink briefly into the mirror. Now he could see that he and the car were surrounded by a faint light that extended as far as the wooden frame of the mirror. Must be the end of the ride. They can’t get any more obvious than that. Effective in its way, I suppose.
He watched himself in the mirror as the car followed the curve past. His silhouette loomed on the greyish light, which had fallen behind. Suddenly he frowned. His silhouette was moving independent of the movement of the car. It was beginning to swing out of the limits of the mirror. Then he remembered the wardrobe that had stood at the foot of his childhood bed, and realised what was happening. The mirror was set in a door, which was opening.
Stone pressed himself against the opposite side of the car, which had slowed almost to a halt. No no, he thought, it mustn’t. Don’t. He heard a grinding of gears beneath him; unmeshed metal shrieked. He threw his body forward, against the nose of the car. In the darkness to his left he heard the creak of the door and a soft thud. The car moved a little, then caught the gears and ground forward.
As the light went out behind him, Stone felt a weight fall beside him on the seat.
He cried out. Or tried to, for as he gulped in air it seemed to draw darkness into his lungs, darkness that swelled and poured into his heart and brain. There was a moment in which he knew nothing, as if he’d become darkness and silence and the memory of suffering. Then the car was rattling on, the darkness was sweeping over him and by, and the nose of the car banged open the doors and plunged out into the night.
As the car swung onto the length of track outside the Ghost Train, Stone caught sight of the gap between the stalls where he had thought he’d seen the stallholders. A welling moonlight showed him that between the stalls stood a pile of sacks, nodding and gesticulating in the wind. Then the seat beside him emerged from the shadow, and he looked down.
Next to him on the seat was a shrunken hooded figure. It wore a faded jacket and trousers striped and patched in various colours, indistinguishable in the receding moonlight. The head almost reached his shoulder. Its arms hung slack at its sides, and its feet drummed laxly on the metal beneath the seat. Shrinking away, Stone reached for the front of the car to pull himself to his feet, and the figure’s head fell back.
Stone closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw within the hood an oval of white cloth upon which—black crosses for eyes, a barred crescent for a mouth—a grinning face was stitched.
As he had suddenly realised that the car hadn’t halted nor even slowed before plunging down the incline back into the Ghost Train, Stone did not immediately notice that the figure had taken his hand.
Afterword
This was my fourth collection to see print, and the first not to appear through the eldritch portals of Arkham House. After imitating Lovecraft in The Inhabitant of the Lake I’d spent five years developing my own approach, which was loosed upon the world at book length in Demons by Daylight. The Height of the Scream was more experimental, too often wilfully so, and less sure of itself. I’d say Dark Companions leaves those problems behind. Only the title was a compromise: I’d meant to call it Just Behind You until I learned that my old friend Manly Wade Wellman had that in mind for a book of his own. In fact he never used the title, and so I did just a couple of years back.
Let me reminisce as best I can about these tales, written by the long-haired genial freak who appears in a zippered suede shirt on the back flap of the first edition. I’ll go at them in the order they appear herein. “Mackintosh Willy” was written in 1977—to be precise, the first draft was begun on 22 August and completed six days later. In those days I kept a diary in a ledger and recorded the progress of my first drafts, though not of the rewriting. Charlie Grant bought the tale for one of his Shadows anthologies but found the punch line understated, even for his taste, and so I substituted the last line we have here. As for the story behind the story, there isn’t much to tell. For several years Jenny and I did indeed live across West Derby Road from Newsham Park, where I often took a hashish-eater’s stroll. One day I misread the graffiti in a shelter as the narrator does, and noticed footprints set in new concrete around the nearby pond. This was all my imagination needed. Alas, when I took J. K. Potter on a tour of my locations years later, the shelter had been demolished. The tale brought me a World Fantasy Award in the short story category, which I shared with Elizabeth Lynn, and we hugged onstage in Baltimore.
“Napier Court” was the last tale I wrote in 1967, in the midst of the Demons by Daylight bunch. Like several of those stories, it was a radical rewrite of a first draft. The 1965 version had a male protagonist laid up in bed, but Alma Napier is based on my solitary ex-fiancée, from whom I’d parted several months before writing this version. Along with “Concussion” it’s among my most nakedly autobiographical tales. Before August Derleth bought it I sent a copy to Kirby McCauley, then a friend and later also my agent. Kirby showed the typescript to J. Vernon Shea, who commented that if I was like Peter in the tale I couldn’t be much of a catch. Indeed, and I knew it, which was why I tried to depict myself as honestly as possible: perhaps it was a means of outgrowing that personality as well. Basing the tale on my experience was also certainly a way of bringing it to life.
I’ve a confession to make about “Down There”. It was begun on 9 September 1978, less than three weeks after our daughter’s birth. Indeed, four days after she was born I set about writing another tale, “This Time”, completed a week later. I may have been afraid that the change in my life might hinder my writing, but was this really an excuse to devote so much time to proving the reverse? The first draft of “Down There” took seven days and is described in the diary as “laboured”—serve me right, you may think. As I often do, I reassured myself that it could be rewritten, and so it was. It certainly needed it, which I can demonstrate with the opening of the first draft:
“Hurry along there,” Steve called as the girls trooped down the office. “Last one tonight. Mind the doors.”
The girls smiled at Elaine as they passed her desk, but their smiles meant different things: just like you to make things more difficult for the rest of us, looks like you’ve been kept in after school, suppose you’ve nothing better to do, fancy having to put up with him by yourself. She didn’t give a damn what they thought of her, which was part of what irked them, and she was quite content to be alone with Steve—if only he wouldn’t make a joke of everything.
Even the lifts, one of which had sunk to the sub-basement every time it was called today. Presumably the sub-basement was no longer so disgusting, but Elaine was glad she hadn’t had to go down there, even momentarily. Glancing back through the window that sealed her off from the lobby, she saw that the lift was out of order now. Its twin was stuffing people into itself, closing its doors whether or not they were ready, leaving the girls behind. They loitered near the other lift as though by pretending not to notice it they might persuade it to relent. When one of them caught her eye, Elaine looked away. She wasn’t about to let them think she was envying them.
There was nothing to envy, especially when they would have to face the November night, the downpour. Around the office building the warehouses looked like melting chocolate; the river and the canals were opaque with tangled ripples that almost extinguis
hed the reflections of streetlamps. Cottages and terraces, some of them derelict, crowded up the steep hills towards the disused mines. Through the skeins of water on the glass their infrequent lights looked shaky as the flames of candles.
“Goodnight comrade,” Steve said like the title of a song as Mr Williams went by, and Elaine had to stifle a grin. Mr Williams had tried to dissuade Elaine from working tonight, from being exploited as he’d called it, long after the rest of them had desisted. It was all very well for him: his father wasn’t an invalid, he earned enough to keep his parents without working overtime. He had only annoyed her by harping on the things that were wrong with the place: she had to work overtime—how could it help to remember what might go wrong?
Still, he’d given up finally [unlike this turgid prose, its greying author grumbles], and she was alone on the sixth floor with Steve—alone in the otherwise untenanted building except for the caretaker, wherever he was. Ranks of cabinets like bookcases divided the long room down the middle; they were stuffed with blue Inland Revenue files. Beneath a fluttering fluorescent tube protruding files drowsed, jerked awake [much like the author as he transcribes this]. Smells of dust and old paper drifted about the room, which was growing oppressively hot. Through the steamy window above an unquenchable radiator, Elaine could just make out the frame where the top section of the fire escape should be.
“There goes our Red,” Steve remarked. “Into somebody’s bed rather than under it, from what I hear.” She smiled a little timidly across the stretch of desks at him and lit a cigarette for confidence. Being alone with Steve and his risqué joke made her feel queasy and nervous, an odd sensation like the start of an adventure, but at least the length of the office separated them. She began to compare a tax return with last year’s.
“You can understand these union men, especially round here,” Steve said. Perhaps he’d taken her shyness for disagreement. “The trouble is, it’s never the employers they hurt most, always the public” [or the long-suffering reader who has to trudge through this mire of dialogue].
He reminded her of her father: fair, but not too fair. Was Mr Williams a genuine Red? [Was their author a genuine bore?] Certainly he’d opposed the move to the building long after the rest of the union had accepted it, very temporarily. Of course his father had lost his job when the mines were shut down, but need that mean employers were always wrong?
Steve was gazing at her, blank-faced again. “Are you feeling exploited again?”
Mr Williams had called her the employers’ weapon against solidarity. “No, certainly not.” She wished Steve would let her be quiet for a while; she would chat when she felt more at ease. “I’m feeling hot,” she said.
“Yes, it is a bit much.” He stood up, mopping his forehead theatrically. “I’ll go and sort out Mr Tuttle,” he said. “Maybe he can do something about this bloody awful first draft we’re stuck in…”
Well, you get the idea, probably more than you want. For the record, the story came to me when the light failed in the lift at Radio Merseyside, where I then worked as a film reviewer. Some years ago Guillermo del Toro rang me, enthusiastically proposing to film “Down There” as his contribution to an anthology movie. The project was set up—it would have been something like the Twilight Zone film, I believe—but alas, the production company decided not to back it after all. Such is Hollywood.
“Heading Home” was written on 14 January 1974 and, I suspect, little altered in the rewrite. It was the fourth of six such tales I wrote that month, having heard from Kirby McCauley that Marvel Comics planned to resurrect horror comics, short filler stories and all. They needed tales about 1800 words long on traditional themes, and the idea seems to have fired up my imagination. Marvel would abort the proposition, but my offerings all found good homes. Later “Heading Home” was reprinted in Read, a classroom magazine aimed at grades 6 to 10. Among the suggestions for classroom work was this one, apparently provided by a Junior High School Middle School Assembly: “Presumably, the narrator will have his head back on, but it will be held in place only by the regrown nerves and the thread. That’s pretty wobbly. Continue the story, telling what happens next.” And they call us horror writers warped!
“The Proxy” started life as “The Bed beyond the Window” on 28 April 1977 but adopted the present title on the first of May, and was finished one day later. I hope it doesn’t show senility is creeping up on me because I’ve absolutely no idea where the idea for the story came from. David Lloyd adapted it with style for the A1 comic.
I spent a couple of days researching the locations of “The Depths” (though the diary suggests it was “an excuse for a day off, really.” Certainly I met our old friends Stan and Marge Nuttall, veterans of the Liverpool Science Fiction Group, for a drink in the Crown. Marge is heard to sing on the first page that she’s glad she’s Bugs Bunny, which she had already done in The Face That Must Die. This wasn’t a lapse of memory on my part; I’d simply despaired of seeing that book published, given the responses of various editors to its oppressive grimness. I plunged into “The Depths” on 28 July 1978 and surfaced from the first draft on the sixth of August. Again, I can’t trace the idea to its source, which may be somewhere in my many notebooks and a quest for someone else to make. I once claimed that the tale was written out of dissatisfaction with my handling of a similar theme in The Nameless, but “The Depths” precedes that novel by a year—so much for the chronology in my cranium. I don’t think horror fiction has to be a holiday from morality, as Angela Carter once declared it was, and perhaps that’s why I keep writing about scapegoats and the rejection of responsibility.
In early July 1977 we had a contingent from Carolina to stay in our little house in Tuebrook—the Wellmans and the Wagners (Karl and Barbara), I believe, and David Drake. I had “Out of Copyright” in mind and asked Dave for a likely Latin phrase, which I used in the tale. When he got back to Chapel Hill he airmailed me his revised thoughts, but too late—I’d written “Out of Copyright” in three days, starting on 10 July. His off-the-cuff response still seems fine to me, but don’t blame Dave for my use of it.
“The Invocation” owes its inspiration to The Godfather. Perhaps it was partly because I knew of Coppola’s roots in horror (specifically the film he made for Roger Corman, Dementia 13, which was hacked to bits by the British censor at the time) that I thought the Hollywood mogul would find worse than a horse’s head when he peeled back the sheets. What I anticipated happens to Ted in my tale. I saw the film at its first Liverpool showing in August 1972, but didn’t start the story until 5 September 1975, completing it on the 12th. When the story was reprinted in Dark Voices 2, a copy-editor presumably assuming ignorance on my part changed Mrs Dame’s citation of Finian’s Wake to Finnegan’s Wake. Sometimes I’m tempted to provide footnotes to make absolutely certain I can’t be misunderstood, like so.
“The Little Voice” was apparently to be called “The Playmate” when I made notes for it in early April 1976. I set about writing it on the 30th and finished it on 9 May. Where did it come from? I have no idea—perhaps just a train of thought that made me scribble notes. By now I carried notebooks with me everywhere I went, though previously I’d made life harder for myself by writing notes in the diary ledger. Charlie Grant bought “The Little Voice” for his Shadows anthology series but suggested I should prune it a little. I believe I rid it of about two thousand words, and that’s the published version.
“Drawing In” was written over the last three days of May 1977. At a guess the idea came out of cracks in the walls of our Tuebrook house, waving its spindly legs as it emerged. I don’t mean I actually saw this happen, despite having taken several acid trips in the preceding couple of years. Strangely enough, I’d dreamed in August 1973 of dropping acid, a year before I ever did. That diary entry records a “genuine sense of growing intensity and muted panic” and notes “powerful images which I constructed in the dream and which remained: a silent avalanche of clouds; walking between amber buildings lik
e banks of sand at sunset”. Incidentally, elsewhere I’ve said that “Through the Walls” was written as a kind of preamble to venturing on my first trip, but in fact it was written just a few days after that experience.
A trip I took in the Cotswolds in May 1975 gave me the seeds of “The Pattern”, and so did my impression some days later of the Freshfield coast near Liverpool, which may have echoed the trip. The diary entry describes “green symmetry everywhere, the more complex the more minutely you look: glimpses of larger mandalas” and “a sense that there may be an enormous pattern (only one? or many?)” The next day (the last of May) saw the start of the tale, completed on 6 June. Halfway through I changed the title from “The Screamer”. In retrospect I think that the lyricism of the story had to give way to or at least include horror because otherwise its pattern would have struck me as incomplete. In any case lyricism needn’t be inimical to horror: see the work of Poppy Z. Brite or Caitlín Kiernan, for instance, or Robert Dunbar, not to mention the father of lyrical horror, Ray Bradbury (too often overlooked as a key writer in my field). Recently I was surprised to learn that Steve Mosby, an excellent writer whose novels are packaged as crime fiction but can certainly be claimed for horror, was fond of the tale—perhaps there’s even an echo of it in his brilliant novel Black Flowers. Previously Doc Brite chose it as his favourite horror story for an anthology of such favourites.
“The Show Goes On” started out as “The Usher” on 24 May 1978. By the 27th it had the title it bears now, and the next day it was done. The cinema was based on the Hippodrome in Liverpool, converted from a variety theatre (the Royal Hippodrome) in 1929. A maze of dressing-rooms survived behind the cinema screen, and one night I got lost among them while searching for an exit. Eventually I came to a pair of double doors, and as I made to push them apart I seemed to glimpse a large dim room beyond, full of figures that rose or tottered to their feet to await me. Perhaps they were homeless, but the light reminded me of waking from a nightmare in an ill-lit childhood bedroom, and I made haste to find another way out. Need anyone ask why I write as I do?
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