My father got his usual cigars and my mother her hated poinsettia. I forget what Louise received, but I certainly remember my present. It felt heavy inside its red and gold Christmas paper.
When I unwrapped it I found, not much to my surprise, that it was a book. Of its kind it was rather a sumptuous volume, bound in green artificial leather, heavily embossed with gold. It was in astonishingly good condition considering that the date on its title page was 1866. The pages were thick and creamy, their edges gilded. I noted that the book was illustrated throughout – drawn, as the title page announced, by eminent artists and engraved by the brothers Dalziel. All this might have attracted me, but for the title of the book itself: A Child’s Treasury of Instructive and Improving Verse.
I did not like that at all. Now, I was nine at the time, but I already considered myself a young adult, not a child. Louise, at six, was still a child, not me. I read quite grownup books like Sherlock Holmes, and Treasure Island, and The Lord of the Rings. Moreover, I did not want to be instructed and improved – I got quite enough of that at school, thank you. I felt the first sting of Aunt Harriet’s revenge for my failure to do as she had told me. Then I looked at the flyleaf.
It was not quite as smooth as the other pages. It was slightly buckled and looked as if it had been treated with some kind of bleach. On it Aunt Harriet had written in purple ink: To Robert. Happy Christmas from Aunt Harriet. Then, in smaller writing a little further down the page she had written: p256.
When I thanked Aunt Harriet for her present with a rather obvious lack of enthusiasm, she merely smiled and tried to pinch my cheek again, but I avoided her. “It’s a very precious book,” she said, “I think you’ll find it interesting.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” said my mother, for once backing up my aunt. “Those wonderful Dalziel engravings. They were the best, weren’t they? And such perfect condition! Where did you find it, Harriet?”
Aunt Harriet gave my mother a dark look, as if she suspected some kind of insinuation in her question. Then, seeing that my mother was, as always, being innocently straightforward, she smiled. “I have my methods,” she said.
Later that night when I was in bed I began to ponder over Aunt Harriet’s present and that cryptic little note, so I got the book and turned to page 256. It was a poem entitled “The Spider and the Fly” by someone called Mary Howitt.
“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
“’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I’ve a many curious things to shew when you are there.”
“Oh no, no,” said the little Fly, “to ask me is in vain, For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”
At the time I wasn’t much into poetry and this was really not my thing at all, but the verse had an oddly compelling quality. I somehow had to read on. There was this ridiculous conversation going on between a spider and a fly – as if two insects could talk! – and the spider was enticing the fly into her den and the fly was, so far, refusing. It was so strange, this weird blend of insect and human life, like a dream, that I was held. I turned the page.
It was then that I got a shock. I was confronted with a black and white engraving. It showed a creature standing in front of a cleft in a rock with the winding stair within going up into the darkness. I say “a creature” because it was halfhuman, half-spider, and it appeared to me to be a “she”, mainly because the head bore a quite shocking resemblance to Aunt Harriet. There was the same longish nose and wide shapeless mouth; above all the bulging eyes had the same predatory stare. The head was fixed, without a neck, onto a great bloated, bulbous body, again rather like Aunt Harriet’s. From the base of this sprang two long, thin legs that sagged at the knee joints as if the great body was too heavy to be held upright. From the body – or thorax, I suppose – came four almost equally thin arms, two from each side. The muscles on the arms were as tight and wiry as whipcord, and what passed for hands at their extremities were more like crabs’ pincers and looked as if they could inflict terrible pain.
Standing in front of this monstrous creature, its back to the viewer, was what I assumed was the fly, though it barely resembled one. It looked more like a very tall thin young Victorian dandy. Its wings were folded to form a swallowtailed coat, one thin arm rested on a tasselled cane and a top hat was set at a jaunty angle on top of its small head. It looked a feeble, doomed creature.
The picture and the poem seemed to me all of a piece, at once surreal and yet frighteningly vivid, inhabiting a world of its own, full of savage, predatory monsters and enfeebled victims. I read on until the inevitable ending.
With buzzing wings he hung aloft, then near and nearer drew,
Thinking only of his brilliant eyes, and green and purple hue –
Thinking only of his crested head – poor foolish thing! At last,
Up jumped the cunning Spider, and fiercely held him fast.
She dragged him up her winding stair, into her dismal den,
Within her little parlour – but he ne’er came out again!
There were some moralising lines after that, something about to idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne’er give heed. But that was just a piece of nonsense put in to give the poem respectability. It was the image that remained, and the torturing fear of being seized and carried up a winding stair into the darkness.
I barely slept that night, and when I did it was worse than being awake. Waking or sleeping there was the sense that something was in one corner of my room. I saw it – if I saw it at all – only on the edge of my vision, and not when I looked at it directly: a bloated thing with a head but no neck, and with several arms or legs that waved at me in a slow way, like a creature at the bottom of the sea. This torment lasted until the frosty dawn when light began to filter through my thin window curtains. At last I managed some untroubled sleep until, hardly two hours later, I was summoned down to breakfast.
On Boxing Day afternoon my parents had a party for neighbours and their children. Aunt Harriet was less than enthusiastic about the affair and went out for a walk immediately after lunch so as not to involve herself in the preparations. On her return, just as a cold, sallow sun was setting, the party had begun. She sat amongst the guests in the sitting room sipping tea and smiling on the proceedings as if she were a specially honoured guest. Occasionally she would condescend to talk to some of our older friends. Various games were organized for the children who came, including Hide and Seek. When this was proposed, Aunt Harriet beckoned me over and said, “I give you permission to hide in my room. They’ll never find you there.”
The idea did not appeal to me at all, but it stayed in my head. Those of us who were to hide began to disperse about the house and I remember finding myself in the passage outside my aunt’s room. It was a moment when the temptation to enter her room seemed unconquerable as I heard the numbers being counted inexorably down to one in the hallway below. I entered her room.
I did not turn the light on. The room was warm and had that familiar musky smell. In the dim light I felt my way across to a walk-in cupboard which I entered and then shut behind me. I was now in utter darkness and silence. The noise and bustle of the house had vanished and the only sensation to which I was alive was that of touch. As I sat down on the floor of the cupboard, my face was brushed by the soft cool tickle of my Aunt Harriet’s fur coat. How did she reconcile the possession of this article with her vegetarianism? That was a question that only occurred to me long years later.
At first I felt a curious exhilaration. I was alone, unseen and quiet. I had myself to myself and no one would break in on my solitude for a long while. I was free of the importunings of my little sister or the more serious demands of my parents. Moreover, the house, heated generously for once by central heating, Christmas candles and company, had become a little stuffy. In here it was exquisitely cool. I allowed my undistracted thoughts t
o slow to a standstill; I may even have fallen asleep.
Darkness is a strange thing – it is both infinite and confining; it holds you tight in its grasp, but it holds you suspended in a void. Silence operates in a similar way. Slowly the two combine to become a threat. I had no idea how much time had passed before I began to feel that it was time that someone found me, but how could they? I was so well hidden. It was then that I decided to open the cupboard door and let myself out. But it would not open.
My heart’s thumping was suddenly the loudest noise in the universe. I was trapped forever in darkness and silence. I banged and kicked at the cupboard door, but to no effect. It seemed to have the strange unyielding hardness of a wall rather than a piece of wood. I shouted as loud as I could, but my voice was curiously close and dead as if I had entered a soundproof studio at midnight.
It was then that I became aware that the space I was in was not entirely dark. Yet I was confused because, though I knew the cupboard I was in to be about three feet by six feet square, the light that I saw seemed to be coming from a great distance. It was an indeterminate blue-green in colour, a rather drab hue, I thought. I stretched out my hand towards it in the hope of touching the back of the cupboard, but I felt nothing but the faintest brush of cold air, as if someone were blowing on my hand from beyond my reach.
By this time I had no sense of where the front, or the back, or the sides of the cupboard were. All appeared to be beyond my reach, and when I felt upwards I could not even sense the cold softness of my aunt’s fur coat. Moreover the floor began to feel icy and damp. I stood up. Nothing now existed but the distant blue-green light.
The next thing that happened was that the light began to grow. The difficulty was that I could not be sure whether I was moving towards it or it towards me. All I knew was that with each move, the atmosphere became more icy, as if I had been transported out of doors into an Arctic void.
The light began to assume shape, and I started to sense that it was a luminous object that was moving towards me. It came not steadily, but in little fits or scuttlings. The thing had six legs or arms and a bulbous body that glowed. The head, smaller but equally round, was darker, though the eyes shone. Their colour was reddish, like amber. It came on and my own body became paralysed with fear, so that I could not retreat from it.
The eyes fixed themselves on me. I tried to raise my hands and found them confined by some fibrous substance, heavy and sticky. In an imitation of my movement, the creature stopped and raised two of its forelimbs in the air and began to wave them in front of its face. It appeared to be in the act of communicating with someone or something, but not with me. Then, with a sudden leap, it was on me and its sinewy, fibrous legs were pawing at my face. I cried out and fell, and when I opened my eyes again I found that I had fallen out of the cupboard into my aunt’s room. I was covered in cobwebs.
When I emerged from her room the house was quiet, and for a moment I thought it was deserted, but a faint sound from below reassured me. When I came downstairs, I found that my parents, Aunt Harriet, and Louise were there, but all our guests had gone. I was chided for having fallen asleep in my hiding place. My Aunt Harriet smiled, but my mother was looking anxiously at me.
“You’re shivering,” she said. “You must be sickening for something. Come along. Off to bed with you.”
I was told later that it was flu of some sort and quite serious, but I remember virtually nothing about the next few days. Fortunately none of the others in the house caught my influenza and Aunt Harriet went home early to avoid infection. When I had recovered some sort of consciousness and was beginning to convalesce I asked for some books to read. I noticed that the ones provided did not include A Child’s Treasury of Instructive and Improving Verse. I asked after it, but was told by my mother that she had burned it in the garden. In the delirium of my fever I had talked about it endlessly, and with apparent terror. “And when I looked in it, I could see why. There were the most beastly illustrations in it. Beautifully done, but beastly.”
“What sort of things?”
“I don’t know … Hobgoblins and demons, and … All sorts of horrid things.”
“But why did you have to burn it?”
“Oh, I had a book like that when I was a girl. It caused no end of trouble,” she said, and that was all she would say.
Some weeks later news reached us that Aunt Harriet had died. She had been crossing a busy road near her flat in Victoria late at night, and a car had hit her and she had had some sort of heart seizure from which she never recovered. The details are vague in my mind, and I have never sought clarity by looking at her death certificate. It is enough to say that in death she was as much trouble as she was in life. It transpired that shortly before that Christmas when she last came to us, she had been dismissed from her job in the library service. There were allegations about missing books which were never fully resolved, and my parents had to satisfy the authorities that we did not have any stolen books in our possession, nor had we profited from their illegal sale.
With the exception of a small bequest to an obscure animal charity, Aunt Harriet had left all her property to my father. There came a time when both my parents had to go up for a few days to deal with the sale of my aunt’s flat and its contents. I begged to be allowed to come with them and help, but they firmly refused, so Louise and I were left at home in the care of a neighbour. On their return my parents looked exhausted and somehow haunted. It was only a few months later that my father began to show signs of the illness that later took his life.
Deprived of a sight of it myself, I begged my father and mother for details of what they had found in Aunt Harriet’s flat, but they were not forthcoming. My father simply would not discuss it, and all my mother said was:
“You wouldn’t have liked it. It’s a horrible place. There were cobwebs everywhere.”
MICHAEL CHISLETT
The Middle Park
MICHAEL CHISLETT LISTS Arthur Machen, Fritz Leiber, Robert Aickman and Clark Ashton Smith amongst his influences, and he takes as his literary maxim these words of Edward Gorey: “If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed”.
He has had fiction published in numerous magazines and anthologies for more than twenty years, including two previous appearances in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. His novella, “The Badlands”, appeared in David Longhorn’s Supernatural Tales last year as a special issue. Look out for more stories forthcoming in that periodical and elsewhere.
As the author explains: “I was walking with my girlfriend Maria on a Sunday afternoon through Pepys Park at New Cross. As we crossed over the road at the park’s end, I noticed an alleyway with a sign indicating that another park was above us, further up the hill. I used to live a few minutes’ away from there and never knew of its existence; passed it dozens of times in fact, without seeing.
“This park was much higher than the other. Not really like that described in the story, except for the view over South London, which, blessed by a rainbow, becomes a deep, green forest.
“I began thinking of the difference between what we think is there and what might actually be. In relationships as well as geography. I came across this quote from Paul Eluard: ‘There is another world, but, it is in this one’. That seemed apposite to the story.”
“I DIDN’T KNOW THAT there were other parks,” admitted Tom to Mina, as they crossed over. “You would have thought that he’d have said, when we were shown the flat.”
Tom and Mina had moved into their new home a few days before, and were now spending a Sunday afternoon exploring what was, to them, an almost unknown region. The local park had been a selling point with the estate agent; a pleasaunce. The word, in his trade’s cant, magically transformed a London suburb, mostly of Victorian houses, into one “leafy”. It was indeed a well-tended garden, set on a hill’s gentle slope, with London spread below and washed bright after morning showers. The glass-and-steel city shone – tower, pyramid, and zig
gurat rose, brave and erect in shards of reflected light. It gave the view (so Mina said) an enchanted aspect.
Above them a multicoloured arc shimmered in the clear blue sky. A rainbow blessed the metropolis, terminated in a haze further up the hill and beyond the park. Mina waved a hand, greeting the rainbow with delight. She exclaimed: “We have to find the end of it. Because of the pot of gold there, which will help pay the mortgage.”
Tom smiled in agreement as, hand in hand, they walked up the path towards the park gate, past a children’s playground. It was empty, he noted, though a roundabout whirled as if its riders had just left. He speculated as to why, apart from he and Mina, the park was empty on a sunny Sunday afternoon. For London it was a singularly quiet suburb. Sleepy, dreaming, one might say … but for a sound of voices that could be heard, soft at first but becoming gradually louder. The voices seemed to be coming from uphill. Were they singing?
“How many sides has a hill?”
Mina delighted in asking such questions. His little conundrum, Tom liked to call her.
“Two. A top and a bottom. An under and an over.” “That’s almost exactly it. An upside and a downside.” Mina then sang the catch of an old song. “Jack and Jill went out to play, over the hill and far away …”
Without finishing the lyric (her memory for them was never good) she pointed across the road as they reached the park gate.
“The rainbow’s end is over there, down that little lane. Shall we go over?”
Immediately opposite, in a continuation of the path they’d walked, an alley ran between high walls. At the narrow way’s end a gate could be seen. A post, topped by two hands with pointing fingers, gave directions. One indicated that across the road Middle and Upper Park could be found, while the other pointed to Lower Park, where Tom and Mina stood.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 21