Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Pain.

  Feeling.

  He ordered his head to move to the right, and it complied. For a moment his face was buried in smooth, dry fur. Halston snapped at the cat. It made a startled, disgruntled sound in its throat—yowk!—and leaped onto the seat. It stared up at him angrily, ears laid back.

  "Wasn't supposed to do that, was I?" Halston croaked.

  The cat opened its mouth and hissed at him. Looking at that strange, schizophrenic face, Halston could understand how Drogan might have thought it was a hellcat. It—

  His thoughts broke off as he became aware of a dull, tingling feeling in both hands and forearms.

  Feeling. Coming back. Pins and needles.

  The cat leaped at his face, claws out, spitting.

  Halston shut his eyes and opened his mouth. He bit at the cat's belly and got nothing but fur. The cat's front claws were clasped on his ears, digging in. The pain was enormous, brightly excruciating. Halston tried to raise his hands. They twitched but would not quite come out of his lap.

  He bent his head forward and began to shake it back and forth, like a man shaking soap out of his eyes. Hissing and squalling, the cat held on. Halston could feel blood trickling down his cheeks. It was hard to get his breath. The cat's chest was pressed over his nose. It was possible to get some air in by mouth, but not much. What he did get came through fur. His ears felt as if they had been doused with lighter fluid and then set on fire.

  He snapped his head back, and cried out in agony—he must have sustained a whiplash when the Plymouth hit. But the cat hadn't been expecting the reverse and it flew off. Halston heard it thud down in the back seat.

  A trickle of blood ran in his eye. He tried again to move his hands, to raise one of them and wipe the blood away.

  They trembled in his lap, but he was still unable to actually move them. He thought of the .45 special in its holster under his left arm.

  If I can get to my piece, kitty, the rest of your nine lives are going in a lump sum.

  More tingles now. Dull throbs of pain from his feet, buried and surely shattered under the engine block, zips and tingles from his legs—it felt exactly the way a limb that you've slept on does when it's starting to wake up. At that moment Halston didn't care about his feet. It was enough to know that his spine wasn't severed, that he wasn't going to finish out his life as a dead lump of body attached to a talking head.

  Maybe I had a few lives left myself.

  Take care of the cat. That was the first thing. Then get out of the wreck—maybe someone would come along, that would solve both problems at once. Not likely at 4:30 in the morning on a back road like this one, but barely possible. And—

  And what was the cat doing back there?

  He didn't like having it on his face, but he didn't like having it behind him and out of sight, either. He tried the rear-view mirror, but that was useless. The crash had knocked it awry and all it reflected was the grassy ravine he had finished up in.

  A sound from behind him, like low, ripping cloth.

  Purring.

  Hellcat my ass. It's gone to sleep back there.

  And even if it hadn't, even if it was somehow planning murder, what could it do? It was a skinny little thing, probably weighed all of four pounds soaking wet. And soon . . . soon he would be able to move his hands enough to get his gun. He was sure of it.

  Halston sat and waited. Feeling continued to flood back into his body in a series of pins-and-needles incursions. Absurdly (or maybe in instinctive reaction to his close brush with death) he got an erection for a minute or so. Be kind of hard to beat off under present circumstances, he thought.

  A dawn-line was appearing in the eastern sky. Somewhere a bird sang.

  Halston tried his hands again and got them to move an eighth of an inch before they fell back.

  Not yet. But soon.

  A soft thud on the seatback beside him. Halston turned his head and looked into the black-white face, the glowing eyes with their huge dark pupils.

  Halston spoke to it.

  "I have never blown a hit once I took it on, kitty. This could be a first. I'm getting my hands back. Five minutes, ten at most. You want my advice? Go out the window. They're all open. Go out and take your tail with you."

  The cat stared at him.

  Halston tried his hands again. They came up, trembling wildly. Half an inch. An inch. He let them fall back limply. They slipped off his lap and thudded to the Plymouth's seat. They glimmered there palely, like large tropical spiders.

  The cat was grinning at him.

  Did I make a mistake? he wondered confusedly. He was a creature of hunch, and the feeling that he had made one was suddenly overwhelming. Then the cat's body tensed, and even as it leaped, Halston knew what it was going to do and he opened his mouth to scream.

  The cat landed on Halston's crotch, claws out, digging.

  At that moment, Halston wished he had been paralyzed. The pain was gigantic, terrible. He had never suspected that there could be such pain in the world. The cat was a spitting coiled spring of fury, clawing at his balls.

  Halston did scream, his mouth yawning open, and that was when the cat changed direction and leaped at his face, leaped at his mouth. And at that moment Halston knew that it was something more than a cat. It was something possessed of a malign, murderous intent.

  He caught one last glimpse of that black-and-white face below the flattened ears, its eyes enormous and filled with lunatic hate. It had gotten rid of the three old people and now it was going to get rid of John Halston.

  It rammed into his mouth, a furry projectile. He gagged on it. Its front claws pinwheeled, tattering his tongue like a piece of liver. His stomach recoiled and he vomited. The vomit ran down into his windpipe, clogging it, and he began to choke.

  In this extremity, his will to survive overcame the last of the impact paralysis. He brought his hands up slowly to grasp the cat. Oh my God, he thought.

  The cat was forcing its way into his mouth, flattening its body, squirming, working itself further and further in. He could feel his jaws creaking wider and wider to admit it.

  He reached to grab it, yank it out, destroy it . . . and his hands clasped only the cat's tail.

  Somehow it had gotten its entire body into his mouth. Its strange, black-and-white face must be crammed into his very throat.

  A terrible thick gagging sound came from Halston's throat, which was swelling like a flexible length of garden hose.

  His body twitched. His hands fell back into his lap and the fingers drummed senselessly on his thighs. His eyes sheened over, then glazed. They stared out through the Plymouth's windshield blankly at the coming dawn.

  Protruding from his open mouth was two inches of bushy tail . . . half-black, half-white. It switched lazily back and forth.

  It disappeared.

  A bird cried somewhere again. Dawn came in breathless silence then, over the frost-rimmed fields of rural Connecticut.

  The farmer's name was Will Reuss.

  He was on his way to Placer's Glen to get the inspection sticker renewed on his farm truck when he saw the late morning sun twinkle on something in the ravine beside the road. He pulled over and saw the Plymouth lying at a drunken, canted angle in the ditch, barbed wire tangled in its grille like a snarl of steel knitting.

  He worked his way down, and then sucked in his breath sharply. "Holy moley," he muttered to the bright November day. There was a guy sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, eyes open and glaring emptily into eternity. The Roper organization was never going to include him in its presidential poll again. His face was smeared with blood. He was still wearing his seatbelt.

  The driver's door had been crimped shut, but Reuss managed to get it open by yanking with both hands. He leaned in and unstrapped the seatbelt, planning to check for ID. He was reaching for the coat when he noticed that the dead guy's shirt was rippling, just above the belt-buckle. Rippling . . . and bulging. Splotches of blood began to bloom there like sinister
roses.

  "What the Christ?" He reached out, grasped the dead man's shirt, and pulled it up.

  Will Reuss looked—and screamed.

  Above Halston's navel, a ragged hole had been clawed in his flesh. Looking out was the gore-streaked black-and-white face of a cat, its eyes huge and glaring.

  Reuss staggered back, shrieking, hands clapped to his face. A score of crows took cawing wing from a nearby field.

  The cat forced its body out and stretched in obscene languor.

  Then it leaped out the open window. Reuss caught sight of it moving through the high dead grass and then it was gone.

  It seemed to be in a hurry, he later told a reporter from the local paper.

  As if it had unfinished business.

  TERRY PRATCHETT

  SIR TERRY PRATCHETT: born 28 April 1948, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. After passing his 11-plus in 1959, he attended High Wycombe Technical High School rather than the local grammar because he felt ‘woodwork would be more fun than Latin’. At this time he had no real vision of what he wanted to do with his life, and remembers himself as a ‘nondescript student’. But he had an interest in radio, he and his father belonging to the Chiltern Amateur Radio Club in the early 1960s, their joint handle being ‘Home-brew R1155’. It was from this that Terry’s interest in computers grew – when a transistor cost a week’s pocket money and you built things like a radio round one.

  When Terry was thirteen, his short story ‘The Hades Business’ was published in the school magazine Technical Cygnet, and two years later, commercially, in Science Fantasy. With the proceeds he bought his first typewriter. Other short stories – ‘Solution’, ‘The Picture’ and maybe others, yet undiscovered – also appeared in the Cygnet. Terry was in line for a bright future. Having earned five O-levels and started A-level courses in Art, History and English, he decided after the first year to try journalism, and when a job opportunity came up on the Bucks Free Press, he talked things over with his parents, and left school in 1965. While with the Press he still read avidly, took the two-year National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency course (and came top in the country in its exams) and passed an A level in English, both while on day release.

  Terry married Lyn Purves at the Congregational Church in Gerrards Cross in October 1968, by which time he had interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, my fellow director of our publishing company Colin Smythe Limited, for the Bucks Free Press about a book he had edited on education in the coming decade, Looking forward to the Seventies. At this time Terry mentioned to him that he had written a book called The Carpet People and asked whether we would consider it for publication? So Peter passed it to me. Yes. It was a delight, and it was obvious that here was an author we had to publish. We got Terry to produce about thirty illustrations and published it in 1971, with a launch party in the carpet department of Heal’s store in Tottenham Court Road, London. Peter and I both wrote a blurb and as each wouldn’t give way as to which was to be used, we used both. The Carpet Peoplereceived few reviews, but those few were ecstatic, with it being described as being ‘of quite extra-ordinary quality’ (Teacher’s World) and ‘a new dimension in imagination ... the prose is beautiful’ (The Irish Times). What the reviews would have been like had reviewers seen the illustrations in colour – Terry hand-coloured the illustrations in about half a dozen copies – can only be guessed. (These coloured illustrations have been on display on the L-Space site for a few years, and many of them will be used in an illustrated edition of the second version of the book to be published by Random House Children’s Books in 2009).

  While at the Bucks Free Press, as well as his other duties Terry took on responsibility for writing the stories for the children’s column, the first of which featured the world and characters that later became The Carpet People. During his time there he wrote sixty short stories for it, never missing an episode for over 250 issues. He left the Press for the Western Daily Press on 28 September 1970, but he returned to the Press in 1972 as a sub-editor. On 3 September 1973 he joined the Bath Evening Chronicle. (At this time he also produced a series of cartoons describing the goings-on at the government’s fictional paranormal research establishment, ‘Warlock Hall’ which Peter commissioned for our monthly journal Psychic Researcher, published by us, that he edited.) Terry and Lyn’s daughter Rhianna was born in 1976, and many of his books have been dedicated to her. The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981) were both written on dark winter evenings, when it wasn’t possible to work in the garden. In 1980 Terry was appointed a publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (now PowerGen) with responsibility for three nuclear power stations (‘What leak? – Oh, that leak’ and in a phone call from his boss at 6.30am ‘Have you heard the news? No? Well, it’s not as bad as it sounds….’).

  In 1981, he spoke about Strata, ‘Fundamental to the story is a theme hinted at in my previous sf book The Dark Side of the Sun, that nothing in the universe is “natural” in the strict sense of the term; everything, from planets to stars, is a relic of previous races and civilisations. Life is not an afterthought on the universal scheme of things, but an integral part of it which was in there shaping its development from the beginning. It might be true, for all I know.’ And he added, ‘I am also working on another ‘discworld’ theme, since I don’t think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities in one book!’ Indeed he had not, as the future was to show. He was working at the CEGB when we published the first of the Discworld books, The Colour of Magic, in 1983. Given that it consisted of four connected tales, I hesitate to call it a novel, and our contract actually defines it as a collection of short stories. Terry’s paperback publisher at the time was New English Library, whom we had licensed to publish The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata (both with cover illustrations by Tim White) but they failed to market Strata adequately – the fact they’d just been taken over by Hodder & Stoughton at the time did not help matters as Hodder’s sales representatives had heard of few of the NEL authors they were now selling, with the possible exception of Robert Heinlein. (NEL published Strata in 1982, but when they remaindered their stock in 1985, I bought about 300 copies and so kept the book in print for a few more years.)

  In September 1987, soon after he had finished writing Mort, Terry decided that he could afford to devote himself to full-time writing, rather than merely doing so in his spare time after work: he thought he might suffer a drop in income for a while but that it would pick up in due course – and anyway, he enjoyed writing more than fielding questions from the Press about malfunctioning nuclear reactors, so he resigned his position with the CEGB (about which he says he could write a book if he thought anyone would believe him). His sales – and income – picked up very much more quickly than he expected, and his next Gollancz contract was for six books, with much larger advances. Gollancz also signed up Faust Eric, a novella illustrated by Josh Kirby, that was first published simultaneously in large-format hardcover and paperback editions in August 1990, and the following year as a small A-format paperback without illustrations. It has since been published in other countries in both illustrated and unillustrated versions.

  Terry’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman on Good Omens was published in May 1990. There have been film options and rumour of options ever since, with Terry Gilliam’s name often associated with it, but it has yet to escape from Development Hell. However, late in 2007 the Costa Book Awards carried out a survey of the most re-read books, and Good Omens came fifteenth, ahead of The Bible and The Hitchhiker’s Guide. Also in 1990, Clarecraft Designs, a company in Suffolk, founded by Bernard Pearson, was licensed to produce a series of models of Discworld characters, and before it closed in 2005 it had produced over 200 figurines, many of which were also produced as pewter miniatures. In October 2008, the Polish company, Micro-Art Studios, started producing Discworld miniatures under licence, based on Paul Kidby’s illustrations.

  As Discworld grew in Terry’s imagination, so did the complexity of the city of An
kh-Morpork, and Stephen Briggs, with Terry’s input, set about creating a street map of the city mostly based on the descriptions of the activities of Samuel Vimes and the City Watch. This was painted by Stephen Player, and with an accompanying booklet was published as The Streets of Ankh-Morpork by Corgi in November 1993. Following its success – it reached no. 4 in the bestseller non-fiction list, if I remember correctly – Terry and Stephen created The Discworld Map, published by Corgi in 1995, again painted by Stephen Player.

  Of his books for young readers, all published by Doubleday, Truckers (1989), the first volume of what is known in the USA as the Bromeliad Trilogy, was a landmark in that it was the first children’s book to appear in the British adult paperback fiction best-seller lists. It was followed by Diggers, and Wings (both 1990), the revised version of The Carpet People (1992), and all three Johnny Maxwell books, Only You Can Save Mankind (1992), Johnny and the Dead (1993), which had been the first Terry had started work on, but put aside to write Only You as a result of the Gulf War, and Johnny and the Bomb (1996), which won the Smarties Prize Silver Award that year.

  Film rights in the Truckers series were acquired by Dreamworks Animation in 2001, but only now in 2010 are things appearing to move on that front, with Danny Boyle at the directorial helm, following his success with Slumdog Millionaire, and while Frank Cottrell Boyce was at one time writing a script, the most recent information I have (3 December 2010) would indicate that Craig Fernandez has written one, entitled Everything Must Go.

  In 1993 Corgi started issuing abridged versions of the Discworld novels as audio-books read by Tony Robinson, and two years later the unabridged versions started to be released by Isis Publishing. Of the first twenty-three, twenty-one were read by Nigel Planer and two by Celia Imrie, and since the twenty-fourth, all have been read by Stephen Briggs, who has also read the Truckers trilogy, The Dark Side of the Sun, Strata and Good Omens for Isis. Chivers (now part of the BBC) have issued the Johnny Maxwell novels and The Carpet People, all read by Richard Mitchley. In the States, Terry’s most recent novels have been also read by Stephen Briggs for release by HarperAudio. Almost all are available for download from audible.com and from audible.co.uk.