The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  “We’ll be here,” Cass called back as I led him towards the truck.

  When we drove up the following afternoon it was late, the sun already burning off the tops of the mountains. Cass had bought a case of True Blue back in Zion. We’d been drinking most of the day, mourning the end of summer, the first golden leaves on the tulip poplars. From the top of the rise Maidie’s house looked still, and as we coasted down the hill I saw no one on the porch. The chairs and empty beer bottles were gone. So was the broom that Cass had made into a hobby-horse for Eva, and the broken pots and dishes that had been her toys. Cass parked the truck on the grass and looked at me.

  “What the hell is this?” he wondered, and opened another beer. For several minutes we sat, waiting for Sam or Eva to greet us. Finally he finished his beer and said lamely, “Guess we better go find out.”

  On the porch Eva’s half-grown kitten mewled, scampering off when Cass bent to pick it up. “Jeez,” he muttered, pushing tentatively at the screen door. It gave gently, and we hesitated before entering. Inside there was nothing: not a chair, not a rag, not a glass. Cass stared in disbelief, but put on a nonchalant expression when Sam trudged in.

  “Looks like you been doing your spring cleaning,” Cass said uneasily.

  Sam nodded. “I got to go. This time of year . . . take the girl with me.” He smiled vacantly and crossed to the back door. Cass and I looked at each other, perplexed. Sam said nothing more and stepped outside. I followed him, peering into the single other room that had held a cot and mattress. Empty.

  I found Cass outside, weaving slightly as he followed Sam to the porch’s crumbling edge. “Where’re you going?” he asked plaintively, but Sam only shook his head in silence, leaning on the splintered rail and gazing out at the field.

  There was no sign of Maidie, but I could hear Eva chanting tunelessly to herself in the thicket of jewelweed at wood’s edge. Cass heard, too, and called her name thickly. The golden fronds, heavy with blossoms and bees, twitched and crackled; and then Eva raced out, breathless, her face damp with excitement.

  “Cass!” she cried, and scrambled up the porch steps to hug him. “We got to go.”

  “Where?” he asked again, resting his beer against her neck as he smoothed her tangled hair. “You going off to school?”

  She shook her head. “No. Sam’s place.” Eva hugged his legs and looked up at him imploringly. “You come too. Okay, Cass? Okay?”

  Cass finished his beer and threw the bottle recklessly towards the field, to crash and shatter on stone. “I wish someone’d tell me where you all are going,” he insisted, turning to Sam.

  The old man shrugged and eyed Little Eva. “You about ready?”

  Eva shook her head fiercely. For the first time since I’d known her I saw her eyes blister with tears. “Sam—” she pleaded, yanking Cass’s hand at each word. “I want Cass too.”

  “You know that ain’t up to me,” Sam replied bluntly, and he turned and went back inside.

  Cass grinned then, and winked at me. “Just like a girl,” he remarked, tousling her hair.

  Faint high voices called from the woods. From the brush scrambled the three Kims, tearing twigs from their hair and yelling to us as they clambered over the fence. Beside me Little Eva stiffened, slipping her hand from Cass’s as she watched her friends waving. Suddenly she let out a yell and sprang to meet them with arms flung wide, her hair a blazing flag in the sunset. Cass called after her, amused.

  “That kid,” he laughed, then stopped and cocked his head.

  “What?” I glanced back at the sagging porch door, wondering where Maidie and Sam had gone.

  “Hear that?” Cass murmured. He looked at me sharply. “You hear that?”

  I shook my head, smoothing the hair from my ears. “No. The kids?” I pointed to the girls greeting Eva in the tall grass.

  “Singing,” Cass said softly. “Someone’s singing.” He stared intently after Eva.

  Above the field the sun candled the clouds to an ardent sea. A chill breeze rose from the west, lifting a shimmering net of bees from the jewelweed and rattling the willow leaves. In the grass the girls shrieked and giggled, and as we watched the other children joined them for their evening games of Gray Wolf and Shadow-Tag, small white shapes slipping from the darkening trees with their mongrels romping underfoot. Eva pelted her friends with goldenrod while the boys tussled in furrows, their long blue shadows dancing across the grass until they were swallowed by the willow’s roots. Cass watched them, entranced, his head tilted to catch some faint sound on the wind.

  “What is it?” I asked, but he only shook his head.

  “Can’t you hear?” He looked at me in wonder, then turned away and walked across the field towards the children.

  “Cass!” I called after him; but he ignored me. For several minutes I waited, and finally stepped back to the door. And stopped.

  Someone was singing. Perhaps I had already heard without realizing, or mistaken the refrain for the cry of the crickets or nightjars. I cocked my head as Cass had done and tried to trace the music; but it was gone again, drowned by the children’s voices. I caught the bellow of Cass’s laughter among their play, then faint music once more: a woman’s voice, but wordless or else too far off for me to understand her song. At the doorway I paused and looked out at the field. The sun scarcely brushed the horizon now above the cirrus archipelago. Lightning bugs sparked the air and the children spilled through their trails, Cass lumbering among them with first Kim and then Little Eva hugging his narrow shoulders. For a long while I watched them, until only Eva’s amber hair and Cass’s white shirt flashed in the dusk. Finally Cass looked up and, seeing me for the first time, beckoned me to join them. I smiled and waved, then bounded down the steps and across the field.

  From the grass hundreds of leafhoppers flew up as I passed, the click of their wings a soft and constant burr. Last light silvered the willow bark and faded. The wind was stronger now, and with the children’s voices it carried that faint music once more, ringing clearly over the whir of insects. I halted, suddenly dizzy, and stared at my feet as I tried to steady myself.

  When I glanced up the children had fallen still. They stood ranged across the field, their dogs beside them motionless, ears pricked. I turned to see what held them.

  As though storm-riven the willow thrashed, branches raking the sky as if to hurl the first stars earthward. I swore and stepped back in disbelief. Beneath me the ground shuddered, buckling like rotten bark. Then with a steady grinding roar the earth heaved. A rich spume of dirt and clover sprayed me as the ground beneath the tree split like a windfall apple.

  The roaring stopped. A second of utter silence; and then song poured from the rift like a flock of swans. I clapped my hands to my ears and fell to my knees.

  The dogs heard first. I felt the heat of their flanks as they streamed past me, heard their panting and faint whimpers. I forced myself to look up, brushing dirt from my face.

  Above a gaping mouth in the red earth the willow reared. In its shadow stood Maidie, arms outstretched. She was singing, and the dogs streamed past her, vaulting into the darkness at her feet. I stared amazed. Then from behind me I heard voices, the soft stir of footsteps. I glanced back.

  The field lay in gray half-light. Abruptly the darkness itself shivered, broken where the children ran laughing across the field, in twos and threes, girls clutching hands to form a chain across the waving grass, the littlest clinging to the bigger boys shouting in excitement. I yelled to them, but my voice was drowned by their laughter. They did not see me as they raced past.

  She drew them, head thrown back as she sang on and on and on, her voice embracing stone and tree and hound and stars, until her song was the children and she sang them all into the earth. Her glasses fell from her face, the gaze she turned upon the children no longer blind but blinding: eyes like golden flowers, like sunrise, like autumn wheat. My hands were raw from kneading the clay as I stared, boys and girls rushing to her and laughing as
they disappeared one by one into the rift at her feet. Her hands moved over and over again in a ceaseless welcoming wave, as though she gathered armfuls of bright blossoms to her breast. But I could not move: it was as if I had become that tree, and rooted to the earth.

  Final footsteps pattered on the grass. Cass and Eva passed me, running hand in hand to join the rest, now gone beneath the willow. I screamed his name and they halted. Cass stared back dimly, shaking his head as though trying to recognize me. The woman I had known as Maidie raised her arms and fell silent. Then she called out a word, a name. Little Eva smiled at Cass, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. He smiled and kissed her forehead, then gathered her into his arms to carry her the last few steps to the willow. I watched as the woman waiting there took his hands; and lost him forever.

  Another figure stepped from the tree’s shadow. He stooped to take the child from Cass’s arms. I saw Cass turn from Sam to the woman beside him, the woman whose wheat-gold eyes held a terrible sorrow. And suddenly I understood: knew the mother’s eternal anguish at losing the child again to him, that bleak consort, He Who Receives Many; knew why she gathered this bright harvest of playmates for a sunless garden, attendants for the girl no more a girl, the gentle maiden doomed to darkness the rest of the turning year.

  One last moment they remained. The child raised her hand to me and opened it, once, in a tiny farewell. The ground trembled. A sound like rushing water rent the air. The willow tree crashed into darkness. A crack like granite shattering; a smell like ash and grinding stone. They were gone; all gone.

  The night was silent. Before me stretched the empty field, an abandoned cottage. Then from the woods echoed a poorwill’s wail and its mate’s echoing lament. I stumbled to the fallen tree and, kneeling between its roots, wept among the anemones hiding children in the earth.

  STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

  Necrology: 1990

  ONCE AGAIN, IT IS TIME to remember those writers, artists, performers and film-makers who made many important contributions to the genre of the fantastique during their lifetimes, and who passed away in 1990 . . .

  AUTHORS/ARTISTS

  After battling lymphatic cancer for more than a year, Robert Adams died at his home in Florida on January 4th. He was 56. Author of 18 novels and editor of several anthologies in the best-selling ‘Horseclans’ series, which began with The Coming of the Horseclans in 1975, he also wrote six volumes in the ‘Castaways in Time’ series and completed two out of three outlined novels in another series, ‘Stairway to Forever’.

  Poet and writer of short supernatural fiction, Joseph Payne Brennan died from acute leukemia on January 28th, aged 71. His first published poem appeared in The Christian Science Monitor (1940) and his first supernatural story, ‘The Green Parrot’ was published in Weird Tales in 1952. Among his best-known books are the Arkham House collections Nine Horrors and a Dream, Stories of Darkness and Dread and Nightmare Need (verse), as well as The Shapes of Midnight and three volumes featuring his psychic detective Lucius Leffing.

  Playwright and screenwriter Arnaud D’Usseau died from stomach cancer on January 29th, aged 73. A big Broadway name (Tomorrow the World) and minor Hollywood writer (The Man Who Wouldn’t Die) in the ‘40s, he was driven abroad by the the blacklist and contributed under ‘front’ pseudonyms to numerous European movies, including Horror Express.

  Julia Fitzgerald, the author of a number of historical romances with fantasy elements, such as Beauty to the Devil, Taboo and Earth Queen, Sky King, died from cancer on February 5th.

  Commercial artist and fantasy author Carl Sherrell died on February 7th from aneurism in his esophagus, aged 60. He had been suffering from a heart condition complicated by leukemia. His first novel, Raum, appeared in 1977, and other books include Skraelings, Arcane, The Space Prodigal and Dark Flowers.

  Popular SF cartoonist Arthur “ATOM” Thomson died from a blood clot on February 8th. He was 62. He discovered fandom in 1954 and contributed to a number of professional magazines during the ’50s, although he preferred to work for fanzines.

  The same day singer/songwriter Del Shannon died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His ’60s hit Runaway was used in both Children of the Corn and TV’s Crime Story.

  Wendayne Ackerman, 76, German-born wife of collector/ editor/ historian Forrest J Ackerman, died on March 5th after a long illness. She translated 137 novels of the German space opera ‘Perry Rhodan’, as well as books by Stanislaw Lem, Pierre Barbet and the Strugatsky brothers, and wrote one of the most popular and often-reprinted features in Famous Monsters of Filmland: ‘Rocket to the Rue Morgue’.

  Pulp magzine publisher and founder of Popular Library, Ned L. Pines died in Paris on May 14th, aged 84. After creating the ‘Thriller’ pulps in the early ’30s, he added the weird menace title Thrilling Mystery in 1935 and the following year bought the ailing Wonder Stories from Hugo Gernsback and retitled it Thrilling Wonder Stories. A companion magazine, Startling Stories, started in 1939 and by the end of the decade Pines Publications had 44 titles on the newsstands, including Captain Future, Fantastic Story Magazine and Wonder Story Annual.

  Children’s author Lucy M. Boston died on June 1st. She was 97, and is best known for the ‘Green Knowe’ series of fantasies, beginning with The Children of Green Knowe in 1954 and followed by five more volumes between 1958–76.

  Film journalist and novelist Geoff Simm died on June 11th from AIDS. He was 40, and contributed to such specialist magazines as Shock Xpress and Starburst, as well as working as a technician on several recent UK movies.

  Playwright and director Paul Giovanni died on June 17th of pneumonia with complications. He was 57. In 1978 Giovanni wrote and staged the Tony Award nominated Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Crucifer of Blood, filmed in 1990 with Charlton Heston as Holmes.

  Screenwriter Sidney Boehm, whose credits include When Worlds Collide, The Atomic City and Shock Treatment, died on June 25th, aged 82. He won an Edgar Award for his script for The Big Heat.

  Argentinian magic realist author Manuel Puig died from a heart attack following complications after surgery on July 22nd. He was 57. His best-known novel was Kiss of the Spider Woman, which was filmed in 1985.

  Ed Emshwiller, one of the top science fiction artists of the 1950s and ’60s died of cancer on July 27th, aged 65. He began illustrating for Galaxy in 1951, signing his paintings ‘Emsh’. For the past decade he was involved in multi-media productions on film and video, and was the visual consultant on the TV movie The Lathe of Heaven.

  Cartoonist B. (Bernard) Kliban, whose bestselling books of weird artwork included Cats, Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head, Whack Your Porcupine and Two Guys Fooling Around With the Moon, died on August 12th, two weeks after undergoing heart surgery. He was 55.

  Screenwriter Edmund H. North died August 28th from pneumonia, aged 79. Among his two dozen screenplays was the classic 1951 SF movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. He won an Oscar for Patton.

  Comics writer Jerry Iger died on September 5th. He was 87. Amongst the characters he created were Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (which became a 1950s TV series and a 1984 movie), Blue Beetle, Wonder Boy and The Ray.

  Fan, author, editor and publisher Donald A. Wollheim died in his sleep from an apparent heart attack on November 2nd, two years after suffering a stroke. He was 76. One of the most important figures in science fiction, he became an early member of fandom in the mid-1930s and by the early ’40s was editing such pulp magazines as Stirring Science Stories and Cosmic Stories. In 1943 he edited the first mass-market SF anthology, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, and between 1947 and 1952 edited 18 issues of The Avon Fantasy Reader, reprinting the cream of Weird Tales-type material. He went on to become the entire editorial staff at Avon Books and, in 1952, he started Ace Books with A.A. Wyn. In 1971, three years after Wynn’s death, Wollheim resigned from Ace and formed DAW Books, the first mass-market publisher solely devoted to science fiction, fantasy and horror. He discovered and developed many new writers and continue
d to edit anthologies until his stroke.

  Gothic and historical novelist Anya Seton died on November 8th from heart failure. She was 86. One of her best-known novels was Dragonwyck, filmed in 1946 starring Vincent Price.

  Bestselling author Roald Dahl died on November 23rd, aged 74. Several of his children’s books, such as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches and The BFG were made into films, he scripted Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice, and hosted the TV series Way Out and Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected.

  Playwright and novelist Dorothy (Dodie) Smith died on November 24th, aged 94. Her most famous book for children was One Hundred & One Dalmatians, filmed by Disney in 1961.

  Pulp publisher Henry Steeger III, who co-founded Popular Publications in 1930 with Harold Goldsmith, died on December 25th, aged 87. At its height, Popular published over 300 individual titles, including Horror Stories, Terror Tales, The Spider, Operator 5, G-8 and His Battle Aces, Fantastic Mysteries, Fantastic Novels, and A. Merritt’s Fantasy.

  Screenwriter Warren Skaaren died of bone cancer, aged 44, on December 28th. He co-wrote the scripts for Beetlejuice, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II and Batman, and completed the script for Beetlejuice 2 just before his death.

  ACTORS/ACTRESSES

  Character actor Alan Hale, Jr. died on January 2nd from cancer of the thymus, aged 71. Best-known for his TV work in such series as Gilligan’s Isle, Casey Jones, Wild, Wild West and Land of the Giants, he also starred in such low-budget gems as The Crawling Hand and The Giant Spider Invasion.

  Actress Lydia Bilbrooke died on January 4th, aged 101. Her film credits include The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Spider Woman, Mr Peabody and the Mermaid and The Brighton Strangler.

  Arthur Kennedy died on January 5th from a brain tumor. He was 75. Amongst his many movie credits are Fantastic Voyage, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, The Antichrist, The Sentinel and The Humanoid.