Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  I heard myself saying banal and unspeakable things.

  Everything else will stay the same, I finished.

  I stressed this point. We both did, my ex backing me up for the sake of the children.

  My daughter looked faintly embarrassed, while my son’s expression darkened quickly. I had never seen such a swift and dramatic transformation in a person’s face. Something fluttered inside my chest. Desperate hopes revealed as vain. The worst that could happen, now happening. I was destroying my life and possibly theirs. My son got up and walked out of the room.

  The washing machine signals the end of its cycle with a high-pitched beep. I open the door and pull the wet clothes out and drop them into the basket. I drape shirts, T-shirts and my son’s football top on hangers and hang these on door handles around the flat, a 14 here, a 16 there. Smaller items, including my daughter’s tights, I fold neatly over the radiators.

  Job done, I pull out my phone and look at it. I realise I’m frowning.

  I text my ex, reminding her it’s a Thursday and I’m wondering where the children are.

  She doesn’t reply.

  I call her.

  What do you want?

  It’s Thursday, I say.

  Don’t, she says. Just stop it.

  She hangs up.

  I go into the children’s rooms. They are very tidy. Really very tidy.

  I find myself back in the kitchen looking at the flats opposite. The top flat is still empty. The middle flat is in darkness. In the kitchen of the ground-floor flat a single glass sits on the worktop.

  I look around my own kitchen. The bread left out, going stale. The bread board. The bread knife.

  I turn to the kitchen drawers and open the second one down. I rummage around and come up with the keys I’d had cut for the children and hadn’t handed in to the letting agents.

  I walk over to the old flat, the contents of my bag rattling with each step. I look up at the window, which is dark. Maybe she is out in one of the local bars or restaurants, or at work, or studying in a university library, or away for a spell. I press the buzzer and wait for a response, which doesn’t come. I use my key to gain entry. The entrance hall looks the same. I see some junk mail addressed to me lying on the floor beneath the pigeonholes and I leave it there as I head for the stairs. On the half-landings I pass doors that were once familiar to me. A television can be heard behind one of them; cooking smells emanate from another. When I reach the top of the building I stand with my ear to my door. It still feels like my door. The key turns in the lock and I enter.

  The flat is warm. She can’t be far away. It doesn’t look like it did in my dream; the bed is smaller, but it’s in the same place. She has a cheap white desk where I used to have my sofa and coffee table. Her TV is where my desk was.

  I hear footsteps on the stairs, a key in the lock. I cross the ten feet to the boiler cupboard in the time it takes her to open the door, and while she is closing the door to the flat I close the door to the boiler cupboard behind me.

  I hear her moving around, even above the suddenly deafening sound of my heartbeat. I can also hear voices coming from behind the boiler. In my dream there had been a large window in the kitchen allowing access to a grassy slope. I had jumped from tussock to tussock, feeling buoyant and free.

  I close my hands around the contents of my bag and try to listen only to the voices.

  REGGIE OLIVER

  THE ENDLESS CORRIDOR

  REGGIE OLIVER is an actor, director, playwright and award-winning author of fiction. Published work includes six plays, three novels, eight volumes of short stories (including Mrs. Midnight, winner of Children of the Night Award for best work of supernatural fiction) and the biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed.

  His stories have appeared in over seventy anthologies and three “selected” editions of his stories have been published: Dramas from the Depths (Centipede Press, 2010), Shadow Plays (Egeus, 2012) and The Sea of Blood (Dark Regions, 2015).

  Recent work includes the novel The Boke of the Divill, the collections Holidays from Hell and The Ballet of Dr. Caligari and Madder Mysteries, and The Hauntings at Tankerton Park and How They Got Rid of Them—a children’s book with over 80 illustrations by the author.

  Oliver’s story ‘Flowers of the Sea’ was included in the Folio Book of Horror Stories (The Folio Society, 2018) amongst such classic luminaries of the genre as Poe, Lovecraft and M.R. James. He is also an illustrator, and has completed illustrations for a deluxe edition of Susan Hill’s classic ghost story The Woman in Black from Centipede Press. The author is currently working on the second volume of his epic horror trilogy, “The Dracula Papers”.

  “Peter Scupham is a fine poet, a dealer in antiquarian books and a delightful man,” says Oliver. “He lives, with his books, his cats, and his partner Margaret Steward in an exquisite, small 16th century manor house in Norfolk. It is always a moment of excitement for me when one of his catalogues comes through the post.

  “On this occasion, I was particularly thrilled because he had on offer, for a very reasonable sum, a first edition of one of my favourite books: Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca and Batalha by William Beckford (Richard Bentley, 1835). Beckford was the author of that superlative early Gothic horror novel, Vathek, but this book, despite its clumsy title, is equally brilliant in its way, even though it is only a travelogue. I had given away my previous copy to a friend and couldn’t get it back, so I had an excuse for buying it.

  “When it arrived, a beautiful leather-bound edition, I re-read it with such pleasure that it proved the starting point and inspiration for this story; that, and other things that were in my mind at the time. But the title and central idea came almost immediately. I wondered why.

  “It was only after finishing the story, and on re-reading Beckford’s book yet again, that I saw it had come directly from the opening sentence of the sixth chapter: ‘I rose early, slipped out of my pompous apartment, strayed about endless corridors—not a soul stirring…’”

  BEFORE MY BOOK about him was published you could be excused for never having heard of William Sotheran. God, that sounds arrogant! I apologise—no, I don’t! It’s a fact.

  If you had known about him before then, it would almost certainly have been through an eight-line quotation of his verse in a celebrated essay by Thomas de Quincey entitled ‘Of Art and Madness’ in The Edinburgh Review of December 1823:

  I roamed the endless corridor of Fame,

  To seek a niche, a statue, or a name;

  But none could find that might belong to me:

  I wondered if I was, or e’er could be.

  We have our hour and leave a fleeting trace:

  A stone-carved name, a tear upon a face;

  Even before our mortal frame’s decay

  The stone has cracked, the tear is wiped away.

  These lines and a few more besides can sometimes be found in old anthologies or books of quotations. They come from a poem of about 1,500 lines entitled ‘The Castle of Oblivion’ which was published in 1817, the year of its author’s death.

  That date, 1817, I am almost ashamed to say, was what really started it. If you are, like me, a young academic, at the start of her career, you will be all too aware of the need to publish. You simply cannot climb the greasy pole in the world of scholarship without having at least one “seminal study” to your name. In addition, it has become increasingly necessary for you to have what is called “impact”; in other words you must make a discovery or come up with an idea that is noticed in the world beyond higher education. An article in one of the broadsheet Sunday papers, or better still a radio or television programme, preferably with you as presenter, will do the trick. Then you will become an asset to your university or college; you will be valued; you will be promoted. Fail to make an impact and you become expendable. That is why I embarked on a study of the poet William Sotheran, with the bi-centenary of both his death and the publication of his major
work looming.

  I lecture in English Literature at Wessex University and I specialise in the Romantics. As you can imagine, the subject has been fairly well covered. You can’t move for studies of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the like. The trick is to break new ground, to find some minor but significant figure who has not been “done” before. So I thought my luck was in when a couple of years ago I stumbled on Sotheran.

  Briefly, William Sotheran (1793-1817) was the younger son of a baronet, Sir Selwyn Sotheran. He was well connected, his mother being a Wellesley and a sister of the Duke of Wellington. It was perhaps from her side of the family that he inherited the urge to excel from an early age, which he did. At the age of eighteen he composed a tragedy in verse, ‘Belisarius’, which showed such promise that it was accepted for performance at Covent Garden with John Philip Kemble in the title role. (It lasted three nights.) At Oxford he continued to write verse, and, after Oxford, took holy orders, the traditional career choice of the aristocratic younger son. But he seems to have been of a restless temperament, and in 1816 he embarked on a tour of the continent, then recovering from the Napoleonic wars. Shortly after his return in January 1817, he began to show signs of mental instability. Then in August of that year while travelling by mail coach from London to Bath to take up a position of curate in the parish of Fonthill, he made an unprovoked attack on a woman with whom he happened to be travelling. Family influence saved him from criminal prosecution, and he was confined to a private asylum where he died a few months later from causes unknown. Syphilitic dementia has been put forward as a possible cause.

  Shortly before his death, his best known work, ‘The Castle of Oblivion’, was published. I won’t go into detail; you will have to read it yourself, because I genuinely think it is worth reading. I am not promoting it simply to further my academic career. But if you are going to understand or believe what happened to me I have to say something about it. De Quincey, in his famous essay, while admiring it, obviously believed it to be the product of an unbalanced mind, but I am not so sure. True, the poem was published while Sotheran was in an asylum, but we have no idea exactly when he wrote it, though a rather oblique reference in the poem to Waterloo and Napoleon’s final exile fixes the date of composition as no earlier than 1815.

  It is in the form of an allegorical epic. The hero, sometimes referred to as “the Poet”, but in other parts of the poem speaking in the first person, is in the process of climbing a mountain which in one passage is called Parnassus. It is clear that the actual mountain in Greece of that name is not intended, and that Parnassus is used for its mythical association with Apollo and the Muses. The Poet meets with various adventures on his way up and, when he thinks he is very near the summit, he suddenly finds that the whole of the top of the mountain is crowned by a great and ancient fortress, the eponymous Castle of Oblivion. The poet enters the castle and there things get very weird indeed. The poem begins to resemble a contemporary Gothic novel of the most lurid kind, and the hero has a succession of horrific and bizarre escapades involving flying skeletons, giant toads dressed as monks, strange shifts in perspective, and, worse still…No! You’ll just have to read it for yourself! Eventually the poet makes his escape but the experience has shattered him and he retires to, as Sotheran puts it, “a hermitage obscure”, there to live out the rest of his life, the final couplets reading:

  Down lonely paths in some sequestered glade

  Where yew trees cast their melancholy shade

  He wanders now, a neighbour of the dead

  His deeds dishonoured and his verse unread.

  It is on the basis of the episodes in the castle that De Quincey decided that ‘The Castle of Oblivion’ must be the work of someone who was already insane. Nowadays our view of what is sane and what is not is more nuanced and, besides, I think I can grasp a kind of meaning behind all that strangeness. Or I thought I could. Maybe. Where was I?

  Well, it is almost two years ago now since I began seriously researching Sotheran, and, almost immediately, I had the most extraordinary piece of luck. Luck? Was it luck? Oh, hell, judge for yourselves!

  I had gone to London to visit the British Library, which holds the only extant printed copy of Sotheran’s tragedy ‘Belisarius’. It’s pretty hard going, as most verse dramas from the early 19th century are, though it is an astonishingly accomplished piece of work for an eighteen year old. The only sign of real dramatic life comes in the final act, when the great Byzantine general Belisarius is seen blind, forgotten and disgraced, begging at the Pincian Gate in Rome. (This was a popular legend beloved of painters and opera composers: history tells a different story, but never mind.) His last speech ends as follows:

  For Time, the only conqueror at last,

  Extinguishes the lamp of glorious fame

  And with a shrug of his great sable robe

  Enfolds the world in universal night. (He expires.)

  Even in this early work Sotheran seems to have had an almost pathological obsession with fame and the transience of reputation. We imagine it is only our age that is celebrity obsessed, but we are wrong. I was beginning to think that I had the key to his character and art. I made notes; I jotted down quotations. I experienced the thrill that all academics feel when they believe they have a thesis, an original focus for their studies—a book!

  I emerged from the British Library at around five. It was an inky October evening. The sky hung low and threatened rain; in spite of which I was feeling rather exultant. Then, as I was crossing the Concourse with the great bronze statue of Newton in it, a male voice just behind me said:

  “Hey, madam! You dropped this!” and a grubby copy of the Daily Mail was thrust into my hand.

  Madam! I am thirty-two; I am unmarried and I have never been called “madam” in my life before. And I never read the Daily Mail! Nobody at Wessex University would allow themselves to be seen dead with the Daily Mail: it’s The Guardian or nothing.

  I caught only a brief glimpse of the man who had given me the paper. He looked like some sort of tramp. I had an impression of lank, straggling hair over a long rusty black greatcoat and dark, lugubrious eyes. By the time I had recovered myself sufficiently to repudiate the doubtful gift, he had shuffled off somewhere. I might have thrown the wretched newspaper into a nearby bin, only I had a long train journey back to Wessex ahead of me and I felt in need of some light reading after the adolescent glooms of ‘Belisarius’.

  As it turned out, what with the crowds on the Underground, a delay in a tunnel, and a consequent rush to catch the 5:30 from Paddington, it was only when I was safely on the train to Morchester that I had the leisure to look at my Daily Mail. I began to leaf through it irritably, now thoroughly angry that I had meekly accepted it from a total stranger. To add to my annoyance, I noticed that it wasn’t even today’s newspaper—it was two days old. I was just about to throw it away when my eye caught a headline.

  NONE OF YOUR “FRACKING” BUSINESS SAYS PEER

  As it happens, my partner Julia is head of Environmental Studies at Wessex, and so naturally I take an interest in such matters.

  Apparently a certain Lord Glimham was allowing a company to prospect for shale gas on his estate and the locals, assisted by various environmental groups, were objecting strongly. Glimham had responded to their protests dismissively by saying that it was “nobody else’s ******* business” and this had inflamed the situation still further. A photograph of his Lordship showed an overweight, red-faced, truculent looking person of about fifty in a tweed Norfolk jacket; an easy man to hate, I thought. Then, further down the page a paragraph made my heart jump.

  In the nearby village of Glimham Parva there have been various demonstrations. Lord Glimham’s effigy has been burnt on the Green and the inn sign of the local pub, The Sotheran Arms, has been defaced, Sotheran being Lord Glimham’s family name.

  Could it be…? I got out my tablet and began to Google frantically. Yes, it was the same family. William’s elder brother George ha
d been a cabinet minister in Sir Robert Peel’s 1841 administration and was consequently raised to the peerage. He took his title from the family estates at Glimham. The present Lord Glimham was the fifth Baron and still lived at the ancient family seat of Glimham Hall, where William Sotheran had been raised. Could there still be papers relating to William Sotheran in the ancestral home?

  As soon as I got back to my flat in Morchester I began to compose a letter to Lord Glimham. It was my partner Julia who suggested that I should gently hint that it might improve his Lordship’s tarnished image if it were known that he was helping me in my researches. I sent the letter on University of Wessex headed notepaper but I included my own mobile number and e-mail address.

  To my amazement, only two days after I had sent the letter, I had a phone call on my mobile.

  “Glimham here. What’s all this about William Sotheran?”

  The voice was loud, braying, assertive—why do posh people have such loud voices?—but I detected a certain hesitancy, a vulnerability even, under the bluster. Arrogance is nearly always a carapace. Within a few minutes I found I was being invited down to Glimham the following Friday. When I told Julia about it, all excitement, she looked at me quizzically.

  “You’re not going to leave me, are you, for this William Sotheran?”

  It was a joke, of course, and we both laughed, but I thought that Julia spoke not entirely in jest.

  At the gates of the Glimham estate I encountered a huddle of protesters watched over by a single glum policeman. There was a smattering of young people, but most of them were very middle-class retired types with grey hair. They had Thermos flasks and camp stools with them for rest and refreshment. They shouted “No more fracking!” at me as I passed through the gates and onto the long drive up to the house. I felt vaguely guilty that I had not responded to them in some way.