The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories

by Michael McDowell

  Now Bill said: ‘Well, I’m damned if I can find anything wrong with you. The blood-­pressure’s a little lower in fact. The heart is fine.’

  ‘I must have imagined it.’ A statement more than a question.

  Bill shrugged. ‘Some trick of the light,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve thought of that. But it’s happened at different times of the day. I mean, if it was a trick of the light, then if the light then changed, if it was coming from a different direction or a different source. . . .’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘I suppose one might call it a hallucin­ation.’

  ‘Well. . . .’ Bill laughed, one massive buttock perched on the edge of the desk while he scratched at the other. He was always scratching himself.

  Mark stared down at his linked hands and then darted an upward look. ‘You don’t think. . . . Well, this isn’t the beginning of a – a breakdown is it?’

  ‘Christ no! I’d be much more worried if you were hallucinating all over the place at all times of the day. The fact that it’s just that one particular spot and just that one particu­lar hallucination. . . . But, in any case’, he added hurriedly, ‘hallucination is not really the word for something so trivial.’

  ‘Then what is?’

  Bill did not answer that. ‘You’ve been through a difficult time. Months ago, I know. But the after-­effects of that kind of traumatic experience are often delayed. I should guess that you’re a bit run-­down. Liable to get depressed. Tired.’

  ‘Well, those children certainly never let me sleep after six or seven!’

  ‘Let me give you a tranquilliser.’

  When Mark’s first wife had been dying, Bill had also given her a tranquilliser, since there was nothing else to give her. ‘A hap­piness pill’ he had called it to Mark; and certainly, whether because of her faith or because of that pill, she had died reasonably happy, when not in pain.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think. . . .’

  ‘Now come on! Half my patients are on tranquillisers. Nothing to it!’

  Mark had the prescription made up; but he pushed the bottle into the back of a drawer and forgot about it.

  The hallucination (if it was a hallucination) now came more and more frequently until it was happening almost every day. As he stepped into the car, sometimes even during his class, he would ask himself, I wonder if I’ll see them today. They even appeared when he was giving another of the teachers, whose motorcycle had broken down, a lift up the hill. There they were ahead of him (he had purposely slowed the car, just in case), straggling out over the road with their brief-­cases, trailing scarves, knee-­high boots and loads of books. He could hear their loud immature voices and hear their loud immature laughter over the purr of the engine. He stopped and watched them, oblivious of his passenger, as they crossed over from the footpath to the lane on the other side. Some of the faces he had never seen before; they had come to the school since his day. Others he recognised and those he hated.

  ‘Anything the matter?’

  ‘What?’ The last of them had gone. He attempted to pull himself together. ‘I was – was looking at that owl in the tree over there. He’s often there at this hour.’

  ‘You must have the most fantastic sight. I can hardly see a thing.’

  ‘It’s as though he waited for me. Every evening.’

  ‘Well, imagine that!’

  Mark released the hand-­brake. Suddenly he felt the sweat icy on his forehead, on his neck and in the small of his back.

  He and the famous ophthalmologist had been at the same Oxford college together; but there had always been a faint condescension even then from the spectacularly gifted man to the one far less gifted, and now it had grown more marked. The ophthalmologist, thin and sharply handsome, with his modish clothes and his modish haircut, might have been at least ten years younger than the schoolmaster.

  ‘Fancy deciding to start a family so late in life! I’d no idea. It’s as though I’d suddenly decided to get married.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t really decide to start a family. It just happened.’

  ‘Still, it must be fun.’

  ‘Up to a point.’

  ‘I don’t really care for children myself. Or animals.’

  Mark nearly said, ‘Neither do I.’ But some impulse of loyalty to Clare, not to the twins, restrained him from doing so.

  ‘Which must mean that I have a shocking character,’ the ophthalmologist went on, obviously not believing anything of the kind.

  When he had finished his examination he said: ‘Well, I can’t find anything amiss.’

  (Mark did not care for the emphasis on the pronoun. Who did he think could find anything? A psychiatrist?) ‘The eyes are perfectly normal for a man of your age. In fact, I don’t think I’d have even prescribed those glasses for you. You could easily do without them.’

  ‘Then what . . . ?’

  The other man shrugged. ‘You might have floaters. People with short sight often do. They’re maddening things and, if you start to think about them – to become too con­scious of them – they can cause you a lot of misery. I had a patient once, a woman, who even advertised in The Times for a cure for them. But there isn’t one, of course. As I’d told her.’

  ‘I’ve had floaters. I know what you mean. But they could hardly account for my seeing a number of school children and seeing them in detail. . . . Could it?’

  The ophthalmologist, who wanted to get home before going on to Covent Garden, sighed and shrugged. ‘You might be haemor­rhaging slightly from the eyes from time to time. Though I see no evidence of it. I’ve often thought that that’s all that Joan of Arc’s visions amounted to. She never menstruated, you know. But she might have bled instead from the tissue of the eye. It’s not unknown. Not at all. I had a woman patient who did precisely that.’

  ‘You don’t suggest that I’m menstruating from my eyes?’

  The two men laughed; but Mark’s laughter was nervous and strained.

  ‘Good God no! And in any case, you’d have reached the menopause by now and the bleeding would be over.’

  Again they both laughed.

  The ophthalmologist put his arm around Mark’s shoulder. It was as a patient that he thought of him now, not as a friend, and the gesture was a purely professional one. ‘I should guess you need a holiday. You look rather strained. You’ve aged a bit since that last Gaudy. Why not go away for a holiday?’

  ‘I might do that.’

  ‘I should ignore the whole thing. Drive through your vision! Why not? Prove to yourself that there’s nothing there at all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The ophthalmologist realised that, so far from encouraging his patient, he had only discouraged him further.

  Mark had left his car in the station car-­park. When he went to reclaim it there, he found two schoolboys examining it carefully. These schoolboys were not from the comprehensive but from the posh preparatory school a few miles outside the town. Mark knew that from their caps.

  ‘That’s a lovely job you’ve got there.’

  ‘Super.’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  Mark put his key in the door, smiling at them, saying nothing. He felt that somehow he must appease them.

  ‘Must cost a fortune to run.’

  ‘What’s the fastest you’ve done?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve no idea. But she’s fast.’

  ‘I bet she is!’

  They hung around; probably they wanted him to offer them a ride. But he did not do so. He slammed the door and thought, you’re like those others. Just like those others. Except that you wear those caps and you sleep in dormitories instead of at home and you have that disdainful upper-­class drawl. I hate the lot of you. It was you who smashed me. Smashed me.

  He drove off, not even bothering to look at them again.

  It was a beautiful December afternoon and he ought to have been happy at the thought of going home after a day in a London that seemed to him, with each visit,
to become more and more noisy, more and more crowded, more and more squalid. But he was not happy. He thought of that lucky ophthal­mologist, who had been wise enough not to burden himself with a wife and children; who had visited the Caribbean for his last holiday and was going to visit East Africa for his next; who had been about to go to Covent Garden to see Traviata. Back home, Clare would complain that the dish­washer had broken down again or that a bulb needed replacing; the children would have broken something or lost something or soiled some­thing; the stain would still be in the centre of the sitting-­room carpet; the seat of the chair on the left of the fireplace would still be sagging; he would still be able to see where Clare had stuck that Crown Derby cup inexpertly together.

  The Aston Martin began to leap up the hill. Would they be there, waiting for him among the trees? In a curious way, he felt that his fragile, failing body was now some­how fused with the strong, ever-­powerful one of the car. I should ignore the whole thing. Drive through your vision, why not? Prove to yourself that there’s nothing there at all. What’s the fastest you’ve done in it? Well, I’m doing over seventy now and on a gradient like this. Lovely job. Super. Fantastic. His heart was now the throbbing heart of the engine; his nerves trilled with each of the explosions that sent it hurtling onwards.

  SCHOOL CROSSING.

  I should ignore the whole thing.

  The impact was terrible. The car ploughed on and on. Then at last it jolted to a stop. Staring out ahead of him, he thought, This must be what is meant by seeing red. The whole windscreen was smeared with blood.

  Or were the smears only on his glasses?

  A PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT by Richard Marsh

  One of the most prolific authors of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, Richard Marsh (1857-1915) produced some 83 volumes of fiction and 300 short stories during his career, including as many as eight books a year at the height of his popularity. Born Richard Bernard Heldmann, he began his career as an author of fiction for boys, published under the name Bernard Heldmann. But following a conviction for passing bad checks and a term of eighteen months’ imprisonment with hard labor, Heldmann began a new career as ‘Marsh’, his mother’s maiden name. He is best known today for his horror classic The Beetle (1897), which was published the same year as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and for a quarter-­century outsold Stoker’s book, until Dracula was adapted for a now-classic 1931 film. But Marsh was more than just a one-book wonder: his vast output comprises work in almost every genre, from horror to crime to comedy to romance, and much of it remains well worth reading. His horror novel The Joss: A Reversion (1901) bears comparison with The Beetle, and the eerie thriller The Goddess: A Demon (1900) is a compelling and unsettling tale. But Marsh may have been at his best in the field of short fiction: he excelled both in tales of horror and the supernatural and in blackly comic stories, with the two sometimes merging, as in the collection Curios (1898), in which rival antique dealers pursue strange artifacts. His best horror fiction can be found in the collections Marvels and Mysteries (1900), The Seen and the Unseen (1900), and Both Sides of the Veil (1901). Valancourt has republished thirteen volumes of Marsh’s novels and stories, including The Seen and the Unseen, from which the present story is taken.

  The conversation had been of murders and of suicides. It had almost seemed as if each speaker had felt constrained to cap the preceding speaker’s tale of horror. As the talk went on, Mr Howitt had drawn farther and farther into a corner of the room, as if the subject were little to his liking. Now that all the speakers but one had quitted the smoking-room, he came forward from his corner, in the hope, possibly, that with this last remaining individual, who, like himself, had been a silent listener, he might find himself in more con­genial society.

  ‘Dreadful stuff those fellows have been talking!’

  Mr Howitt was thin and he was tall. He seemed shorter than he really was, owing to what might be described as a persistent cringe rather than a stoop. He had a deferential, almost frightened air. His pallid face was lighted by a smile which one felt might, in a moment, change into a stare of terror. He rubbed his hands together softly, as if suffering from a chronic attack of nerves; he kept giving furtive glances round the room.

  In reply to Mr Howitt’s observation the stranger nodded his head. There was something in the gesture, and indeed in the man’s whole appearance, which caused Mr Howitt to regard him more at­tentively. The stranger’s size was monstrous. By him on the table was a curious-looking box, about eighteen inches square, painted in hideously alter­nating stripes of blue and green and yellow; and although it was spring, and the smoking-room was warm, he wore his overcoat and a soft felt hat. So far as one could judge from his appearance, seated, he was at least six feet in height. As to girth, his dimensions were bewildering. One could only guess wildly at his weight. To add to the peculiarity of his appearance, he wore a huge black beard, which not only hung over his chest, but grew so high up his cheeks as almost to conceal his eyes.

  Mr Howitt took the chair which was in front of the stranger. His eyes were never for a moment still, resting, as they passed, upon the bearded giant in front of him, then flashing quickly hither and thither about the room.

  ‘Do you stay in Jersey long?’

  ‘No.’

  The reply was monosyllabic, but, though it was heard so briefly, at the sound of the stranger’s voice Mr Howitt half rose, grasped the arm of his chair, and gasped. The stranger seemed surprised.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Mr Howitt dropped back on to his seat. He took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead. His smile, which had changed into a stare of terror on its reappearance, assumed a sickly hue.

  ‘Nothing. Only a curious similarity.’

  ‘Similarity? What do you mean?’

  Whatever Mr Howitt might mean, every time the stranger opened his mouth it seemed to give him another shock. It was a moment or two before he regained sufficient control over himself to enable him to answer.

  ‘Your voice reminds me of one which I used to hear. It’s a mere fugitive resemblance.’

  ‘Whose voice does mine remind you of?’

  ‘A friend’s.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘His name was – Cookson.’

  Mr Howitt spoke with a perceptible stammer.

  ‘Cookson? I see.’

  There was silence. For some cause, Mr Howitt seemed on a sudden to have gone all limp. He sat in a sort of heap on his chair. He smoothed his hands together, as if with unconscious volition. His sickly smile had degenerated into a fatuous grin. His shifty eyes kept recurring to the stranger’s face in front of him. It was the stranger who was the next to speak.

  ‘Did you hear what those men were talking about?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They were talking of murders.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I heard rather a curious story of a murder as I came down to Weymouth in the train.’

  ‘It’s a sort of talk I do not care for.’

  ‘No. Perhaps not; but this was rather a singular tale. It was about a murder which took place the other day at Exeter.’

  Mr Howitt started.

  ‘At Exeter?’

  ‘Yes; at Exeter.’

  The stranger stood up. As he did so, one realised how grotesquely unwieldy was his bulk. It seemed to be as much as he could do to move. The three pockets in the front of his overcoat were protected by buttoned flaps. He undid the buttons. As he did so the flaps began to move. Something peeped out. Then hideous things began to creep from his pockets – efts, newts, lizards, various crawling crea­tures. Mr Howitt’s eyes ceased to stray. They were fastened on the crawling creatures. The hideous things wriggled and writhed in all direc­tions over the stranger. The huge man gave him­self a shake. They all fell from him to the floor. They lay for a second as if stupefied by the fall. Then they began to move to all four quarters of the room. Mr Howitt drew his legs under his chair.

  ‘Pretty
creatures, aren’t they?’ said the stranger. ‘I like to carry them about with me wherever I go. Don’t let them touch you. Some of them are nasty if they bite.’

  Mr Howitt tucked his long legs still further under his chair. He regarded the creatures which were wriggling on the floor with a degree of aversion which was painful to witness. The stranger went on.

  ‘About this murder at Exeter, which I was speak­ing of. It was a case of two solicitors who occupied offices together on Fore Street Hill.’

  Mr Howitt glanced up at the stranger, then back again at the writhing newts. He rather gasped than spoke.

  ‘Fore Street Hill?’

  ‘Yes – they were partners. The name of one of them was Rolt – Andrew Rolt. By the way, I like to know with whom I am talking. May I inquire what your name is?’

  This time Mr Howitt was staring at the stranger with wide-open eyes, momentarily forgetful even of the creatures which were actually crawling beneath his chair. He stammered and he stuttered.