The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories

by Michael McDowell

  Stephen Gregory is the author of seven novels, the first three of which, The Cormorant (1986; winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Woodwitch (1988), and The Blood of Angels (1992) have recently been republished by Valancourt Books. Author Mark Morris has written that Gregory is ‘one of the best and most underrated novelists in the world’, and has noted the ways in which nature and the natural world play a prominent role in his fiction, particularly (as in this story) birds, which appear in Gregory’s fiction as ‘malign, destructive spirits or harbingers of doom’. This rare early tale first appeared in the Illustrated London News on December 6, 1982, and is reprinted here for the first time.

  Mrs Crabbe gave birth to a son one month after the death of her husband. She named the boy John Arthur, in memory of him. Mr Crabbe had been overjoyed at the news of his wife’s unexpected preg­nancy. A middle-­aged man, disappointed for many years by his wife’s failure to produce a child, he was delighted at the prospect of a son who would trans­form the marriage he saw as adequate and comfor­table into something much more satisfactory. So it was tragic that he should die before the child was born.

  John Arthur was a remarkable little boy. For one thing, it was realized within 18 months of his birth that he was severely mentally handicapped. As he grew into a strapping toddler it was obvious that his mind was defective. For such a young child he had a disconcerting, rasping, even sonorous voice, which he produced from his chest in a series of garbled speeches made up of sounds not unlike real words. In spite of his mother’s sustained efforts to teach John Arthur the beginnings of a vocabulary, the boy con­tinued to clamour in his own clanging language, as though half remembering words and phrases from some distant past. He developed a shock of unruly black hair which flopped over his brow, although it did not grow to such an extent on the crown or the back of his head. Most striking of all was his bulging forehead which protruded over his eyes, shadowing them. They retreated into his head like two danger­ous eels in an underwater crevice.

  But Mrs Crabbe soon discovered that her growing son, so inwardly disturbed and so incommunicative, had an unusual gift. He had the power in his hands to heal. The first manifestation of this was when he came into the house from the bushes of the garden holding the broken body of a fledgling bird. It stared from his cupped hands and beat itself against his palms. But soon it became calm, even torpid. As Mrs Crabbe watched, John Arthur caressed the wound on the bird’s breast until his fingers were smeared with its blood. Then he raised the tiny creature to his lips and kissed it on the crown of its head. Its eyes flickered suddenly, like gems struck from a rock. The bird hopped from the boy’s hands on to the carpet. The only traces of any wound were the blood which stained John Arthur’s hands and a tiny feather which clung to his lips. So Mrs Crabbe realized that her son had an affinity with wild creatures. She could hardly help noticing his tendency to bring into the house all sorts of wounded animals, birds and insects. Each time, however severely damaged the sparrow, the spider or the shrew, it was soon whole again, and happy to stay with John Arthur in his room.

  The boy continued to grow sturdy. He carried himself well, if occasionally with a stoop, cultivated from the almost continual nursing of injured creatures. The mass of hair still fell on his forehead and still his eyes seemed buried under his powerful brow. John Arthur’s hands were long and thin, even fragile. They held the dusty wings of a moth or the limbs of a daddy-­longlegs with a tenderness which Mrs Crabbe found touching. As she watched her son’s strong body and his ponderous head hunched over his latest find she marvelled at the gentleness of his fine fingers. Then she felt her love for John Arthur and her regret for her dead husband mingling and aching inside her.

  The boy did not go to school. Instead, he stayed at home and tended his ever-­growing collection of spe­cimens. His bedroom was full of small creatures which came and went from his window. They were not imprisoned. They were free to go, once heated by the warmth of John Arthur’s fingers, but sometimes the grateful creatures would return to the boy. John Arthur could not wash or dress himself. He could not feed himself without making a fearful mess. He could not communicate with other human beings although he still held forth at length, and with a seemingly increasing vocabulary, in his own discordant language. But John Arthur had the heat in his hands and the breath from his lips to salve and restore the broken limbs of his many patients.

  Naturally, word of John Arthur’s power spread among Mrs Crabbe’s friends, the circle that had grown up as her husband had become more successful. They had consoled her on the death of Mr Crabbe and had followed the development of John Arthur. But much as Mrs Crabbe enjoyed the company of her friends, she often felt that their interest in her and her curious son was ghoulish. She imagined them discussing John Arthur with a sort of unhealthy relish whenever she was not there. She could hear them describing the inhabitants of his bed­room, the voles, the mice and the moths, the leathery bat and the ducking, sidling jackdaw which never blinked. Mrs Crabbe particularly resented the dash­ing Mrs Sylvester, who pried into John Arthur’s every small sign of progress, who chuckled at his rasping cries. She was gaudy, metallic. Mrs Crabbe resented her almost predatory interest in the boy.

  Mrs Sylvester had a son who was as pert as herself. He was a success at school, regarding his fellows with a lift of his eyebrows and a mocking smile. Some­times he accompanied his mother on her visits to Mrs Crabbe’s house, but he was plainly uncomfortable in the presence of John Arthur. He flushed under the distant gaze of John Arthur’s eyes and seemed over­whelmed, dominated by the weight of John Arthur’s brow. But his mother remained jaunty, and her son gained in confidence until he, too, had developed a kind of growing curiosity about the power of John Arthur’s fragile hands.

  Then tragedy struck the Sylvester family. Within a few hours of being bright and swift, Mrs Sylvester’s son fell gravely ill. He lay inert on his bed, his eyes open but unseeing. The doctors diagnosed that the boy had had the seed of a tumour growing within his skull, unsuspected until now. With the sudden pres­sure of the tumour against his brain, he was immed­iately paralysed in every limb. Furthermore, the tumour, at present the size of a small fist, would con­tinue to grow, unclenching like a fist threatening to burst within the boy’s head. He would die. Mean­while, he lay with his eyebrows raised and with his mouth fixed in the faint smile which he had so often carried in the swift brightness of his health. More doctors were consulted. All of them were pessimistic, even advising against the boy’s removal from the house to a hospital. It would be in vain; better to leave him lying on his own bed, breathing faintly and with the hard smile caught on his lips.

  One evening Mrs Crabbe was astonished, on an­swering the door, to see the figure of Mrs Sylvester standing in the porch. The powerful, still glinting woman held the motionless body of her son in her arms. She stepped silently into the house. John Arthur stood at his mother’s elbow and watched the progress of the woman who came into the hall. His chin was up, his eyes caught the light and threw it back at the limp boy in Mrs Sylvester’s arms. There was an electric, crackling interchange between the sunken eyes of John Arthur and those of the unsee­ing, dying boy. And instantly John Arthur began to chatter in his harsh voice, releasing a torrent of half recognizable, half remembered sounds. Mrs Crabbe followed her son towards his bedroom and Mrs Syl­vester carried her son behind them.

  John Arthur opened his door. As he went into the room there started from all corners of the darkness the whispers of his other patients. Mrs Sylvester swal­lowed her apprehension and advanced towards the bed. She placed her motionless son on it. Still John Arthur poured out his dry, shouting sounds, echoed around the room by the rustling of the bat and the crow, the movement of the mole and the moth. Then Mrs Crabbe took Mrs Sylvester firmly by the arm and led her back to the door, out of the room. They left John Arthur and the stricken boy alone, in the muttering darkness.

  John Arthur’s cries stopped as the door closed. The two women waited outside the room
, looking away from each other, along the corridor. Then, as though no time had passed at all, they were woken from their confusion, their doubts, by a barely per­ceptible click as the door opened and slowly swung wide. The light from the hallway spilled into the bed­room. John Arthur stood near his bed. His hair swept back from his brow, his eyes challenged the light, boldly staring towards the door.

  There was no one, no figure, no boy lying on the bed. Only the rumpled blankets showed the imprint of a body. Two things seemed to happen as one, two outbursts of sound and colour simultaneously. Up from the bed there rose the metallic brightness of a bird, a jay. It beat across the room, blue, black, white and blue again. The jay struck the mirror with a loud crack, a dazzling duplicate of itself, dropping to the carpet and releasing a torrent of guttural shrieks. At the same time, with a mocking smile on his lips, John Arthur Crabbe began to speak in a clear, measured voice, welcoming his mother.

  THE FROZEN MAN by John Trevena

  The career of John Trevena (1870-1948), whom a critic for the Times Literary Supplement in 2013 called ‘one of England’s lost novelists, a writer of startling ability’, was a strange one. From 1897 to 1907 he built a minor reputation for himself under his birth name, Ernest G. Henham, publishing a number of moderately successful novels, including the weird decadent tale Tenebrae (1898) and the haunted house novel The Feast of Bacchus (1907), both republished by Valancourt. But for reasons of health, Henham was obliged to move to Dartmoor, where he apparently disowned his earlier works, adopting the pseudonym John Trevena and publishing a series of highly accomplished mystical novels which were ranked by a contemporary Los Angeles Times critic as being on par with the classics of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. The virtuosity of Trevena’s prose is on full display in ‘The Frozen Man’, which originally appeared in the collection Written in the Rain (1912) and which is reprinted for the first time here.

  The country was the home of the cold genius of the north: a ridiculous ball of sun, no warmer than the moon, surrounded by coronae, the air glittering with crystals, every bush and bough coated with glazed frost; I had but to kick up the snow to see a shower of diamonds; and above the steel-­blue of the horizon hung a mirage, a deserted city of ice, a place of dreams and folklore. While I was staring at the spires and pinnacles shooting upward from silent streets of cloud, looking in vain for the snow-­clad ghosts which should have been walking there, Chief Factor Armstrong came across, drew the corn-­cob from his mouth, and spoke:

  ‘It’s real good of you to go with Mac. I couldn’t send him out by himself, as you might say, for Sinapis as a companion is no better than a dog. The boy isn’t right either – swears he is, but I know better. I believe he’s sick. He must go, for I’ve no one else.’

  ‘Old Mac is a good sort,’ I said.

  ‘The best in the world, when you can keep him off religion and whisky. He’s fond of preaching, and the other thing. Here come the dogs,’ Armstrong went on heartily. ‘Good-­luck to you, good weather, and lots of thanks.’

  The assistant-­factor, MacDonald, and myself were about to start upon an expedition to the north. Game of every kind had been scarce that season, not a fox came near the fort, even wolves appeared to have deserted us: so we were going to explore the country for signs of the fur-­bearers, as we couldn’t place much reliance upon the reports of wandering natives, although these same individuals had lately supplied Armstrong with information which made a journey of investigation necessary. According to them a party of Germans were passing through the country further north, trapping and shooting all the furs they could find, thereby infringing upon the rights of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay.

  ‘There’s no truth in the yarn,’ Armstrong had said. ‘Anyway, it’s like this: if I make a search for these fellows, it will be found that the story is false. If I don’t look for them, it will be true, and I shall hear something about neglect of duty.’

  The long sleigh lay upon the glistening snow before the fort, packed with provisions and furs, while Sinapis with a heavy whip attempted to control the team of twenty-­four dogs, the finest lot in the country, and the pride of the chief factor’s heart. Well they might be, for the famous breed of sleigh dog, or husky, as the animal is generally named, is well-­nigh extinct to-­day. These powerful brutes are more like bears than dogs. Their strength and staying powers are enormous, and their ferocity is on a par with their hardiness, which is indeed almost abnormal, as I have driven a team for a week on nothing but a little hard biscuit, with a few scraps of deer pemmican and frozen fish strips once in the twenty-­four hours. Yet they have snapped as fiercely and been to all appearance as lusty on the last few miles as at the start.

  Sinapis crawled into the back of the sleigh, the long lash curled out, the leaders yelped impatiently and bit each other. The next moment we were gliding along swiftly, enveloped in the smoke-­like breath of the dogs, while old Armstrong waved a farewell from the fort. There is nothing half so exhilarating as a good scamper over the northern plains, wrapped up to the nose tip, lying full length along the sleigh, with a score of thoroughbred dogs in front. Away on all sides extended the snow-­covered wastes, broken here and there by dark-­green fir bluffs, their tresses blue with ice. Not a man, not an animal, nor bird, nor insect could be seen for miles. But what of that? It was glorious to see the pale-­blue sky spotted with fragile cirri, to watch the frost dancing around, and to feel the sharp prick of the crystals against the exposed cheeks and nose, and to hear the comfortable swish of the sleigh as it slid along, and the quick panting of the dogs.

  That first day we travelled at a great rate, for the snow was solid and fairly even, although at times we would glance with a sudden shock off a hidden point of rock, or grate over a fallen tree trunk which the last sprinkle of snow had managed to cover. At evening we camped well inside a bluff, keeping up a huge fire, which was indeed needed, for our little spirit thermometer marked forty-­six below zero when I read it at ten o’clock, and it would sink lower than that before morning.

  It was not until we had finished supper, and were bending to light our pipes at the fire, that MacDonald put a suspicion I had been harbouring for the last hour into words.

  ‘Say,’ he remarked; ‘been watching the boy lately?’

  Sinapis appeared restless and miserable. He never spoke, moved listlessly, and accomplished his tasks without any show of alacrity, working slowly and heavily, although that was no new thing with him.

  I answered MacDonald’s question with another, ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  He snorted impatiently. ‘Sick, and dead sick, too. He was bad when we started, but wouldn’t own to it, darn him.’

  ‘He’ll be all right to-­morrow.’

  ‘That’s a silly thing to say. You know what a flimsy affair an Indian’s constitution is. He’s sick one day, dead the next. Doing his usual chores in the morning, taking his long rest at night. It’s no use kicking back because you don’t want to go on. What we want to do is to face the question.’

  ‘Let’s put him in the sleigh, cover him up, and if he is all right in the morning the better for us. If he isn’t, we’ll have done all we can. You might have been worse off, Mac. If I hadn’t come – ’

  ‘If you weren’t here I shouldn’t think twice about it,’ he interrupted. ‘I should hitch up the huskies first thing in the morning, and start to work crossing those tracks we made to-­day.’

  Unluckily next morning there could be no question about the seriousness of the man’s illness. What the disease was I couldn’t tell; but his strength had gone, his head and body were racked with pains, and altogether he seemed in a bad way. However, we started off north as soon as we had partaken of some food, and made good progress all forenoon. Then evil fortune overtook us. We reached bad country, covered with rocks, and protected upon either side by a deep bank of pines. Here the snow-­bed was uneven. The sleigh, instead of gliding over the surface, broke through the crust, while the d
ogs sank up to their bellies, tugging ineffectually, and filling the air with their short angry barks.

  MacDonald and I looked at each other. Anger was visible all over his face, as he shouted sulkily to the dogs, who ceased from their labours willingly enough.

  ‘Just what I told you,’ he grumbled. ‘Directly Sinapis is struck down, this sort of job crops up. We’re going to have a happy day, I tell ye.’

  There was no help for it. We lashed on the snowshoes and walked ahead of the dogs, breaking a trail for them. It was hard work, and took all the breath we could spare, so there was little talk until we reached a good camping-­place and began to fix up for the night. Luckily the last few miles had been fairly easy, so we looked forward to good going on the morrow. It was worthy of note that during the whole of the day’s journey we had never sighted a living thing.

  Sinapis was better, I thought. He was quieter and had stopped groaning. He lay still, and did not appear to notice either of us. We did what we could – little enough – then left him and tried to get to sleep ourselves. The night was milder, if twenty-­five below may be called warm, but we were well sheltered by bluffs on every side.

  I was beginning to doze when MacDonald hit me in the ribs with the stem of his pipe, and I saw his quaint hairy face near mine.

  ‘Man,’ he whispered, ‘have ye seen the boy?’

  ‘Not for the last hour or two. What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘Have ye seen his eyes?’

  ‘Get away, Mac,’ I muttered.

  ‘I saw his eyes,’ he went on, ‘I waved my hand up and down and they never winked. Man, he’s crazy.’

  ‘Look here, Mac,’ I said, ‘keep your horrors to yourself, and let me get to sleep.’

  ‘Crazy,’ he repeated unpityingly. ‘Knows he’s going to die, and the fear o’ death has crazed his brain because he’s a papist, and knows – ’