The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories

by Michael McDowell

  When the day of the performance arrived I asked him if he wanted to drive to the Alhambra in our specially built car, or to use the carriage and horses that I knew he preferred for public appearances. He chose the latter.

  We departed early, knowing that in addition to the distance we had to cover there would be several delays caused by admirers.

  We placed Todd at the front of the carriage, next to the driver, sitting him up in the seat I had built for him. Elizabeth and I sat behind, her hand resting lightly on my leg. Every so often, Todd would half turn his head and speak to us. On these occasions, either she or I would lean forward to acknowledge him and reply.

  Once we were on the main road into Paris we encountered many large groups of admirers. Some cheered or called; some stood in silence. Todd acknowledged them all, but when one woman tried to scramble up into the carriage he became agitated and nervous and screamed at me to get her away from him.

  The only place where he came into close contact with any of his admirers was during our stop to change horses. Then he spoke volubly and amiably, though afterwards he was noticeably tired.

  Our arrival at the Théâtre Alhambra had been planned in great detail, and the police had cordoned off the crowd. There was a broad channel left free through which Todd could be wheeled. As the carriage halted the crown began to cheer, and the horses became nervous.

  I wheeled Todd in through the stage door, responding in spite of myself to the hysteria of the crowds. Elizabeth was close behind us. Todd took the reception well and professionally, smiling round from side to side, unable to acknowledge the acclaim in any other way. He appeared not to notice the small but determined and vociferous section of the crowd chanting the slogans that they bore on placards.

  Once inside his dressing-room we were able to relax for a while. The show was not scheduled to start for another two and a half hours. After a short nap, Todd was bathed by Elizabeth, and then dressed in his stage costume.

  Twenty minutes before he was due to give his performance, one of the female staff of the theatre came into the dressing-­room and presented him with a bouquet of flowers. Elizabeth took them from the woman and laid them uncertainly before him, knowing well his dislike of flowers.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to the woman. ‘Flowers. What beautiful colours.’

  Gaston came in fifteen minutes later, accompanied by the manager of the Alhambra. Both men shook hands with me, Gaston kissed Elizabeth on her cheek, and the manager tried to strike up a conversation with Todd. Todd did not reply, and a little later I noticed that the manager was weeping silently. Todd stared at us all.

  It had been decided by Todd that there was to be no special ceremony surrounding this performance. There were to be no speeches, no public remarks from Todd. No interviews to be granted. The act on the stage would follow carefully the instructions he had dictated to me, and the rehearsals that the other assistants had been following for the last week.

  He turned to Elizabeth, and put his face up towards her. She kissed him tenderly, and I turned away.

  After nearly a minute he said: ‘All right, Lasken. I’m ready.’ I took the handle of his carriage and wheeled him out of the dressing-­room and down the corridor towards the wings of the stage.

  We heard a man’s voice talking in French of Todd, and a great roar of applause from the audience. The muscles of my stomach contracted. The expression on Todd’s face did not change.

  Two assistants came forward, and lifted Todd into his harness. This was connected by two thin wires to a pulley in the flies, and when operated by one of the assistants in the wings would move Todd around the stage. When he was secure, his four false limbs were strapped in place.

  He nodded to me, and I prepared myself. For a second, I saw the expression in Elizabeth’s eyes. Todd was not looking in our direction, but I made no response to her.

  I stepped on to the stage. A woman screamed, then the whole audience rose to its feet. My heart raced.

  The equipment was already on the stage, covered with heavy velvet curtains. I walked to the centre of the stage, and bowed to the audience. Then I walked from one piece of apparatus to another, removing the curtains.

  As each piece was revealed the audience roared its approval. The voice of the manager crackled over the P.A. system, imploring them to return to their seats. As I had done at previous performances, I stood still until the audience was seated once more. Each movement was provocative.

  I finished revealing the equipment. To my eye it was ugly and utilitarian, but the audience relished the appearance of the razor-­sharp blades.

  I walked to the footlights.

  ‘Mesdames. Messieurs.’ Silence fell abruptly. ‘Le maître.’

  I moved downstage, holding out my hand in the direction of Todd. I tried purposely to disregard the audience. I could see Todd in the wings, hanging in his harness beside Elizabeth. He was not talking to her or looking at her. His head was bent forward, and he was concentrating on the sound from the audience.

  They were still in silence . . . the anticipatory motionlessness of the voyeur.

  Seconds passed, and still Todd waited. Somewhere in the audience a voice spoke quietly. Abruptly, the audience roared.

  It was Todd’s moment. He nodded to the assistant, who wound the pulley ropes and propelled Todd out on to the stage.

  The movement was eerie and unnatural. He floated on the wire so that his false legs just scraped the canvas of the stage. His false arms hung limply at his side. Only his head was alert, greeting and acknowledging the audience.

  I had expected them to applaud . . . but at his appearance they subsided again into silence. I had forgotten about that in the intervening years. It was the silences that had always appalled me.

  The pulley-­assistant propelled Todd to a couch standing to the right of the stage. I helped him lie down on it. Another assistant – who was a qualified medical doctor – came on to the stage, and carried out a brief examination.

  He wrote something on a piece of paper, and handed it to me. Then he went to the front of the stage and made his statement to the audience.

  I have examined the master. He is fit. He is sane. He is in full possession of his senses, and knows what he is about to undertake. I have signed a statement to this effect.

  The pulley-­assistant raised Todd once more, and propelled him around the stage, from one piece of equipment to another. When he had inspected them all, he nodded his agreement.

  At the front of the stage, in the centre, I unstrapped his false legs. As they fell away from his body, one or two men in the audience gasped.

  Todd’s arms were removed.

  I then pulled forward one of the pieces of equipment: a long, white-­covered table with a large mirror above it.

  I swung Todd’s torso on to the table, then removed the harness and signalled for it to be lifted away. I positioned Todd so that he was lying with his head towards the audience, and with his whole body visible to them in the mirror. I was working amidst silence. I did not look towards the audience. I did not look towards the wings. I was perspiring. Todd said nothing to me.

  When Todd was in the position he required, he nodded to me and I turned towards the audience, bowing and indicating that the performance was about to commence. There was a ripple of applause, soon finished.

  I stood back, and watched Todd without reaction. He was feeling the audience again. In a performance consisting of one solitary action, and a mute one at that, for best effect his timing had to be accurate. There was only one piece of apparatus on the stage which was to be used this evening; the others were there for the effect of their presence.

  Todd and I both knew which one it was to be: I would wheel it over at the appropriate time.

  The audience was silent again, but restless. I felt that it was poised critically; one movement would explode it into reaction. Todd nodded to me.

  I walked again from one piece of apparatus to the next. On each one I put my hand to the blad
e, as if feeling its sharpness. By the time I had been to each one, the audience was ready. I could feel it, and I knew Todd could.

  I went back to the apparatus Todd had selected: a guillotine made from tubular aluminium and with a blade of finest stainless steel. I trundled it over to his table, and connected it with the brackets for that purpose. I tested its solidity, and made a visual check that the release mechanism would work properly.

  Todd was positioned now so that his head overhung the edge of the table, and was directly underneath the blade. The guillotine was so constructed that it did not obscure the view of his body in the mirror.

  I removed his costume.

  He was naked. The audience gasped when they saw his scars, but returned to silence.

  I took the wire loop of the release mechanism and, as Todd had instructed me, tied it tightly around the thick meat of his tongue. To take up the slack of the wire, I adjusted it at the side of the apparatus.

  I leaned over him, and asked if he was ready. He nodded.

  ‘Edward,’ he said indistinctly. ‘Come closer.’

  I leaned forward so that my face was near his. To do this I had to pass my own neck under the guillotine blade. The audience approved of this action.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘I know, Edward. About you and Elizabeth.’

  I looked into the wings, where she was still standing.

  I said: ‘And you still want to . . . ?’

  He nodded again, this time more violently. The wire release on his tongue tightened and the mechanism clicked open. He nearly caught me in the apparatus. I jumped away as the blade plummeted down. I turned from him, looking desperately into the wings at Elizabeth as the first screams from the audience filled the theatre.

  Elizabeth stepped out on to the stage. She was looking at Todd. I went to her.

  Todd’s torso lay on the table. His heart was still beating, for blood spurted rhythmically in thick gouts from his severed neck. His hairless head swung from the apparatus. Where the wire gripped his tongue, it had wrenched it nearly from his throat. His eyes were still open.

  We turned and faced the audience. The change that had come over them was total; in under five seconds they had panicked. A few people had fainted; the rest were standing. The noise of their shouting was unbelievable. They moved towards the doors. None looked at the stage. One man swung his fist at another; was knocked down from behind. A woman was having hysterics, tearing at her clothes. No one paid her any attention. I heard a shot, and ducked instinctively, pulling Elizabeth down with me. Women screamed; men shouted. I heard the P.A. click on, but no voice came through. Abruptly, the doors of the auditorium swung open simultaneously on all sides, and armed riot-­police burst in. It had been planned carefully. As the police attacked them, the crowd fought back. I heard another shot, then several more in rapid succession.

  I took Elizabeth by the hand, and led her from the stage.

  In the dressing-­room we watched through a window as the police attacked the crowds in the street. Many people were shot. Tear-­gas was released, a helicopter hovered overhead.

  We stood together in silence, Elizabeth crying. We were obliged to stay within the safety of the theatre building for another twelve hours. The next day we returned to Racine House, and the first leaves were spreading.

  THE GHOST OF CHARLOTTE CRAY by Florence Marryat

  Florence Marryat (1833-1899) was the daughter of Captain Frederick Marryat, author of The Phantom Ship (1839), and went on to become a popular and prolific author in her own right. She published sixty-eight novels during her career, many of them falling into the genre of the ‘Sensation’ novel popular in late-­Victorian England and often dealing with then-shocking themes such as marital cruelty, adultery, and alcoholism. Later in life, she became known for her involvement in the Spiritualist movement, and her highly successful nonfiction volume There Is No Death (1891) compiled her experiences with séances and mediums, including numerous anecdotes tending to prove the existence of a life after death. Over the past decade or so, critical and scholarly interest in Marryat has been high, particularly in her strange novel The Blood of the Vampire (1897), which Valancourt reissued in 2009. Originally published the same year as Dracula, Marryat’s novel was a very different sort of vampire tale, focusing on a beautiful young woman – the daughter of a mad scientist and a voodoo priestess – who seems to possess the power to psychically drain victims of their life essence. ‘The Ghost of Charlotte Cray’, taken from A Moment of Madness, and Other Stories (1883), is a classic, creepy Victorian ghost story written by a woman who believed wholeheartedly in the paranormal.

  Mr Sigismund Braggett was sitting in the little room he called his study, wrapped in a profound – not to say a mournful – reverie. Now, there was nothing in the present life nor surroundings of Mr Braggett to account for such a demonstration. He was a publisher and bookseller; a man well to do, with a thriving business in the city, and the prettiest of all pretty villas at Streatham. And he was only just turned forty; had not a grey hair in his head nor a false tooth in his mouth; and had been mar­ried but three short months to one of the fairest and most affectionate specimens of English woman­hood that ever transformed a bachelor’s quarters into Paradise.

  What more could Mr Sigismund Braggett pos­sibly want? Nothing! His trouble lay in the fact that he had got rather more than he wanted. Most of us have our little peccadilloes in this world – awkward reminiscences that we would like to bury five fathoms deep, and never hear mentioned again, but that have an uncomfortable habit of cropping up at the most inconvenient moments; and no mortal is more likely to be troubled with them than a middle-­aged bachelor who has taken to matri­mony.

  Mr Sigismund Braggett had no idea what he was going in for when he led the blushing Emily Primrose up to the altar, and swore to be hers, and hers only, until death should them part. He had no conception a woman’s curiosity could be so keen, her tongue so long, and her inventive faculties so correct. He had spent whole days before the fatal moment of marriage in burning letters, erasing initials, destroying locks of hair, and making offer­ings of affection look as if he had purchased them with his own money. But it had been of little avail. Mrs Braggett had swooped down upon him like a beautiful bird of prey, and wheedled, coaxed, or kissed him out of half his secrets before he knew what he was about. But he had never told her about Charlotte Cray. And now he almost wished that he had done so, for Charlotte Cray was the cause of his present dejected mood.

  Now, there are ladies and ladies in this world. Some are very shy, and will only permit themselves to be wooed by stealth. Others, again, are the pursuers rather than the pursued, and chase the wounded or the flying even to the very doors of their stronghold, or lie in wait for them like an octopus, stretching out their tentacles on every side in search of victims.

  And to the latter class Miss Charlotte Cray de­cidedly belonged. Not a person worth mourning over, you will naturally say. But, then, Mr Sigismund Braggett had not behaved well to her. She was one of the ‘peccadilloes.’ She was an authoress – not an author, mind you, which term smacks more of the profession than the sex – but an ‘authoress,’ with lots of the ‘ladylike’ about the plots of her stories and metre of her rhymes. They had come together in the sweet connection of publisher and writer – had met first in a dingy, dusty little office at the back of his house of business, and laid the foundation of their friendship with the average amount of chaffering and prevarication that usually attend such proceedings.

  Mr Braggett ran a risk in publishing Miss Cray’s tales or verses, but he found her useful in so many other ways that he used occasionally to hold forth a sop to Cerberus in the shape of publicity for the sake of keeping her in his employ. For Miss Char­lotte Cray – who was as old as himself, and had arrived at the period of life when women are said to pray ‘Any, good Lord, any!’ – was really a clever woman, and could turn her hand to most things required of her, or upon which she had set her mind; and sh
e had most decidedly set her mind upon marrying Mr Braggett, and he – to serve his own purposes – had permitted her to cherish the idea, and this was the Nemesis that was weighing him down in the study at the present moment. He had complimented Miss Cray, and given her pre­sents, and taken her out a-­pleasuring, all because she was useful to him, and did odd jobs that no one else would undertake, and for less than any­one else would have accepted; and he had known the while that she was in love with him, and that she believed he was in love with her.

  He had not thought much of it at the time. He had not then made up his mind to marry Emily Primrose, and considered that what pleased Miss Cray, and harmed no one else, was fair play for all sides. But he had come to see things differently now. He had been married three months, and the first two weeks had been very bitter ones to him. Miss Cray had written him torrents of reproaches during that unhappy period, besides calling day after day at his office to deliver them in person. This and her threats had frightened him out of his life. He had lived in hourly terror lest the clerks should overhear what passed at their interviews, or that his wife should be made acquainted with them.

  He had implored Miss Cray, both by word of mouth and letter, to cease her persecution of him; but all the reply he received was that he was a base and perjured man, and that she should con­tinue to call at his office, and write to him through the penny post, until he had introduced her to his wife. For therein lay the height and depth of his offending. He had been afraid to bring Emily and Miss Cray together, and the latter resented the omission as an insult. It was bad enough to find that Sigismund Braggett, whose hair she wore next her heart, and whose photograph stood as in a shrine upon her bedroom mantelpiece, had married another woman, without giving her even the chance of a refusal, but it was worse still to come to the conclusion that he did not intend her to have a glimpse into the garden of Eden he had created for himself.