Chilling Horror Short Stories Read online

  This is a FLAME TREE Book

  Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells

  Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck

  Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker

  Thanks to Will Rough

  FLAME TREE PUBLISHING 6 Melbray Mews, Fulham, London SW6 3NS, United Kingdom

  www.flametreepublishing.com

  First published 2015

  Copyright © 2016 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd

  Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78361-374-8

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78664-509-8

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The cover image is created by Flame Tree Studio, based on artwork by Slava Gerj and Gabor Ruszkai.

  A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library.

  Introducing our new fiction list:

  FLAME TREE PRESS | FICTION WITHOUT FRONTIERS

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  Horror, Crime, Science Fiction & Fantasy

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  Contents

  Foreword by Dr Dale Townshend

  Publisher’s Note

  Ecdysis

  Rebecca J. Allred

  The Damned Thing

  Ambrose Bierce

  Beyond the Wall

  Ambrose Bierce

  Mirror’s Keeper

  Michael Bondies

  The Watcher by the Threshold

  John Buchan

  The Dying Art

  Glen Damien Campbell

  The Yellow Sign

  Robert W. Chambers

  Breach

  Justin Coates

  The Dead Smile

  F. Marion Crawford

  The Screaming Skull

  F. Marion Crawford

  The Child’s Story

  Charles Dickens

  The Leather Funnel

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  In Search of a New Wilhelm

  John H. Dromey

  Leonora

  Elise Forier Edie

  A Game of Conquest

  David A. Elsensohn

  Thing in the Bucket

  Eric Esser

  The Murdered Cousin

  Sheridan Le Fanu

  The Grey Woman

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Worth the Having

  Michael Paul Gonzalez

  Extraneus Invokat

  Ed Grabianowski

  The Three Strangers

  Thomas Hardy

  Young Goodman Brown

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  The Gateway of the Monster

  William Hope Hodgson

  The Challenge from Beyond

  Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, and C.L. Moore

  The Man in the Ambry

  Gwendolyn Kiste

  Start with Color

  Bill Kte’pi

  The Rocking-Horse Winner

  D.H. Lawrence

  The Magnificat of Devils

  James Lecky

  The Dunwich Horror

  H.P. Lovecraft

  The Call of Cthulhu

  H.P. Lovecraft

  The Horla

  Guy de Maupassant

  The Woman of the Wood

  A. Merritt

  The Vampire

  Jan Neruda

  The Masque of the Red Death

  Edgar Allan Poe

  The Premature Burial

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Trial and Error

  Frank Roger

  The Mortal Immortal

  Mary Shelley

  The Body Snatcher

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Dracula’s Guest

  Bram Stoker

  Blessed Be the Bound

  Lucy Taylor

  Dead End

  Kristopher Triana

  Justified

  DJ Tyrer

  Afterward

  Edith Wharton

  Deep-sixed Without a Depth Gauge

  Andrew J. Wilson

  The Dew of Heaven, Like Ashes

  William R.D. Wood

  Biographies & Sources

  Foreword:

  Chilling Horror Stories

  In her posthumously published essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826), Ann Radcliffe, the most popular, successful and well-remunerated Gothic writer of the late eighteenth century, set out an extremely influential distinction between the aesthetics of terror and horror. ‘Terror and horror are so far opposite’, her fictional stand-in in the essay, Mr W_, observes, ‘that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life’. Horror, by contrast, ‘contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them’. While, according to the principles that Edmund Burke had outlined in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the terror that Radcliffe’s speaker finds in the work of Shakespeare and Milton is sublime, horror, the essay maintains, is lacking in the requisite sense of uncertainty that is central to the generation of sublime or awe-inspiring effects. It is on the principle of obscurity, then, that the distinction between horror and terror for Radcliffe ultimately depends: ‘and where lies the great difference between horror and terror’, her speaker rhetorically enquires, ‘but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?’ If terror demands a lack of clarity, horror thrives on a sense of immediacy; while terror proceeds by means of hints, suggestions and subtle prompts, horror is always graphic in its rendition, leaving almost nothing to the work of the imagination. Terror is an aesthetic of economy, while horror is the writing of excess.

  Though located very firmly in eighteenth-century debates, Ann Radcliffe’s account remains central to the ways in which we conceptualize the aesthetics of horror today. Notable in this regard is the emphasis that her essay places upon horror’s effects upon the physical body of the spectator: while the life-enhancing scenes of terror are said to ‘expand’ the ‘soul’, horror ‘contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates’ his or her faculties. The ghost’s lines from Act I, scene v of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, frequently cited in Gothic tales of terror and wonder, illustrate horror’s corporeal effects particularly well: ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, / Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, / Thy knotted and combined locks to part / And each particular hair to stand on end, / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine’. Freezing the blood, causing the eyes to leave their sockets, the hair to stand on end like the quills of a porcupine: horror demands of the reader’s body a physical reaction. Indeed, perhaps its appeal today lies precisely in its ability to reawaken through its repulsive and shocking scenes the human bodies that have been elided and repressed by the screens and digital networks of cyberculture in the twenty-first century.

  More than generating these effects in its participants, horror, from its eighteenth-century literary origins to the horror films of the present, is also internally characterised by a concern with corporeality, with bodies th
at splatter and bleed, decompose and decay, mutate and change form. While terror engages the mind of the reader in attitudes of mystery, tension and suspense, horror, invariably with a certain forcefulness, confronts us with bodies that are broken, violated, wretched and foreign indeed, with physical forms that may no longer be deemed ‘human’ at all. Such is the case in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Damned Thing’ (1893), in which the invisible, superhuman force or ‘thing’ of the story’s title violently destroys and eviscerates the body of Hugh Morgan in ways that suggest the activities of a mountain lion. When such forces of invisible horror assume physical shape and form, they are often monstrous, as they are in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1929), in which the town and its people are menaced by an oozing, formless monster that is neither man nor beast nor fish. If the ghost is the cipher of terror, the monster, often spectacularly rendered, is horror’s equivalent. These abject, monstrous figures characteristically engender feelings of dread, nausea and disgust in those who perceive them, three powerful impulses that are often recorded as protagonists’ responses to monstrous objects within horror narratives themselves.

  Here, the examples offered up in Matthew Lewis’s seminal horror novel, The Monk (1796), are particularly illuminating: in each of the many scenes of horror that the novel contains are episodes that include the bloody dismemberment of an evil Prioress at the hands of an enraged crowd, and the live-burial of a young mother who, when she is discovered, is found still clinging to the maggot-eaten corpse of her baby. It is disgust that is the overwhelming response. Inducing repulsion, nausea and disgust, horror is an aesthetic of negative impulse, a characteristic clearly illustrated in the deranged narrator’s responses to the screaming skull in F. Marion Crawford’s story of 1911 of that name. As it does here, horror often involves the voluble articulation of the presence of death, either through the dead and mutilated bodies that litter so many horror fictions and films, or through foregrounding death’s ubiquity even at the heart of life, perhaps no more so than in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842). Continuously reminding us of the death-head beneath the mask, the skull beneath the skin, the grimace behind the smile; we’re reminded of Radcliffe’s observations that horror ‘contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates’ the human faculties. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret to the extraordinary popularity that the mode has enjoyed globally ever since it was first given literary expression in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century: though horror does not constitute for its devotees and fans a form of enjoyment in any simple sense, its appeal is no less gripping and powerful.

  Dr Dale Townshend, 2015

  Publisher’s Note

  This collection of Gothic Fantasy stories is part of a new anthology series, which includes sumptuous hardcover editions on Horror, Ghosts and Science Fiction. Each one carries a potent mix of classic tales and new fiction, forming a path from the origins of the gothic in the early 1800s, with the dystopian horror of Mary Shelley’s ‘The Mortal Immortal’ to the chill of M.R. James’s classic ghost stories, and the fine stories of the many modern writers featured in our new series. We have tried to mix some renowned classic stories (Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’), with the less familiar (E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’), and a healthy dose of previously unpublished modern stories from the best of those writing today.

  Our 2015 call for new submissions was met by a tidal wave of entries, so the final selection was made to provide a wide and challenging range of tales for the discerning reader. Our editorial board of six members read each entry carefully, and it was difficult to turn down so many good stories, but inevitably those which made the final cut were deemed to be the best for our purpose, and we’re delighted to be able to publish them here.

  Ecdysis

  Rebecca J. Allred

  The waiting room is empty, but it isn’t quiet. Behind the door marked PRIVATE, a woman chokes out wet, anguished sobs. Dr. Allison’s secretary pretends not to notice. She greets me with a practiced, professional smile that lacks even a hint of warmth and asks me to wait. Wait? For what? I’m the last patient of the week. Always have been. Always will be. It’s not like there’s a line.

  I smile. Nod. Sure. I’ll wait.

  The secretary punches a few buttons, clicks the mouse once, twice, drags something across the screen, double clicks, and resumes typing. Once, I arrived early and caught her snooping through patient files. I could have turned her in – HIPAA violations are serious business – but frankly, I don’t care, and even if I did, who’d believe a paranoid nutbag like me?

  The secretary finishes checking her e-mail, or whatever’s so important she couldn’t check me in immediately, and asks for my name. She knows my name, but I give it to her anyway. She asks me to confirm my address. It hasn’t changed since last week. Neither has my insurance. When she’s done checking all her little boxes, I take a seat on a cream-colored sofa. The room smells like those little bars of soap shaped like sea shells, and an instrumental version of a song I almost recognize wafts from speakers I can’t see. There is a coffee table made of black wood. Resting on its surface is a little Zen garden and the latest issues of half-a-dozen tabloid magazines. Behind the door, the crying has stopped.

  My palms itch. I scratch them with nails jagged from daily dental manicures; they are barely long enough to register any measure of relief. One of my fingertips slides over a pair of fine, almost invisible, hairs.

  In middle school, the kids said if you masturbated too much you’d get hairy palms.

  I don’t masturbate, and the hairs on my palm aren’t really hairs.

  Delusional Parasitosis, eponymously known as Ekbom’s Syndrome (I read that in one of Dad’s medical texts, back when I wanted to be a doctor, too) is the medical name for my particular brand of nutbaggery. Or it would be, if the bugs infesting my body were all in my head like Dr. Allison says. They are in my head; I can feel their antennae quiver as they poke through the skin on my face, masquerading as a beard, but they’re other places, too.

  I look back to Dr. Allison’s secretary. She’s working on the computer again, getting ready to go home for the long weekend. Mentally, she is already gone, and so she doesn’t see me pinch the hairs, pluck a beetle from my palm, and toss it into the Zen garden on the table. It lands on its back, legs combing the air a few moments before it rights itself and burrows beneath the sand.

  The door to Dr. Allison’s office opens. A short woman with puffy eyes and dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail exits. Her son is dead. Just like my mom. I know, because Dr. Allison’s secretary isn’t the only one who has been snooping in patient files.

  Lately, I’ve been thinking about this woman. Every week, I think about stopping her as she passes me in the soap-scented waiting room, wrapping her in my arms, and allowing sorrow to flow freely between our wounded souls. We would share everything, she and I, and we would be made whole again. The woman’s eyes never leave the floor as she moves across the room, her shoes whispering against the high-quality beige carpet and carrying her out of the building.

  Dr. Allison lingers in the frame of the door marked PRIVATE. She invites me inside.

  * * *

  Dr. Allison isn’t my first shrink, and she won’t be my last. My first therapist was Dr. Carlson; he went to medical school with my dad. I went to see him when the bugs first showed up. Back then, they didn’t call it Delusional Parasitosis – I know because Dad has copies of all my medical records up until age eighteen in a locked drawer in his office. They sit right on top of Mamma’s.

  Dr. Carlson was cool. He had red hair and a beard and smoked cigars (not during our sessions, but always when he came over to drink wine and “talk shop” with Dad). He told me the bugs were all in my head, too, but that it wasn’t my fault, because Mamma had put them there. They were contagious, like the chicken pox, so Mamma had to go to the hospital for a while. When Mamma went away, so did the b
ugs.

  Folie à deux is French for ‘a madness shared by two.’ The medical term is Shared Psychotic Disorder. That’s what’s written in my clinic notes from Dr. Carlson.

  * * *

  Dr. Allison’s office doesn’t smell like soap. It smells like lavender and tears. There is no music in here, only the soft, predictable tick of a clock counting down the minutes with malign diligence. The walls are lined with bookshelves, neatly organized. A desk with a computer, a stack of folders (patient files), a fountain pen, and a lead crystal paperweight is nestled in the corner. Near the center of the room are a high-back leather chair and a couch. She sits in the chair and gestures to the couch. Usually, I lie down. Today, I sit.

  She comments on my beard, says she likes it (she’s lying), and then asks how the last week has been. I tell her my roommate is mad at me because he thinks I killed his cat. She asks if I did, and I tell her I didn’t (I’m lying, sort of), and she asks how that makes me feel.

  I tell her I feel itchy.

  * * *

  The last time I saw Mamma alive, she was lying in an expensive hospital bed. The bugs hadn’t bothered me in months, and both Dad and Dr. Carlson thought it would be okay for me to visit.

  She looked different. Not like Mamma at all. Her soft yellow hair had been cut short. Dad said it was because she’d been pulling it out. The medical word for this is trichotillomania. There were little red sores all over her face and scalp, and she wore mittens that she couldn’t take off.

  Mamma just lay there, ignoring both me and my dad, murmuring over and over again that she was hungry. I begged Dad to get her something to eat. He patted me on the head, told me I was a good boy, and asked me to keep Mamma company while he stepped out to get some graham crackers.

  As soon as he was gone, Mamma popped out of bed like some lunatic, termite-infested jack-in-the-box. She told me that the bugs were hungry. That if she didn’t feed them soon, they would eat her instead. Tears welled up inside her eyes; tiny black specks swam in them. Mamma kissed me on the forehead and I felt something crawl out of her lips and up onto my scalp. I pulled back, running my hands thorough my hair, trying to dislodge the invader.