Karl Wagner - The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

I’m out for hours because when I come to, rubbing my forehead, the sun casts quite different shadows on the stony face. Dismayingly I have to admit he still looks like me. For several minutes I sit and watch the insects that use his cavities and passages as they would any similar rock formation.

Later I tell Flavia how closely his volcanic features resembled mine.

“It’s quite common to hallucinate after an eruption,” she says, applying a piece of sticky tape to the newspaper covering the driver’s window.

That’s all very well, I think, but I’m 2000 years too late. Or did she mean him? But I don’t want to dwell on it because the faster the newspaper goes up the sooner I can have her.

It clicked with me that I could make the most of Flavia’s carbound vivacity so that her passivity at home would not matter as much.

Through a narrow gap at the top of the windscreen I can see Vesuvius rising and falling as Flavia and I punish the old Fiat’s suspension.

In a few hours’ time I’ll be climbing Vesuvius herself. Flavia’s away somewhere—working, she said—so I’m to tackle the volcano alone, and although I could have taken a cab to the tourist car park halfway up the mountain I decided to walk all the way from Ercolano which, as Herculaneum, was itself covered by the same lava flows that buried Pompeii. The road folds over on itself as I climb. The routine is soon automatic as I maintain a regular ascent and efficient breathing. My mind is rerunning the night before in Flavia’s car. Six times her emotions reached bursting point and boiled over. In the early hours the air in the car was so thick and cloying we had to wind down the window, which meant losing part of our newsprint screen, but the park had emptied hours before.

In her apartment, where I swallowed glass after glass of fresh orange juice, Flavia was once more still and gray. I was thinking about getting her out in the car again but I knew I had to climb the volcano before I left: it had been calling me and this was my last day in the city.

If the air were not so thick with dust, the view from halfway up the mountain would be spectacular. I can just make out a darker shadow which is the center of Naples and a thin line separating the land from the sea. Only the island of Capri is clear in the distance, but its profile is still no more like a woman than the trembling slope beneath my feet. Down here there are trees either side of the road, but I can see that higher up the ground is bare. The sun still manages to break through the thickening air and once caught between the ground and the dust the heat cannot escape. I’ve taken off my shirt and tied it around my neck to soak up some of the sweat. The mountain seems to get no smaller even though I know I’m climbing. The road hugs the side and disappears some way round the back before twisting back on itself to reach the car park and refreshment stand. I have the sense, the higher I get, of the volcano as an egg, its exterior thin and brittle and cracked open at the top. I stop for breath, and lean back, and stretch. The summit and crater are covered by cloud.

Beyond the empty car park the narrow path zigzags into the clouds. I climb with the same sense of purpose that took hold of Flavia and me in the car and I sense that the prize is not so far removed from that sweet and fiery memory which even now stirs me. The earth and trees have been left behind and the slate-gray cloud thickens about me like hospital blankets. The mountain is loose cinders and disintegrated volcanic material, a uniform gray-brown, like a dying horse in a burnt field. I’m suddenly engulfed by a wave of sympathy for Flavia and the years of suffering. They have turned her into a brittle shell, but life lingers within her, a dormant energy that last night we fired up. She deserves longer-lasting happiness and yet I know she wouldn’t even flicker in some other city; Naples is her only home. Some things are rooted too deeply in the earth to shift.

Never in my life have I felt so alone as I feel now, wrapped in cloud, buffeted by sea winds, following a path to a crater. I can’t see more than ten barren yards in any direction.

When I hear the music I think I’ve died or am still asleep in Flavia’s bed and dreaming. Soft notes that gather a little power then fade quickly as the wind blows new ones slightly up or down the scale. I’ve already called Flavia’s name three times before I realize I’m doing it. The name is taken from my lips and wrapped in this soiled cotton wool that surrounds me. Her name rolls on with the cloud over the top of the mountains where the crater must be. It mustn’t fall in.

The source of the music comes into view—an abandoned shack supported by an exoskeleton of tubular steel shafts. The wind plays them like panpipes. A sign still attached to the side of the shack advertises the sale of tickets to the crater. I begin to laugh at the absurdity of such an idea, and wade on past the chiming tubes and up toward the edge. I know it’s up there somewhere although I can’t see it and I stumble blindly onward, scuffing my shoes in coarse, loose material. Then suddenly the ground disappears beneath my feet and I’m clawing at space for a handhold. Somehow I manage to fall back rather than forward and I crouch in the harsh volcanic rubble peering over the edge of the crater. Below me the cloud twists in draughts of warm air. I’m muttering Flavia’s name to myself and thinking I should never have gone to look for her. Then I’m thinking maybe I never did go, but stayed in the insect-ridden hotel instead.

As I watch the updrafts of ash and dust, I see a recognizable group of shapes take vague form in the clouds. The German tourists—he with the red shirt, the camcorder, the stomach, she of the shorts and smart training shoes, still frozen as an exhibit of statuary—descend through the rising dust as if on a platform. The thicker swirls beneath me envelop them.

They pass into the throat of the giant and are followed by a facsimile of Flavia, falling like a slow bomb. A cast of myself—whether from Pompeii or the hotel, I don’t know—is next, slipping in and out of focus behind curtains of clogging ash.

The last thing I remember is the buffeting and turbulence the 737 went through as it passed over Vesuvius on its descent into Naples, and suddenly the whole crazy city with its strange visions and coating of fine dust—from a waiter’s shoes to the air rattling in lungs—makes perfect sense.

Terry Lamsley was born near London on January 28, 1941, and he presently lives in the High Peak of Derbyshire with his wife and family. Many of his stories are set in and around his home town, Buxton, including those in Under the Crust, his first collection of supernatural tales—the title story from which appears here. Lamsley seems to be trying to do to Buxton what Ramsey Campbell has done to Liverpool. I imagine that the authorities will make it look like an accident.

Writing about himself, Lamsley informs us: “Terry has had a vast number of jobs, and sometimes no job at all. In 1989, finding himself at a loose end, he foolishly took up social work. He’s still doing it. He has been writing, with mixed success, as long as he can remember (his memory is not so good). He first seriously attempted the supernatural genre about three years ago, and a number of his stories are due to appear in print in the near future. He is now working on his next regional collection, High Peaks of Fear, and hopes to start a novel when it is complete. His hobbies are playing pool, emptying bottles, and hanging on by the skin of his teeth.”

And now we begin our final descent into the strange and disturbing.

Maurice began to feel ill as he came off the Chapel-en-le-Frith bypass and drove up the A6 to Dove Holes. Suddenly, his palms were damp, and his hands slithered on the steering wheel. He was trying to grip too hard, to compensate for a feeling he had that if he didn’t do so, his hands would start to tremble. Also, he was having trouble with his vision. The edges of things were hazy, and patches of blue sky that showed through the gaps in the high, blousy clouds, looked far too bright, like neon light shining off painted metal. He wanted to stop, but was caught in a line of lorries, and there was nowhere to pull off the road that he could remember. He wiped his hands on his shirt. They became sticky again at once. There was a droning sound somewhere. He wasn’t sure if it was coming from the car engine or inside his skull.