Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

I peered expectantly at him, thinking that he would wave his age-withered arm and Smithers would come striding in from the hall. But no: instead he worked at the clasp of that big wooden box with those trembling fingers of his for what seemed like half an hour, and opened it at last, and lifted the lid and gestured to me to peer in.

Inside lay a bleached skull, sitting atop a jumble of other bones, looking like relics exhumed from some tumulus of antiquity. They were resting on a bed of sand.

“This is Smithers,” he said.

For a moment I could find nothing whatsoever to say. Then I blurted, “How did he die?”

“He died of extreme age,” Brewster said.

And he told me how, after expending many weeks and months crossing India and bashing around in the Thar, he had finally heard the ghostly singers and the distant drums and gongs again, and they had led him to the hidden valley. There he found Smithers, fluent now in the local lingo and busy with all manner of public-works projects in a full-scale attempt to bring the inhabitants of the valley into the nineteenth century overnight.

He was married, Brewster said, to that lovely long-legged native princess who had been teaching him the language.

“Married?” I repeated foolishly, thinking of mournful Helena, the Adjutant’s beautiful daughter, faithful to him yet, still waiting hopefully for his return.

“I suppose it was a marriage,” said Brewster. “They were man and wife, at any rate, whatever words had been said over them. And seemed very happy together. I spoke to him about returning to his assignment here. As you might suspect, he wasn’t eager to do so. I spoke more firmly to him about it.” I tried to imagine the diffident Brewster speaking firmly to his strong-willed friend about anything. I couldn’t. “I appealed to his sense of duty. I appealed to him as an Englishman. I spoke of the Queen.”

“And did he yield?”

“After a while, yes,” Brewster said, in a strange tone of voice that made me wonder whether Brewster might have made him yield at gunpoint. I could not bring myself to ask. “But he insisted that we bring his — wife — out of the valley with us. And so we did. And here they are.”

He indicated the box, the skull, the bones beneath, the bed of sand.

“Hardly had we passed through the barrier but they began to shrivel and age,” he said. “The woman died first. She became a hideous crone in a matter of hours. Then Smithers went.”

“But how — how?”

Brewster shrugged. “Time moves at a different rate within the valley. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. The people in there may be living six or eight hundred years ago, or even more. Time is suspended. But when one emerges — well, do you see me? How I look? The suspended years descend on one like an avalanche, once one leaves. I spent a few weeks in that village the first time. I came back here looking ten or twenty years older. This time I was there for some months. Look at me. Smithers had been under the valley’s spell for, what, two or three years?”

“And the woman for her entire life.”

“Yes. When they came out, he must have been a hundred years old, by the way we reckon time. And she, perhaps a thousand.”

How could I believe him? I am an engineer, a builder of railroads and bridges. I give no credence to tales of ghosts and ghouls and invisible spectres whose voices are heard on the desert air, nor do I believe that time runs at different rates in different parts of our world. And yet — yet — the skull, the bones, the withered, trembling old man of not quite thirty-seven who stood before me speaking with Brewster’s voice—

I understood now that Brewster had been aware of what going back into that terrible valley to fetch Smithers would do to him. It would rob him of most or all of the remaining years of his life. He had known, but Yule had ordered him to go, and, yes, he had gone. The poor man. The poor doomed man.

To cover my confusion I reached into the box. “And what is this?” I asked, picking up a pinch of something fine and white that I took for desert sand, lying beneath the little heap of bones like a cushion. “A souvenir of the Thar?”

“In a manner of speaking. That’s all that remains of her. She crumbled to dust right in front of me. Shrivelled and died and went absolutely to dust, all in a moment.”

Shuddering, I brushed it free of my fingers, back into the box.

I was silent for a while.

The room was spinning about me. I had spent all my days in a world in which three and three make six, six and six make twelve, but I was no longer sure that I lived in such a world any longer.

Then I said, “Take what’s left of Smithers to the chaplain, and see what he wants to do about a burial.”

He nodded, the good obedient Brewster of old. “And what shall I do with this?” he asked, pointing to the sandy deposit in the box.

“Scatter it in the road,” I said. “Or spill it into the river, whatever you wish. She was Smithers’ undoing. We owe her no courtesies.”

And then I thought of Helena, sweet, patient Helena. She had never understood the first thing about him, had she? And yet she had loved him. Poor, sweet Helena.

She must be protected now, I thought. The world is very strange, and too harsh, sometimes, and we must protect women like Helena from its mysteries. At least, from such mysteries as this one — not the mystery of that hidden valley, I mean, though that is mysterious enough, but the mysteries of the heart.

I drew a deep breath. “And — with regard to the Adjutant’s daughter, Brewster—”

“Yes?”

“She will want to know how he died, I suppose. Tell her he died bravely, while in the midst of his greatest adventure in Her Majesty’s Service. But you ought not, I think, to tell her very much more than that. Do you understand me? He died bravely. That should suffice, Brewster. That should suffice.”

REGGIE OLIVER HAS BEEN a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorised biography of writer Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed , published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and five collections of stories of supernatural terror, of which the latest, Mrs Midnight , is now in paperback, having sold out its hardback edition from Tartarus.

His novel, The Dracula Papers I: The Scholar’s Tale , is the first of a projected four, and he is now working on the second volume, The Monk’s Tale . Meanwhile, an omnibus edition of his short stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is being published by Centipede Press, as part of that imprint’s “Masters of the Weird Tale” series.

The author’s stories have appeared in more than thirty anthologies, including several previous volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror .

“There is no point in denying it: this story is a deliberate pastiche of M. R. James’ style and manner, and set in his period,” Oliver confesses, “though perhaps with a few flourishes that are my own.

“It was originally written as an inset story inside a tale called ‘The Giacometti Crucifixion’, and appears as such in my latest collection, Mrs Midnight .

“There, it is purported to have been written by ‘The Rev. A. C. Lincoln’, an Oxford contemporary and rival of James’. However, the story was thought capable of standing on its own and appears as such in The Eighth Black Book of Horror .

“It is one of a number of stories I have written located in the fictional English cathedral city of Morchester. Readers who know the lovely old city of Salisbury will have some idea of my inspiration for Morchester.”