Stephen Jones: Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Climbing out, he stared at the sky and then his house and then the empty garden. A few drops of cold rain on his cheeks decided him; he drove the rattling half-truck into the empty garden, unlatched the metal back flap, opened it just an inch so as to allow a proper flow, and then began motoring back and forth across the garden, letting the dark stuffs whisper down, letting the strange midnight earth shift and murmur, until, at last, the truck was empty and stood in the blowing night, watching the wind stir the black soil.

Then he locked the truck in the garage and went to stand on the back porch thinking, I won’t need water. The storm will soak the ground.

He stood for a long while simply staring at the graveyard mulch waiting for rain until he thought, What am I waiting for? Jesus! And went in.

At 10 o’clock, a light rain tapped on the windows and sifted over the dark garden. At 11, it rained so steadily that the gutter drains swallowed and rattled. At midnight, the rain grew heavy. He looked to see if it was eroding the new dark earth, but only saw the black muck drinking the downpour, like a great black sponge, lit by distant flares of lightning.

Then, at 1 in the morning, the greatest Niagara of all shuddered the house, rinsed the windows to blindness, and shook the lights.

And then, abruptly, the downpour ceased, followed by one great downfall blow of lightning, which ploughed and pinioned the dark earth close by, near, outside, with explosions of light as if ten thousand flashbulbs had been fired off. Then darkness fell in curtains of thunder, cracking the heart, breaking the bones.

In bed, wishing for the merest dog to hold, for lack of human company, hugging the sheets, burying his head, then rising full to the silent air, the dark air, the storm gone, the rain shut, and a silence spread in whispers as the last drench melted into the trembling soil. He shuddered and then shivered and then hugged himself to stop the shivering of his cold flesh, and he was thirsty, but could not make himself move to find the kitchen and drink water, milk, leftover wine, anything. He lay back, dry-mouthed, with unreasonable tears filling his eyes.

Free dirt, he thought. My God what a damn fool night. Free dirt!

At 2 o’clock he heard his wristwatch ticking softly.

At 2:30 he felt his pulse in his wrists and ankles and neck and then in his temples and inside his head.

The entire house leaned in the wind, listening.

Outside in the still night, the wind failed and the yard lay soaking and waiting.

And at last. yes. He opened his eyes and turned his head towards the window.

He held his breath. What? Yes? What?

Beyond the window, beyond the wall, beyond the house, outside somewhere, a whisper, a murmur, growing louder and louder. Grass growing? Blossoms opening? Soil shifting, crumbling?

A great whisper, a mix of shadows and shades. Something rising. Something moving.

Ice froze beneath his skin. His heart ceased.

Outside in the dark, in the yard.

Autumn had arrived.

October was there.

His garden gave him.

A harvest.

Ray Bradbury is, without doubt, our most distinguished living fantasy writer. Cutting his literary teeth in the memorable pages of Weird Tales in the 1940s, his early stories from that pulp magazine were reprinted in the Arkham House collection Dark Carnival, published in 1947. Known principally for his short fiction, he has sold his work to all the major magazines in the intervening fifty years, and his many tales of science fiction, fantasy and horror have been widely collected. The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The October Country, A Medicine for Melancholy, I Sing the Body Electric and Long After Midnight are just a few of the evocative titles that hint at the equally atmospheric prose to be found in Ray Bradbury’s timeless fiction. He is also the author of several classic novels, including Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Halloween Tree and, more recently, Death is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics. His screenwriting credits include Moby Dick (for John Huston) and It Came from Outer Space, and since 1985 he has adapted his own short stories for The Ray Bradbury Theater. ‘I took a couple of years off, and did sixty-five teleplays for my TV series, plus a couple of screenplays,’ says Bradbury. ‘But I wanted to get back to my root system — because I started as a short story writer when I was twelve. I had a lot of ideas put away, just old scribbled notes I started going through.’ The result was a number of new short stories written during the last year or so, including ‘Free Dirt’, which have been collected in Quicker Than the Eye.

Justin had read Dandelion Wine seventeen times now, but he still hated to see it end. He always hated endings.

He turned the last page of the book and sat for several minutes in the shadows of his bedroom, cradling the old thumbed paperback, marvelling at the world he held in his hands. The hot sprawl of the city outside was forgotten; he was still lost in the cool green Byzantium of 1928.

Within these tattered covers, dawning realization of his own mortality might turn a boy into a poet, not a dark machine of destruction. People only died after saying to each other all the things that needed to be said, and the summer never truly ended so long as those bottles gleamed down cellar, full of the distillate of memory.

For Justin, the distillate of memory was a bitter vintage. The summer of 1928 seemed impossibly long ago, beyond imagining, forty years before blasted sperm met cursed egg to make him. When he put the book aside and looked at the dried blood under his fingernails, it seemed even longer.

An artist who doesn’t read is no artist at all, he had scribbled in a notebook he once tried to keep, but abandoned after a few weeks, sick of his own thoughts. Books are the key to other minds, sure as bodies are the key to other souls. Reading a good book is a lot like sinking your fingers up to the second knuckle in someone’s brain.

In the world of the story, no one left before it was time. Characters in a book never went away; all you had to do was open the book again and there they’d be, right where you left them. He wished live people were so easy to hold on to.

You could hold on to parts of them, of course; you could even make them part of yourself. That was easy. But to keep a whole person with you for ever, to stop just one person from leaving or gradually disintegrating as they always did… to just hold someone. All of someone.

There might be ways. There had to be ways.

Even in Byzantium, a Lonely One stalked and preyed.

Justin was curled up against the headboard of his bed, a bloodstained comforter bunched around his bare legs. This was his favourite reading spot. He glanced at the nightstand, which held a Black & Decker electric drill, a pair of scissors, a roll of paper towels, and a syringe full of chlorine bleach. The drill wasn’t plugged in yet. He closed his eyes and allowed a small slow shudder to run through his body, part dread, part desire.

There were screams carved on the air of his room, vital fluids dried deep within his mattress, whole lives sewn into the lining of his pillow, to be taken out and savoured later. There was always time, so long as you didn’t let your memories get away. He had kept most of his. In fact, he’d kept seventeen; all but the first two, and those he didn’t want.

Justin’s father had barely seen him out of the womb before disappearing into the seamy nightside of Los Angeles. His mother raised him on the continent’s faulty rim, in an edging-towards-poor neighbourhood of a city that considered its poor a kind of toxic waste: ceaselessly and unavoidably churned out by progress, hard to store or dispose of, foul-smelling and ugly and dangerous. Their little stucco house was at the edge of a vast slum, and Justin’s dreams were peppered with gunfire, his play permeated with the smell of piss and garbage. He was often beaten bloody just for being a scrawny white boy carrying a book. His mother never noticed his hands scraped raw on concrete, or the thin crust of blood that often formed between his oozing nose and mouth by the time he got home.