Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Vol 15

They walked in silence through the suburbs before Lieutenant Smith realized he hadn’t asked the logical question. “Mr Machen, you said we have somewhere to go?”

“Indeed I did, sir.”

“Where?”

“I believe we require a little hard evidence. Something tactile to grasp in our hands.”

“Oh?”

“You feel well enough? The explosion at the house…”

“I feel perfectly fine. Perhaps even better than I ought in the circumstances. That bomb scored a direct hit.”

“We were fortunate. Or maybe there are forces at work requiring us to seek a resolution to our mystery.”

Smith saw Machen’s grim smile by the light of burning buildings.

“So where are we going?”

“To the archive of the London Evening News in Bloomsbury.”

“I don’t see that-”

“Ah, lieutenant. Remember the ancient Oriental proverb: ‘The longest journey begins with a single step.’ A trip to the newspaper’s document depository will furnish us with that first step.” The man nodded in the direction of central London, a city ringing with fire-engine bells, glowing with a thousand incendiary fires. “That is if the building hasn’t been reduced to ashes. Ah, careful where you step, my dear fellow. I dare say the authorities will collect these with due respect.”

Human remains, especially blood spilled on a flat, hard surface, are astonishingly slippery. Smith recalled a young corporal slipping on human entrails on a cobbled yard, falling with such force that it detonated the rifle grenade in his backpack. Even as Smith walked through this present-day apocalypse, he sensed the tug of the past drawing him back to the trenches of the Great War. That was a haunted time; and, dear God, he refused to be haunted by it just at that moment.

To prevent himself from slipping back into malignant reverie he said, “Mr Machen… won’t you tell me something of yourself and what led to you write ‘The Bowmen’?”

“Why not? It’s a filthy night in so many respects. A little storytelling now might do us some good.”

The old writer began to speak in his deep, resonant voice about the beginning of his own life. Smith found himself drifting into a state that was nearer trance than wakefulness. Here he was, walking through London in the dead of night, body parts littering an otherwise empty street, the surviving occupants still taking refuge in their shelters. The sky above London burned a bloody red. And from all quarters of the ancient city sirens rose in a single note to signify the “all clear”, although it could equally have been the trumpets of angels calling newly released souls to heaven. Trying not to let the air of unreality settle too deeply into his bones, Smith concentrated on Machen’s words.

“‘… I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen on me, that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent.’ If you will excuse an author’s conceit, those words I’ve just recited are from my autobiography. And I still stand by them. On 3 March 1863 I was born into what seemed a magical borderland between this reality and others too fabulous for mortals to describe with any accuracy. I’m still far from adept at capturing the quiddity of the land I grew up in. A land of hills, deep lanes and dark woods aplenty. Of rivers that foamed red after rain. And peopled by men and women who spoke an ancient language that no Englishman could fathom. My father was rector there, and I grew up an only child, often with only my imagination as a companion. I roamed what, for me, is a faery land of ineffable mystery. It was littered with the romantic ruins of the Roman occupation. It was saturated to the very roots with Celtic myth. No wonder, then, that I grew into a young man with one burning ambition: to write! As soon as I could I left my native Wales for London. And there, as many a young man has done before me, I wrote beautifully incomprehensible literature in an attic room. I sustained my body on green tea, dry bread and tobacco. And all the time my mind blazed with stories — such incredible stories! Tales of mystery, gods and spirit worlds that would astonish the world of letters. Of course, publishers rejected them as the awfully conceited trumpery of an eager but inexperienced scribbler, such as I was in those days. And like so many young men who’d followed their star to Grub Street, I starved. Well… I managed to avoid the work house and death by malnutrition… by a whisker, I should add. I earned a meagre wage as by turns a teacher, cataloguer, publisher’s assistant. And step by step, inch by inch I began to earn my daily bread as a writer. And so I saw my strange compositions begin to appear in print, only to puzzle the great British public, I dare say. The Great God Pan, The Inmost Light, The Three Impostors… and many short stories and essays. If you disregard the piffling sums I received for my work you could almost describe it as a successful literary life. I found a home. I married, only to lose my wife, Amy, within twelve years to cancer. No angel was at hand then at her deathbed, you’ll note. At least none that I saw. In order to try and cope with bereavement I changed careers. At the age of thirty-seven, in 1900, I became an actor with the Benson company. Marvellous times. Forget what they say about schooldays — those were the happiest of my life, treading the boards. Did you know I even starred in a silent picture? Good grief, me! Can you believe such a thing? Ah… then by the end of the decade I’d retired, gracefully I hope, from a life of acting, to earn my daily bread with the pen once more. I’d also rather fortuitously acquired a second wife along the way. She’s at home at Amersham at the moment. Safe, I hope, bearing in mind this little outbreak of hellfire tonight.” Machen indicated bombed buildings with his unlit pipe. Flames still licked at exposed timbers. At the end of the street men directed water hoses onto a burning post office. “Now where was I? Uhm… ah, yes, back to the quarry face of literature. From the heaven of greasepaint and make-believe to my own personal hell — becoming a reporter on the London Evening News. Lieutenant, I’d dreamt of weaving tales of magic and awe only to find myself sitting at my desk in the journalists’ cattle shed of an office, writing interminable copy concerning the rich and famous of London society. My given quests? To learn whether the Duke of Richmond favoured flannels over tweed that particular season, or whether it was fashionable for the daughters of admirals to devour their pate on toast or wafer, or to discover the name of Lady Such-and-such’s favorite poodle. It was deadly dull work; my family straddled the line between being merely hard-up and actually poverty-stricken. There you have it, the needs of providing for my family — poor though it was — made a prisoner of me in a newspaper office. A job, you will have surmised, that I hated with absolute passion.”

“You still wrote fiction?”

“Yes, there were still short stories and literary sketches for magazines.”

“Then the war. The Great War.”

“Yes, lieutenant. The Great War. My age required me to view the battles in Europe from afar. And I was still a slave of the press galley. However, I saw that for the first time my talent, what there was of it, might have a greater purpose than I first supposed. Those first months of the war were bad ones for Britain. Food ran short, tens of thousands of our soldiers were killed, towns and villages alike grieved for the loss of their young men, we were in constant retreat as the Germans scored victory after victory. People from the lowest classes to the aristocracy were considering the awful possibility that we might lose the war, and that the Kaiser would claim the British Empire for himself. It seemed to me that although I could never fire a rifle in anger, I might help alleviate this pervading air of despondency. With my editor’s blessing I began to write short articles in praise of the British way of life, in studies of how ordinary men and women went about their work. I strove to illuminate the working folks’ innate sense of honesty and goodness. As well as the factual articles I contributed short squibs of fiction to the newspaper, intended to warm the patriot’s heart and perhaps raise the spirits of the reader, at least for a few moments.”