Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Stewart next applied his lips to a glass, then said, “Well, I would give this a… a B-minus. You, Dr Smith? Trouble with amateurs, they are always reinventing the wheel.”

“MORE ON PAPER-MAN NAMES (CONT.)” Jack read.

“We find that the so-called ‘Minorcan’ descended people of St Augustine, Fla., employ the name or term ‘Clicky Dicky.’ Alas for our hopes that we might find some such Spanish survival variants. Crossing the peninsula to Pensacola, we note that ‘Clicky Bizky’ has become ‘Tricky Dicky,’ a term extending as far south on that coast as Tampa. We were unable to find this legend at all in St Petersburg, Fla, an absence tentatively attributed to the Northern-Origin of so Many of The People in the ‘Winter Capital’. Mr Pabrocky has suggested, with the well-known twinkle in his eye, that it is remarkable nonetheless that neither ‘Clicker’ nor ‘Clicky Dicky’ is to be found where there are so many Senior Citizens (of whom he is one!), considering how many of them have the medically well-known condition, ‘a clicking knee-cap’! Humor apart, this does raise the QUESTION, if the ‘clicking’ attributed to the specter comes from the sound of teeth as had generally been believed or to some other source. Hmmm.” Jack put the News Bulletin down.

Vlad sighed wearily. “Is there any more brandy in the bottle?”

There was no more brandy in the bottle. They argued back and forth about opening another bottle. Each took both sides. Then they opened another bottle.

“Should we read more mind-improving books now?” asked Jack.

Vlad said he’d rather write a mind-improving book called, “The Myth of the Paper-Man Examined and Refuted. Even that title shows how far I’ve come in my thinking. A month ago I’d no more have needed to refute it than I would have refuted Dracula or Frankenstein. Household words; everybody knows about them, but nobody believes in them, or cowers in fear of them.”

Jack slipped a cassette of Buxtehude’s Misa Brevis into his lil ole cassette player. His movements made goofy shadows on the wall. “That nice?” he asked.

“More than nice, it’s ravishing,” said Vlad sleepily. “When it’s over, play it again, Sam.”

Perhaps Sam had played it again, but now it was not playing. A shadow was playing on the floor, which goofy would not describe. It looked like the shadow of an enormous four-legged spider gliding upside down across the floor. Whatever it was looked horrible. Dear god, would he forever be seeing horrid and impossible things?

Jack was sitting up in his bed with his face gone ghastly. Then he leaped out of his bed and out of their room, and went roaring and running down the hallway. “Where did it go? Did you see it, Vlad? It ran along the ceiling!” Jack dragged a table and chair into the hallway and started to climb on it.

Mrs Warrington appeared, with her hair in a gray-streaked braid, and a man’s bathrobe over her nightgown. She stretched out her hands and called, “Mr Stewart! You must stop this now!”

“Miz Warrington! Where did it go? Where did it come from? What lives in this hallway?”

Many expressions passed rapidly over her worn face, but now they settled into one expression: a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances. “Mr Stewart,” she said in a quick but firm and level voice, “I am very sorry that you had a bad dream, but I will not be shouted at in my own house, and I refuse to hold a conversation with a strange man in his underwear. Please take the table and chair back, sir!”

“No I won’t, Miz Warrington, not yet. Please excuse me ma’am,” said Jack, as he climbed onto the table and chair, and began to examine the imperfect surface of the ceiling.

Mrs Warrington was actually wringing her hands. “What is he doing ? Can’t you make him stop, Professor Smith? You have terrified me with those awful yells, and now this! What is it?”

Jack said in doleful tones, “It didn’t rattle or click, but I know what it is, ma’am, and I reckon you know too.”

The woman’s face seemed to collapse in upon itself, and she tottered and leaned against the wall, for just a moment, then sprang away as though it were red-hot. Her voice was now trembling but fierce. “This guesthouse is all I have to live on. I don’t know who you are, but I want you to get out right now. I don’t want your money, please go!”

They went as soon as they could dress and pack. Without discussion they left money on the table. Then they got into the car and drove in silence, with Vlad behind the wheel. His sallow face was weary, and his blue-gray eyes were troubled and gray.

“What did you see?” Vlad finally asked.

“I woke up and saw this thing scuttling across the ceiling. Something like a man, but horribly bony and filthy, and utterly nasty in some way I can’t describe. You?”

“I just saw the shadow,” said Vlad. “I never heard of one on the ceiling.”

“It was clinging by its long nails to the tiny gaps in the plaster, and the flaps of torn clothing swayed, and that vile body swayed too. I don’t know where it came from, or where it went to. There’s no window or hatchway, only a little ventilation slit that maybe a rat could get through, but not a man.”

Eventually they stopped at the brightest and newest motel they could find, with walls too thin for even a roach to hide.

Mr Pabrocky’s News Bulletin led Vlad and Jack to a privately-endowed art museum. They were repeating a list of names to the “museum lady”, and the list had begun to seem very tiresome and, indeed, loathsome. “. or the Boss in the Wall.?” Vlad finished the list, and a look of great surprise came over her face.

She said, “Of course. Hobson’s Ghost. You know that all institutions have their skeletons in the closet. That one is ours. Long ago we bought what is known as a ‘primitive’ portrait, meaning it was painted by a self-taught, itinerant artist. It showed a woman sitting in a room. Evidently something was painted into the picture which wasn’t apparent. Something was painted over, and then the over-paint sloughed off. It rose to the surface like a ghost, and it was ghost-like, and quite famous for a while. But finally we had to take the picture off exhibition because parents complained that it scared their children — and it probably scared them. On the old acquisition slip is written Hobson. We aren’t sure if that’s the subject or the artist, and faintly penciled in is Boss in the Wall. Whatever that means. Would you like to see it?”

Primitive it certainly was. A late middle-aged woman sat stiffly in a chair in an old-fashioned room. Her skirt was long and black, her shawl was white, and her face was stiff. Above her was something gray and ghastly that seemed to ooze from a panel in the wall. It looked like the bleached carapace of a long-dead spider, with bared teeth, and skeletal hands with clawing nails. Its expression was both fearful and malignant. Hobson’s Ghost.

“Oh god, yes,” said Vlad in a sick, weak voice. “That’s it… a Boss in the Wall. Do you know any more about it?”

“Well, there is an old story about a Henry and Hannah Hobson, who were settlers over in Blainesville. He was a widower, she a widow. He wanted to move west to live with his children. She wanted to move east to live with her children. Folks didn’t divorce or separate in those days, so they quarreled day and night. Then either he got sick and she let him die without calling a doctor, or she slowly poisoned his food. Anyway, his last words were that he’d never leave the house alive — and neither would she. And after he died, she never did leave. She packed more than once, but never left. Then old Hobson began to haunt her. One time or another, that wretched woman lived in every room of the house. No use. He’d find her, so in the end she hanged herself. There’s even an old song about it.” The museum lady began to sing in a wavering voice: