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

Then the headless body in the doorway, in its reeking and tattered clothes, the shattered body began to writhe and crawl. Its hands went scrabbling and pawing and feeling. feeling for the missing head. Vlad knew it must not find the head. He broke the window with a single kick, seized the head by its scant and filthy hair, and threw it out into the flames. Still the headless thing in the doorway twitched and flung its scrannel arms around, and lunged. Then there was a sound like a breaking stick, and the thing in the doorway was still. Choking smoke filled the room, as Vlad, shielding whimpering Bella in his arms, leaped over the Paper-Man’s body, and raced out of the old house. into the front yard.

A large yard it is, and one in which many splendid carriages had come, one after the other, one after the other. and then had ceased to come. At all. Long years ago.

Outside it is by now the long summer twilight.

Hillsmith walks along the old carriage-drive, now a neglected lane, to the large Oak tree draped with Spanish Moss, very near where the street begins; and there he leans, against the tree, facing the house. He waits. Waits.

Hillsmith was still there long after the night air was filled with smoke and noise. Now there were many people with him, and police cars and fire-engines and ambulances. Many people by then were there, shouting and screaming and pointing as the flames poured forth from every window of the old, old house. “Purified by fire!” Hillsmith cried. Again. Again. He felt weak, he tottered.

A man’s large arm went around his waist, and Hillsmith found it immensely comforting. “ Purified by fire!” he cried. again, again, in a voice gone weak.

“Easy now, Mr Hillsmith. Easy. Lean against me, now. That’s right. You know me, Mr Hillsmith?”

“Dr Eberhardt?”

“That’s right. That’s right. You set this fire, right? Why did you —?” His voice stopped abruptly. Every voice of the growling, howling multitude stopped. Abruptly. Atop the roof of the house, like a spectacle prepared to amuse some King of Ghouls, appeared a row of figures. dancing. stamping. pirouetting. flinging out gant arms and lifting gant legs.

“Good Lord!” cried Eberhardt. The crowd began its growl again.

Lifting gant legs and flinging gant arms in mad disco-ordinate movement; stamping and dancing, and all silent. Silently dancing.

And all ablaze — dancing on the rooftop all ablaze — all ablaze.

After a while the roof fell in, and the crowd groaned. Steam and vapor from the fire-hoses began to hide it all from sight.

Hillsmith said, really gently, to Dr Eberhardt, “You see why? Purified by fire. No longer human. Abominations, they were.”

From a corner of the yard, the ambulance crew dragged someone. Someone kicking. dancing. flinging arms and legs about. Someone crying and screaming. Screams and cries. “Dry bones live! Dry bones live!” screamed Nasser Fauntleroy, as they lifted him and carried him away. “ Dry bones live!”

Hillsmith said, so softly that Dr Eberhardt had to put his ear up close, “. purified by fire. ”

Vlad wrapped Bella in his jacket, and from the bottom of the jacket a pair of very small feet projected. “Bella, my god. Bella!”

She opened her eyes and rolled them up until only the whites showed. Then she rolled them down. Then she looked at him directly with wide blue-grey eyes, and shook her head and said, “No.” Then she reached her arms to him, and he couldn’t say anything at all.

“Was that a bad dream, daddy?” she asked, into his ear.

“Something like that.”

“It was very bad. I don’t like it here. Let’s go home.”

To say that the office looked dirty and shabby was to say that water looked liquid and wet. Newspapers, documents, magazines, clippings, files and folders lay stacked and slipped and scattered. Someone was thrusting his hand into a large manila envelope. Someone was turning the pages of an old illustrated publication. Someone was going through a scrapbook, moistening loose corners with a small glue-brush. On one webby wall was a sign, THE CONTRACT NEVER EXPIRES. None of the men was working hard or working fast, none of them seemed interested in what he was doing, and whatever they were all doing they gave the impression of having been doing it for a long, long time. One man ruffled through the clippings taken from the manila envelope. Stopped. Went back a few clippings. Opened a drawer and removed an album, opened it. Turned pages. Put the album down and read the clipping. Cleared his throat. Another man looked up, said, after a moment, “What.”

The first man said, “Mackilwhit’s head.”

The second stared. “Mackilwhit’s head?”

“Yeah.”

The second man said, “Where’s the rest of him.”

The first man slightly shrugged. “Doesn’t say.”

“Mackilwhit. He went into the wall. Yeah. In the wall.”

The first man fumbled till he found what seemed an old handpenned list. From his rat’s nest of a desk he selected a worn-down pencil, the point of which he moistened in his mouth. Then he let his finger find a line. Slowly, as though he had all the time in the world, he made a pencil-mark through it.

“Well,” the man said, “he’s out now.”

And he dwelleth in desolate cities, and in houses which no man inhabiteth.

— Job xv, 28

The great fantasist Theodore Sturgeon once remarked, “Anywhere you go in the world, if there are at least two writers in the group, they’ll wind up having a conversation about Harlan Ellison.”

Although that well-known epigram may be more than slightly apocryphal, there is still no denying the fact that Ellison is certifiably a legend in his own lifetime.

He has won more awards in the genres of imaginative fiction than any other living author — including the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar, Writer’s Guild of America, World Fantasy and Bram Stoker; so many in fact, that they now merely give him prestigious Lifetime Achievement Awards.

Since making his professional debut in a 1956 edition of Infinity Science Fiction, he has published countless acclaimed novels and short stories, appeared in The Best American Short Stories collection, won Audie awards for spoken-word recordings and Writers Guild Awards for Most Outstanding Teleplay, written fiction in bookstore windows in plain view of amazed onlookers (including the memorable piece that follows), edited such landmark science fiction anthologies as Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), discovered and promoted new writers such as Dan Simmons and Poppy Z. Brite, and produced numerous movie and TV scripts and essays and columns and articles and reviews.

At the same time Ellison sued the producers of The Terminator for plagiarism — and won; travelled 3000 miles to punch in the mouth a writer who had spoken ill of one of his friends, and is renowned for speaking his mind at public gatherings.

Such is the stuff of which legends are truly made.

We found the poor old guylying in garbage and quite a lot of his own blood in the alley next to the Midnight Mission. His shoes had been stolen — no way of knowing if he’d been wearing socks — and whatever had been in the empty, dirty paper bag he was clutching. But his fingernails were immaculate, and he had no beard stubble. Maybe sixty, maybe older. No way of telling at a cold appraisal.