Herbert van Thal: The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories

Up through the apple and almond trees, lurching with stiffness from lying in the grass, her limbs feeling idiotically like those of an old crone until she made them work all the faster. No rheumatism for her, especially not tonight. Through the arbor of grape-vines with the carnations and gaillardias planted by Jenkins. Up the path of the vegetable garden with scarcely a glance. If she tried to squeeze out reality as she ran, a game she still loved to play with herself, she could almost see what a wilderness of weeds and horror it could all become if ever they should leave it. But that, of course, they would never do; Father wouldn't even contemplate such a thing; and why should they leave, with all this peace and beauty around them? As though her own silly day-dream — or day-mare? — would not be dispelled, she decided to dismiss it by calling Flora to let her know she was coming.

'Flora, Flora!' she shouted, still running and running, panting for her breath, laughing helplessly to herself and thinking: If she didn't reach the house soon, she'd be bound to collapse. 'Flora, Flora…!'

And then she stopped dead.

O yes, the house was still there, but what on earth could have happened to it? The door was not only open, but gone. What could have happened to it? And what was all that dirt, all that dust and dry dead leaves doing all over the verandah. and. and. how could the verandah itself have rotted and fallen in as it had? And the windows! The windows! Smashed, every one of them! Panes gaping and jagged or gone altogether. No paint on the frames; only chars as if from a fire. Even some of the frames were gone from obscenely nude brick. Above her, rafters sagged and rotted and, even more unbelievable, supported only a few remnants of roof. Great gaping holes in it exposed malevolent sky. And inside, inside — where there should have been curtains and carpets, pictures and furniture, her sisters flitting bird-busy from one room to another — there was…

Nothing! A charred-blackened wreck of a house, a mere shell, as though it had been blasted to smithereens. She shrank back, stunned, incredulous, horrified, barely stifling her sobs and possibly a scream.

until it occurred to her: Of course, she had come up to the wrong house. She had gone to some other part of the river, for wasn't it true that she could no longer remember how she had come there at all? That was why the punt and the jetty had been missing. That was why the river itself had been somehow different today. That's what she had done: she'd come back to the wrong house. Now, instead of sobs, she couldn't help laughing at herself. Flora was always saying she was a fool. Was that what they meant when they said she was 'simple'? Well, she didn't care, she didn't care, just let them see if she did. And just to defy them, she'd sing that song she had heard their Aunt Bella once sing, until their father had stopped her, saying such things were unfit for his young daughter's ears:

'Take me in your arms, love, Fan me with your fan;

Kiss me and caress me -

That's a nice young man!

But then, although she tried hard to laugh and be happy, defying also the dusk which frightened her so, she found herself sobbing again, sobbing and running she didn't know where, hadn't the faintest idea any more, because the bend of the river, the trees, the shape of the banks, all told her that from where she was running was where the house s hould have been; but something had happened, she didn't know what, except that it must have been some dreadful catastrophe, some horror that wouldn't bear thinking about. And now the house was all, all of it gone, her sisters and Father and Bridget and Jenkins and everything. All, all gone. There was only herself left, fleeing from her terror in this horror of wilderness.

From the river to the road, and then the next horror assailed her. Some sort of machine, some monstrous and inconceivable thing, all glass and metal glinting evil in the last light from the sun, had baulked her path and was threatening to devour her. She screamed; screanied all the louder when she saw the two figures — a man and a woman, she thought, in some kind of uniform, black — somehow emerging from the monstrous machine like the two demons that they were. She wanted to run from them, but couldn't. As in a nightmare, her legs failed her and she felt herself sagging, sinking to the ground, falling and flailing, and all she could do was moan her despair. When they reached her, the monsters, she hadn't the strength even to struggle against them, but could only fall limp with her weeping. The devil's advocates had sought and seized her for her wickedness, and it was too late, too late; it could never be undone.

'Flora!' she moaned. 'O Flora, Flora! Don't let them take me, and cast me into Hell. '

The devil's chariot throbbed and roared with mechanical monstrosity, and his advocates gripped and strapped her inside some kind of device so that she couldn't free or even move her arms behind her. And they leered at her so, leering and jeering:

'Now, now, Maisie Matthews. Come along quietly and we'll soon have you home again. You'll be all right, dear. We'll soon have you home. ' And the she-demon jabbed a poison-dart into her arm, and filled it with venom.

Home? Hell, they meant. They were taking her away from her home; they had even, now that they had drugged her, taken away her home itself. Nothing, nothing of it was left. She could only cringe and quiver in horror, too terrified to think of what might still be ahead of her.

Hell was a street of buildings like cliffs, all concrete and glass of incredible height and hideous taste, the street an inferno of hell-bent contraptions that hooted and hissed. Lights like molten suns glared in the night around her, making it garish as day never was. Voices boomed at unbelievable volume from what she thought must also be some kind of machines. When roof-tops could be seen, they bristled with contraptions like enormous paper-clips.

'We'll soon have you home,' the demons beside her kept saying, over and over, as though they could fool her, 'we'll soon have you home.' And they half dragged her out of the contraption that at last stopped throbbing and roaring and led her across that terrifying canyon and into one of the cliffs with stone floors and incredible slashes of colour where pictures should have been. They took no notice of her whimpering or of what she was trying to tell them, but dragged and pushed her to the fresh horror of a machine in the wall that carried them upwards, upwards, when they'd always told her that hell was below . It stopped, and they led her out, too terrified to say anything any more, and she found herself at what she supposed was a door, where the man pushed some kind of button that gave a shrill little shriek.

When the door opened, she was confronted by some apparition of an old woman — could it be the woman she had seen at the river, come to claim her at last? But no; there was, she had to admit, something familiar about this one, as though she had seen it before, or had known she would encounter it some time in the future. Yes, that was it; for the apparition was a crude, a cruel parody of her sister, or what Flora might be like when she would be seventy, perhaps even eighty years old. Its face had a scar livid as a firebrand on one of her cheeks. And as though the demons who had captured her knew what they had conjured, one of them said:

'We've found her, Miss Matthews. Yes, in the usual place.' And then, as though this wasn't torment enough, they had to go on and say: 'Come along now, Maisie. Be a good girl. Here you are home again, safe with sister Flora.'

'O Flora, Flora,' she heard herself whimpering. 'If only it could be…'