James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

All of a sudden, the mastiffs recovered their ferocity. As if they were coming out of a dream, they shook themselves, stretched, and turned fierce again. Their barks awakened the whole house. Catuja shot up in bed as if propelled by a spring, yelling:

‘Burglars, burglars, burglars!’

The hunt began.

Lupo and the girl flew down the corridors, descended the stairs in the blink of an eye, crossed the hall, went out into the garden like in a dream. They carried the mastiffs with them, fastened to their bodies. They felt their fangs tearing their flesh, cracking their bones. In the night, sweet with blood and noisy like a celebration, shouts were heard and lights were lit. The thorns of the rose bushes caught in the folds of the cloak, feet tripped over paws, hands groped desperately at the garden gate until managing to open it.

No one had ever been able to catch Ángela, who knew how to scurry through cracks like a little viper and knew all the city’s labyrinths. Though she was injured now, they weren’t going to catch her this time either. She hid in a doorway. She descended stairs to forgotten basements, sneaked like a rat, coughing bloody froth, through damp passages, then along tunnels, through sewers, until she emerged at the surface, very far away.

Finding herself once more under the stars in the serene night, without shouts or commotion, or any other danger now that death was nesting in her wounds, she sighed with relief. Lupo had followed her. He was missing an ear, he was limping so much that he was really just dragging himself along on his stomach. He was black with blood in the moonlight. How much blood it costs to reach the end.

‘Stupid fucking mutt . . .’ she murmured with something vibrating in her voice, perhaps a little tenderness.

What shone in front of her like a white ribbon wasn’t the river but the wall of the cemetery.

‘Look! We were always meant to wind up here!’

The next morning when Bastián neared the pit he had left half dug the previous night, he knew that something was going on. It wasn’t merely a feeling: a trail of blood, coming out of a bush, came to a stop at the hole.

‘Damn it! Now the dead are coming on their own two feet and putting themselves in the hole all alone,’ he said aloud to relieve himself from the sudden terror that had gotten the better of him.

He leaned over and cast a fearful glance: for the moment, he didn’t want to notice too many details of whatever was there, he only wanted a general idea. The first thing he saw was a wrinkled cloak that seemed familiar to him. He forgot the blood and felt better.

‘Eh, girl! Having a free sleep in my inn again?’

She didn’t move. Nor did the shapeless and dirty lump that lay curled up in her lap.

‘Oh, Lupo, you senile old bastard! I knew things weren’t going to go well for you out there! Why did you need to suffer hardships at your age?’

And although prudence didn’t advise it, he filled the pit with dirt, planted a white rose bush on top, and kept that little secret in his old heart.

Translated from the Spanish by James D. Jenkins

Hungary, a relatively small country of fewer than 10 million people, has always had an outsized literary and artistic production, but horror fiction seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon there. One author working to put Hungary on the horror map is Attila Veres ( b. 1985) , a novelist, short story writer and screenwriter. His first novel, Odakint sötétebb [Darker Outside] (2017) was a surprise success in his native country and was followed by the story collection Éjféli iskolák [Midnight Schools] in 2018 . ‘The Time Remaining’ is one of his most recent stories, first appearing in the anthology Aether Atrox (2019) , a volume that features a lineup of Hungary’s best contemporary horror authors. We think he’s a writer to keep an eye on and whose work we’re confident will continue to make its way to English readers.

My therapist urges me to picture a different story, a story in which Vili doesn’t die, or at least not like that. But before I can rewrite my past, first I need to face it – recount everything that happened exactly as it happened, up to the point when I lost control.

Vili’s death struggle started on a Friday. It was pouring outside, giving the perfect melodramatic tone for announcing bad news. The three of us, my mother, Vili and I, were sitting in the kitchen.

Vili was given to me by my maternal grandmother on the 1st of May. I remember this because I was desperately trying to decipher the meaning of this celebration, but no one was able to give me a satisfactory answer. In a way, the 1st of May celebration continues to be a mystery for me to this day.

We were going to the festivity, the whole family, my father, my mother, and my grandmother, to enjoy the company of other families, watch the performers on the main stage, and indulge ourselves with the purchase of unnecessary objects at the vendors’ row. Early on during the festivity a great storm materialized out of nowhere, devastating the marketplace. My grandmother ran back at the last minute to buy Vili from a seller who was desperately trying to save his hut from destruction. My grandmother grabbed Vili, not even bothering to wait for the change, while the seller was defying the torrential wind.

Grandmother slipped the gift into my hand, and she yelled – and this was the first time she yelled at me, though it was driven only by the need to be heard over the raging wind – to take care of Vili and always remember her. I could not make sense of that request at the time, for she was my grandmother, how could I ever forget her? Standing in the windstorm, I suddenly had an eerie vision. I felt like the world was about to fall to pieces, the wind would soon rip through the field and tear apart people and the past and the future, and I would fall into a dark abyss beyond time. I embraced Vili, and I found his touch rather comforting. He was soft and warm, and he made me feel that together we were solid enough to withstand the violent force of the wind. Vili’s charm rested in his smile; not a clumsy grin, nor a condescending half-­smile, not even the downward-­facing, bitter grimace that so often featured on his fellow toys. Vili had a friend’s smile, empathetic, approving, animating, but also with a touch of adult-­like solemnity.

The sense of apocalypse ceased in the car. I clutched Vili in the back seat, and I knew that everything was all right. Grandmother was sitting next to me. I saw tears blurring her eyes, but she smiled at me, assuring me it was only sand. My mother turned back and looked at grandmother with that stern look I thought she exclusively reserved for me when I did something wrong or when she assumed I had done something wrong, which were basically the same after all. I didn’t think she could give that look to others, especially not to her own mother. They did not say a word to each other, and I soon fell asleep, grasping Vili.

After that, I saw grandmother very rarely, until one day my parents explained that she had gone to Australia on a family visit and would not return for a while. They showed me where Australia was on a world map to address my confusion, and they also showed me kangaroos and other peculiar animals in a book, which intrigued me. I hoped we would soon visit grandmother so we could maybe watch kangaroos together. My father and my mother agreed that if I behaved well enough throughout the year, this wish of mine might become reality and sooner or later we could visit grandmother.

I was a kid, surely that’s the reason why I was so blind to the truth, although they say that children have heightened sensitivity to the minor changes in their environment. Perhaps I am the exception, or my mother was especially skilled at lying, even to herself. What is important to note is that I was not in possession of that information then: I did not know that my grandmother had passed away during that year. My mother asked her not to visit us, and we did not visit her either. My mother did not want me to remember my grandmother as a sick old woman, as her illness had consumed her body little by little, though I only know this from my father’s account. He told me when he was drunk, decades later. I know that my mother wanted to protect me when she decided to lie. I know that she wanted the best for me: what else could a parent possibly wish for her offspring but the very best? My father, inebriated, made wise by long years of experience, thought otherwise – he believed that my mother was scared to pronounce the words, she was scared to verbalize that her own mother was dead. In any case, for me my grandmother was a living person for years to come, even though she had long been buried under the ground at the time when Vili started dying.