Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

He found himself sitting exhausted beneath a vast fiery sun on a ground of baked mud, waiting for the charity worker in front of him to dole out a ladle of water from a rust-reddened oil drum. Staring down into the opalescent petrol stains on the rancid liquid, he saw his opposite self: an encephalitic head, fly-crusted eyes, cracked thin lips, sore-covered ribs thrust so far forward that they appeared to be bursting from his skin; the knife of perpetual hunger twisting in his swollen stomach. Looking around, he saw hundreds of others like himself stretching off into the dusty yellow distance, the marks of hunger and disease robbing them of any identity. He would have screamed then, if his throat had not been withered long ago to a strip of sun-dried flesh.

Daz made his way along the balcony of Montgomery House, avoiding pools from the dripping ceiling, swinging the cans of beer he had withdrawn from his secret stash behind the bins. He had half-expected Mats to trail him back to the flat, but perhaps he was off sulking somewhere about the phone joke. That was the great thing about people like Mats – you could tell them any old shit, and at some primitive level, even when they said they didn’t, they actually believed you. Heart and soul.

DENNIS ETCHISON IS THE winner of two World Fantasy Awards and three British Fantasy Awards. The late Karl Edward Wagner described him as “the finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced”.

Etchison’s stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies since 1961, and some of his best work has been collected in The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss and The Death Artist. Talking in the Dark is a massive retrospective volume from Stealth Press marking the fortieth anniversary of his first professional sale, and Fine Cuts is a volume of stories about the dark side of Hollywood, from PS Publishing.

Etchison is also well known as a novelist ( TheFog, Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic and Double Edge ) and has published the movie novelizations Halloween II, Halloween III and Videodrome under the pseudonym “Jack Martin”.

As an acclaimed anthologist, he has edited Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors and Gathering the Bones (with Jack Dann and Ramsey Campbell).

More recently, Etchison has written thousands of script pages for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas , broadcast world-wide and available on audiocassette and CD. He also reads his stories “The Dog Park” and “Inside the Cackle Factory” on Don’t Turn on the Lights! The Audio Library of Modern Horror, Vol. 1.

“In 2000 I was asked to assemble a retrospective collection of my stories,” remembers the author, “to be entitled A Long Time Till Morning. This required me to re-read forty years’ worth of short stories, and the experience was a shock to the system. They were not at all as I remembered them. Those I had believed were the best now seemed tedious and embarrassingly overwrought, and some of the minor pieces, while not very good stories, contained quirky, idiosyncratic material that surprised and fascinated in ways I could not have anticipated. All of which suggests that we are not reliable, objective judges of even the most important events in our lives at the time we live through them.

“I lived through a lot, some of it not very pleasant, while this story was written at the beginning of the 1980s. But that could be said about any period of my life after the age of five or six, and I suspect the same applies to everyone. My stories usually reflect personal events and obsessions, either directly or metaphorically. I won’t bore you with autobiographical details, except to say that I felt very alone for several years and began to wonder when if ever my real life, the one I had always looked forward to, would begin. Poor me. But the feeling was very real.

“It was difficult to talk about this in a way that might be entertaining or interesting to other people, who surely had problems of their own. Then one day, as is often the case, several unrelated entries from my notebooks suddenly came together, and I began to see a story that might convey some of what I had held inside for so long, in the manner of a song that serves as a vehicle for a singer’s deepest emotions. The working title was ‘The Sources of the Nile’, and it began with my recollections of a well-known (and benign) editor and personality in the science fiction field who once took a car trip across America for the sole purpose of meeting fans with whom he had corresponded over the years.

“Victor Ripon’s name derives from two waterfalls located on the River Nile, and Gezira, the fictional town in which he resides, refers to a point where the two Niles, the blue and the white, come together, as well as to the school colours in my hometown, where my uncle Harold owned an ice cream parlour called ‘The Blue and White’ across the street from Stockton High. The naive, painfully heartfelt words Victor writes to his favourite author, the imaginary Rex Christian, were inspired by actual letters sent to a very real horror writer, containing his readers’ comments about a non-fiction book he had published, after he asked me to read and evaluate them in case there were any factual errors that needed to be corrected for the revised edition.

“And the ending is obviously influenced by Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now , one of my favourite films from the 1970s. By the time my retrospective collection finally came out in 2001 I had refilled it Talking in the Dark, after another part of the quotation by Kenneth Patchen that provided the title of this story when it was first published in Charles L. Grant’s anthology Shadows 7.

“I have since been told that this is a comic story rather than the tragic, heartbreaking metaphor I had intended. Perhaps so. Apparently I’m not the most reliable authority. You will have to go to the source of the Nile, if you can find it, for the final word . . .”

IN THE DAMP BEDROOM Victor Ripon sat hunched over his desk, making last-minute corrections on the ninth or tenth draft, he couldn’t remember which, of a letter to the one person in the world who might be able to help. Outside, puppies with the voices of children struggled against their leashes for a chance to be let in from the cold. He ignored them and bore down. Their efforts at sympathy were wasted on him; he had nothing more to give. After thirty-three years he had finally stepped out of the melodrama.

He clicked the pen against his teeth. Since the letter was to a man he had never met, he had to be certain that his words would not seem naive or foolish.

Dear Sir, he reread, squinting down at the latest version’s cramped, meticulously cursive backhand. He lifted the three-hole notebook paper by the edges so as not to risk smearing the ballpoint ink. Dear Sir . . .

First let me say that I sincerely hope this letter reaches you. I do not have your home address so I have taken the liberty of writing in care of your publisher. If they forward it to you please let me know.

I am not in the habit of writing to authors. This is the first time. So please bear with me if my letter is not perfect in spelling, etc.

I have been reading your Works for approximately 6 yrs., in other words since shortly after I was married but more about that later. Mr Christian, Rex if I may call you that and I feel I can, you are my favorite author and greatest fan. Some people say you are too morbid and depressing but I disagree. You do not write for children or women with weak hearts (I am guessing) but in your books people always get what they deserve. No other author I have read teaches this so well. I can see why you are one of the most popular authors in the world. I have all 6 of your books, I hope there are only 6, I wouldn’t like to think I missed any! (If so could you send me a list of the titles and where I might obtain them? A S.A.S.E. is enclosed for your convenience. Thank you.)