Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

This is it, Victor thought, your chance. Don’t blow it. It’s happening just the way you had it planned. Don’t lose your nerve. Ask the question – now. Do it.

“But where does it come from?” asked Victor. “The things you write about. How do you know what to say? Where do you get it? I try, but the things I know aren’t . . .”

“ You want to know ,” said the dwarf, his face splitting in an uproarious grin, “ where I get my ideas ? Is that your question?”

“Well, as a matter of fact . . .”

“From you, Vic! I get my material from people like you! I get them from this cesspool you call life itself. And you know what? I’ll never run out of material, not as long as I go directly to the source, because I’ll never, ever finish paying you all back!”

Victor saw then the large pores of the dwarfs face, the crooked bend to the nose, the sharpness of the teeth in the feral mouth, the steely glint deep within the black eyes. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck and he pulled away. Tried to pull away. But the dwarfs hand stayed on his head.

“Take my new novel, for instance. It’s about an epidemic that’s going to sweep the nation, leaving a bloody trail from one end of this country to the other, to wash away all of your sins. At first the police may call it murder. But the experts will recognize it as suicide, a form of harakiri, to be precise, which is what it is. I know, because I’ve made a careful study of the methods. Perfect!”

The underdeveloped features, the cretinous grin filled Victor with sudden loathing, and a terrible fear he could not name touched his scalp. He sat back, pulling farther away from the little man.

But the dwarf followed him back, stepping onto the table, one hand still pressing Victor in a grotesque benediction. The lamp glared behind his oversized head, his eyes sparkling maniacally. He rose up and up, unbending his legs, knocking over the bottles, standing taller until he blocked out everything else.

Victor braced against the table and kicked away, but the dwarf leaped onto his shoulders and rode him down. Victor reached out, found the bottle opener and swung it wildly.

“No,” he screamed, “my God, no! You’re wrong! It’s a lie! You’re . . . !”

He felt the point of the churchkey hook into something thick and cold and begin to rip.

But too late. A malformed hand dug into his hair and forced his head back, exposing his throat and chest.

“How does this feel, Vic? I have to know! Tell my readers!” The other claw darted into the briefcase and dragged forth a blade as long as a bayonet, its edge crusted and sticky but still razor-sharp. “How about this?” cried the dwarf. “And this?”

As Victor raised his hands to cover his throat, he felt the first thrust directly below the ribcage, an almost painless impact as though he had been struck by a fist in the chest, followed by the long, sawing cut through his vital organs and then the warm pumping of his life’s blood down the short sword between them. His fingers tingled and went numb as his hands were wrapped into position around the handle. The ceiling grew bright and the world spun, hurling him free.

“Tell me!” demanded the dwarf.

A great whispering chorus was released within Victor at last, rushing out and rising like a tide to flood the earth, crimson as the rays of a hellishly blazing sun.

But his mouth was choked with his own blood and he could not speak, not a word of it. The vestiges of a final smile moved his glistening lips.

“Tell me!” shrieked the dwarf, digging deeper, while the room turned red. “I must find the perfect method! Tell me! ”

SYDNEY JAMES BOUNDS BEGAN his career by contributing “spicy” stories to the monthly magazines produced by Utopia Press in the 1940s. He was soon writing hardboiled gangster novels for John Spencer under such house names as “Brett Diamond” and “Ricky Madison”, and he contributed short stories to their line of SF magazines which included Futuristic Science Stories, Tales of Tomorrow and Worlds of Fantasy.

He became a regular contributor to such magazines as New Worlds Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Authentic Science Fiction, Nebula Science Fiction, Other Worlds Science Stories and Fantastic Universe. However, as the science fiction magazine markets started to dry up during the 1960s, the author began to notice the growth of paperbacks. Although he continued to be published in such periodicals as London Mystery Magazine, Vision of Tomorrow, Fantasy Tales, Fantasy Booklet, Fantasy Annual and Fantasy Quarterly , he quickly became a prolific and reliable contributor to such anthology series as New Writings in SF, The Fontana Booh of Great Ghost Stories, TheFontana Booh of Great Horror Stories , the Armada Monster Book , the Armada Ghost Book and Fantasy Adventures.

Bounds has also pursued parallel careers as a successful children’s writer and a Western novelist for Robert Hale, and in 2003 Cosmos Books issued the first-ever collections of the author’s work as two paperback volumes, The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: Strange Portrait and Other Stories and The Wayward Ship and Other Stories , both edited by Philip Harbottle.

One of the author’s best-known stories, “The Circus” was adapted by George A. Romero for a 1986 episode of the syndicated television series Tales of the Darkside.

“One of the tricks a writer has for producing a new story is to reverse a standard situation,” explains Bounds. “Back in the 1970s, werewolves and vampires were considered evil and words like horror and terror were applied to them. So why not devise a story based on the wonder of the differences in nature? Here it is . . .”

BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN drinking, Arnold Bragg considered it a stroke of good fortune that the accident happened a long way from any main road and the chance of a patrolling police car. He had no exactidea of his locationjustthatitwas somewhere in the West Country.

He was on his way back from Cornwall where he’d been covering a story, an expose of a witches’ coven, for the Sunday Herald. He drove an MG sports car and, as always with a few drinks inside him, drove too fast. With time to spare, he’d left the A30 at a whim. It was a summer evening, slowly cooling after the heat of the day. The countryside was what he called “pretty”, with lanes twisting between hedgerows. He took a corner at speed and rammed the trunk of a tree that jutted into the road around the bend.

Shaken but unhurt, he climbed from his car and swore at a leaking radiator. Then he got back in and drove on, looking for a garage. He found one, a couple of miles further along, next to a pub with a scattering of cottages; there were not enough of them to justify calling them a village.

A mechanic glanced at the bonnet and sniffed his breath. “At, I can fix it. Couple of hours, maybe.”

Arnold Bragg nodded. “I’ll be next door when you’ve finished.”

It was the kind of pub that exists only in out-of-the-way places, and then rarely: a house of local stone with a front room converted as a bar. The door stood open and he walked in past a stack of beer crates. The walls were thick and it was cool inside. On a polished counter rested two casks, one of cider and one of beer. A grey-haired woman sat knitting behind the counter, and two oldish men sat on a wooden bench by the window

Bragg turned on a charm that rarely failed him. “I’ll try a pint of your local beer.”