Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

His heart turned to stone in his chest. There was no mistaking Charlotte’s voice. His mind must be going. He knew her body was already dissolving within the tank. The blow alone would have killed her instantly.

The voice went on calling his name imperatively. He went down hurriedly, his nerves aflame as though the acid were eroding them too. He had to know whether he had been dreaming or something unexplainable had happened in the cellar. He ran down quickly, careless now, a great roaring in his ears.

Too late he realised he had mistaken his direction on the landing in the dark. His feet encountered empty space. He had time only for a mumbled cry as he descended into the darkness where the concrete floor awaited.

IV

“It’s Hallowe’en tonight,” Kathy said.

She sat on the floor in front of the window seat, busy with her preparations for the evening, intent on the contents of a big cardboard box. On the boulevard outside the dusk was falling almost imperceptibly on the facades of the houses opposite; the automobiles cutting red trails with their rear-lights in the gathering darkness.

Charlotte sat at her husband’s desk, uneasily conscious of her daughter’s strange violet eyes regarding her from beneath the mass of blonde hair.

“What did Daddy say?” she asked impatiently for perhaps the tenth time that day.

Martin’s inexplicable disappearance was only one of several things that were disturbing her thoughts. She had been through the wardrobe and none of his clothes or his suitcases were missing. When he was called away on urgent business he usually left a note or telephoned her from the office.

“Perhaps Daddy and Auntie Janet have run off together,” the child said maliciously.

Charlotte was shocked at the vehemence and the understanding in her daughter’s tones. It was evident that she knew a great deal more of what went on around her than her parents had ever guessed.

But she gave a bright, false smile that matched her daughter’s own.

“What an extraordinary thing to say! What makes you think that, dear.”

The child went on fiddling with something in the big cardboard box by her side. Around were spread the strange paraphernalia of the Hallowe’en ritual. White sheets that looked at though they had been taken from her narrow bed; some stumps of red wax candles; an old lantern from the garage that had been tied with string to the end of a broken-off tree-branch.

Charlotte looked on absently, her thoughts elsewhere. Her lips curved bitterly. It would solve a good many of her problems if Martin and Janet had run off somewhere. She had forgotten how many weary years the problems involved in his treachery had flourished like a rank weed in their marriage.

She again caught a faint thread in the child’s prattle, prompted by a band of youngsters passing the window, lanterns already lit. The blurred chant of “Trick or treat!” died off round the next corner, chopped into segments by the rising wind that gusted at the windows. The fire flickered, sending weird shadows over the furniture until she got up to switch on the ceiling lights.

All Hallows’ Eve. It was a strange custom, she reflected, her calm gaze fixed on her daughter’s deliberate and methodical actions. A small rose of fire came to life in the corner by the window seat, made a warm glow in which Kathy’s absorbed face was silhouetted against the darkening window panes. The child had lit one of the red candles in its metal holder.

“Be careful,” Charlotte warned.

Her daughter turned innocent eyes upon her and once again the mother was struck by the strange, almost baleful glance that had the power to draw even an adult up short.

There was an ethereal quality about Kathy sometimes that was a little unnerving. Charlotte’s interest aroused, she walked over from the light switch.

“What have you got there?”

Kathy smiled one of her sweetest smiles.

“A skull. I’m going to put a candle in it.”

Charlotte gave the girl an incredulous look.

“A skull! Where did you get it? Is it made of candy?”

Kathy ignored her questions. She was again absorbed in the cardboard box, her fingers rustling mysteriously among folded twists of paper. She held up the candle, dripping the burning tallow below the edge of the box.

Charlotte was held halfway across the room, her attention focused on the child’s intent activity. Kathy lifted the object now. Charlotte gave a gasp. The thing was certainly – she was going to say lifelike – but that was absurd under the circumstances. It was a small, beautiful, highly polished skull; delicately made and apparently that of a woman.

Charlotte waited breathlessly as the girl fixed the candle, manipulating it delicately through one of the eye-sockets.

“Don’t you think it looks like Auntie Janet?” the child said.

Charlotte was astonished; she supposed the exquisitely modelled artefact was made of spun sugar, probably purchased at some establishment which specialised in such macabre aspects of Hallowe’en. Her throat tightened and her breath came fast and shallow.

There was an amazing resemblance to Janet now that the child came to mention it. Janet had a small, delicate head, almost like some ancient Egyptian queen. There was one tiny blemish which would have revealed the absurdity of the suggestion, but Charlotte remained where she was; pinned there by some sudden, overmastering emotion.

Kathy had lit the candle again now, the skull a subtle shell of growing radiance through which the eye-sockets and the teeth gleamed eerily.

“It gives a lovely light!” the child piped excitedly.

Charlotte fought down her nervous qualms. She recalled Edna St Vincent Millay’s lines. It did give a lovely light.

Kathy had twisted the skull, so that the light gleaming from the jagged orifices threw uneven shadows on the wall. She cradled her soft cheek against the white bone, posing for her mother’s approval.

Charlotte stared at the candle in the skull, its small halo of orange flame making little fretwork patterns on the girl’s cheek, shimmering on the golden mass of hair.

“It’s Hallowe’en tonight!” Kathy said.

RAMSEY CAMPBELL HAS BEEN named Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horrors Writers Association.

His latest supernatural novel, The Overnight , is now available from PS Publishing, Tor Books has reprinted his landmark collection Alone With the Horrors , and a new edition of his Arkham House collection The Height of the Scream was recently reissued by Babbage Press. An original ghost story, “The Decorations”, appeared in a limited edition from Sutton Hoo Press of Winona for Christmas 2004, and the author is currently at work on a new novel, Secret Stories.

“I see from the ledger I used as a diary in those days that ‘The Chimney’ was conceived on Christmas Day 1972,” recalls Campbell, “after (but presumably not related to) my first viewing of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape. To quote the notes:

“ Child afraid of Santa Claus . . . Perhaps from a very early age has associated horror with the large fireplace in his bedroom? His parents tell him of Santa Claus . . . But when they tell him the truth about SC, the horror comes flooding back . . . And somethings always moving in there toward Christmas . . . He sees it emerge each year: but this year he sees it in more detail . . .

“I sketched some other details, including the final apparition, and there the material appears to have lain until I was looking back in search of story ideas in June 1975. The tale was written in a little over a week, from the 20th to the 27th of that month. By gum, the energy of the young! I don’t think I could be so productive these days.