Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

An abridged version of the following story originally appeared on the BBC’s horror website with illustrations by veteran artist Frazer Irving. It was also broadcast on BBC7 digital radio, read by Jamie Bamber. This marks the story’s first appearance in print.

“I have been fascinated by mirrors ever since my mother read me Alice Through the Looking-Glass when I was very young,” recalls Masterton. “Lewis Carroll’s idea that something different was happening in a mirror-world, if only you could see it, both alarmed and excited me, and I used to spend hours with my cheek pressed against the mirror in my grandparents’s house, trying to see the strange and different garden which I was convinced existed just beyond the reflected back door.

“My novel Mirror told the story of ayoung boy whose murder was witnessed by a mirror, but I returned to the subject of reflected evil after reading a poignant story called ‘The Lady of Shalott’, about a small crippled girl in New York who (like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott) could only see the outside world by means of her mirror.

“I wrote three different stories on the same theme, including this one.”

IT WAS RAINING SO hard that Mark stayed in the Range Rover, drinking cold espresso straight from the flask and listening to a play on the radio about a widow who compulsively knitted cardigans for her recently-dead husband.

“It took me ages to find this shade of grey. Shale, they call it. It matches his eyes.”

“He’s dead, Maureen. He’s never going to wear it.”

“Don’t be silly. Nobody dies, so long as you remember what they looked like.”

He was thinking about calling it a day when he saw Katie trudging across the field toward him, in her bright red raincoat, with the pointy hood. As she approached he let down the window, tipping out the last of his coffee. The rain spattered icy-cold against his cheek.

“You look drowned !” he called out. “Why don’t you pack it in?”

“We’ve found something really exciting, that’s why.”

She came up to the Range Rover and pulled back her hood. Her curly blonde hair was stuck to her forehead and there was a drip on the end of her nose. She had always put him in mind of a poor bedraggled fairy, even when she was dry, and today she looked as if she had fallen out of her traveler’sjoy bush and into a puddle.

“Where’s Nigel?” he asked her.

“He’s still there, digging.”

“I told him to survey the ditches. What the hell’s he digging for?”

“Mark, we think we might have found Shalott.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Katie wiped the rain from her face with the back of her hand. “Those ditches aren’t ditches, they used to be a stream, and there’s an island in the middle. And those lumps we thought were Iron Age sheep-pens, they’re stones, all cut and dressed, like the stones for building a wall.”

“Oh, I see ,” said Mark. “And you and Nigel, being you and Nigel, you immediately thought, ‘shalott!’”

“Why not? It’s in the right location, isn’t it, upstream from Cadbury?”

Mark shook his head. “Come on, Katie, I know that you and Nigel think that Camelot was all true. If you dug up an old tomato-ketchup bottle you’d probably persuade yourselves that it came from the Round Table.”

“It’s not just the stones, Mark. We’ve found some kind of metal frame. It’s mostly buried, but Nigel’s trying to get it out.”

“A frame ?”

Katie stretched her arms as wide as she could. “It’s big, and it’s very tarnished. Nigel thinks it could be a mirror.”

“I get it . . . island, Camelot, mirror. Must be Shalott!”

“Come and have a look anyway. I mean, it might just be scrap, but you never know.”

Mark checked his watch. “Let’s leave it till tomorrow. We can’t do anything sensible in this weather.”

“I don’t think we can just leave it there. Supposing somebody else comes along and decides to finish digging it up? It could be valuable. If we have found Shalott, and if it is a mirror –”

“Katie, read my lips, Shalott is a myth. Whatever it is you’ve dug up, can’t you just cover it up again and leave it till tomorrow? It’s going to be pitch dark in half an hour.”

Katie put on one of those faces that meant she was going to go on nagging about this until she got her own way. They weren’t having any kind of relationship, but ever since Katie had joined the company, six weeks ago, they had been mildly flirting with each other, and Mark wouldn’t have minded if it went a little further. He let his head drop down in surrender, and said, “Okay. . . if I must. ”

The widow in the radio-play was still fretting about her latest sweater. “He’s not so very keen on raglan sleeves . . . he thinks they make him look round-shouldered.”

“He’s dead, Maureen. He probably doesn’t have any shoulders.”

Katie turned around and started back up the hill. Mark climbed down from the Range Rover, slammed the door, and trudged through the long grass behind her. The skies were hung with filthy grey curtains, and the wind was blowing directly from the north-east, so that his wet raincoat collar kept petulantly slapping his face. He wouldn’t have come out here at all, not today, but the weather had put him eleven days behind schedule, and the county council were starting to grow impatient.

“ We ’ re going to be bloody popular!” he shouted. “If this is bloody Shalott!”

Katie spun around as she walked, her hands thrust deep in her duffel-coat pockets. “But it could be! A castle, on an island, right in the heart of King Arthur country!”

Mark caught up with her. “Forget it, Katie. It’s all stories – especially the Lady of Shalott. Burne Jones, Tennyson, the Victorians loved that kind of thing. A cursed woman in a castle, dying of unrequited love. Sounds like my ex, come to think of it.”

They topped the ridge. Through the misty swathes of rain, they could just about make out the thickly-wooded hills that half-encircled the valley on the eastern side. Below them lay a wide, boggy meadow. A straggling line of knobbly-topped willows crossed the meadow diagonally from south-east to north-west, like a procession of medieval monks, marking the course of an ancient ditch. They could see Nigel about a quarter of a mile away, in his fluorescent yellow jacket and his white plastic helmet, digging.

Mark clasped his hands together and raised his eyes toward the overbearing clouds. “Dear Lord, if You’re up there, please let Nigel be digging up a bit of old bedstead.”

“But if this is Shalott—” Katie persisted.

“It isn ’ t Shalott, Katie. There is no Shalott, and there never was. Even if it is – which it isn’t – it’s situated slap bang in the middle of the proposed route for the Woolston relief road, which is already three-and-a-half years late and six-point-nine million pounds over budget. Which means that the county council will have to rethink their entire highways-building plan, and we won’t get paid until the whole mess has gone through a full-scale public enquiry, which probably means in fifteen years’ time.”

“But think of it!” said Katie. “There – where Nigel’s digging – that could be the island where the castle used to stand, where the Lady of Shalott weaved her tapestries. And these were the fields where the reapers heard her singing! And that ditch was the river, where she floated down to Camelot in her boat, singing her last lament before she died!”

“If any of that is true, sweetheart, then this is the hill where you and I and Historic Site Assessment Plc went instantly bankrupt.”