Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

“The maypole’s not very far away, Anthea,” Melissa said. “Just a short walk. I’m sure that if you’re not feeling well these gentlemen will lend you support.”

Reverend Luckhurst took Anthea’s left arm in a firm grip. “It will be a pleasure, Miss Moore,” he said. Reg Feltham, with a friendly nod, grasped Anthea’s other arm.

“Shall we go?” asked Melissa Taybourne.

Anthea stumbled along with them, any will to resist drained from her. She became aware of a noise from somewhere ahead. It sounded like singing and clapping.

She had her first glimpse of the maypole at a distance and her mind tried to tell her that it was all right, that everything was normal after all. The singing came from a crowd of villagers while others were dancing around the maypole in threes, each middle dancer holding the ribbon which spiralled around the tall shaft. It was just a simple village tradition.

Then as they drew near, Anthea knew that it was not all right. There was something truly strange about the dancers, or at least about the ribbon holders.

The flanking pair of each trio wore the long white robes but the middle dancers, men and women, were naked. And the ribbons were wrong. They were not gay strips of multi-coloured bunting but thick and greasy-looking, aberrant purple-grey coils.

And then Anthea saw that the naked dancers’ chests and bellies were spattered with what seemed to be red paint, and seconds later she knew that it was not paint and that they were not holding the ribbons but that the ribbons protruded from their lower bodies and were growing longer as they stumbled about the maypole.

“You’re all insane,” Anthea whispered.

Melissa Taybourne smiled and shook her head. “What is insane about propitiating the old gods of the land as our ancestors did?” She waved an elegant hand at the dancers. “These are all volunteers. Thomas Comstock – you saw him in the church, Anthea – gave his blood for the fertility of the land but he has left his seed in many wombs. The ceremony of the maypole is to ensure the fertility of that seed.”

“And you were sent to us for a purpose, Miss Moore,” said Jack Lewis. “From time to time it is only good and proper that an outsider be brought into our rites. Fresh blood, you know, can only be beneficial to the community.”

“We thought that you, Anthea, of all people would understand this,” said the rector.

Anthea wanted to scream but she could only whimper. With firm gentleness her escort led her to the maypole. They cut away her clothing until she was quite naked, after which Melissa Taybourne went to work with the sickle.

Then Anthea was able to scream.

TERRY LAMSLEY WAS BORN in the south of England but lived in the north for most of his life. He currently resides in Amsterdam, Holland.

His first collection of supernatural stories, Under the Crust, was initially published in a small paperback edition in 1993. Originally intended to only appeal to the tourist market in Lamsley’s home town of Buxton in Derbyshire (the volume’s six tales are all set in or around the area), its reputation quickly grew, helped when stories from the book were included in two of the annual “Year’s Best” horror anthologies.

The book was subsequently nominated for no less than three prestigious World Fantasy Awards, with the story reprinted here eventually winning the award for Best Novella. Ramsey Campbell accepted it on the author’s behalf, and Lamsley’s reputation as a writer of supernatural fiction was assured.

In 1997, Canada’s Ash-Tree Press reissued Under the Crust as a handsome hardcover, limited to just five hundred copies and now as sought-after as the long out-of-print first edition. A year earlier, Ash-Tree had published a second, equally remarkable collection of Lamsley’s short stories, Conference With the Dead: Tales of Supernatural Terror , and it was followed in 2000 by a third collection, Dark Matters.

More recently, he has had stories in By Moonlight Only, Don’t Turn Out the Light and Taverns of the Dead , and a new novella appears in Fourbodings from PS Publishing.

“Dove Holes is a real place,” reveals Lamsley. “People living there, not having much else to do a lot of the time, were in the habit of packing their families in the car, at weekends and holidays, to have a day out rummaging about on the large Council tip on the edge of the village. Rumour had it that rich people from Buxton sometimes dumped valuable antiques there.

“To get into the main part of the tip you had to have some bona fide waste material of your own to deposit, though a lot of people brought out a lot more rubbish than they took in. Or so I was told. Whatever the truth of this, I have seen long queues of cars lined up at the entrance on sunny days. The Victory Quarry was much as I described it, at the time of writing.”

MAURICE BEGAN TO FEEL ill as he came off the Chapel-en-le-Frith by-pass and drove up the A6 to Dove Holes. His palms were damp, and his hands slithered on the steering wheel. He was trying to grip too hard to compensate for a feeling he had that if he didn’t do so, his hands would start to tremble. Also, he was having trouble with his vision. The edges of things were hazy, and patches of blue sky that showed through the gaps in the high, blousy clouds, looked far too bright, like neon light shining off painted metal. He wanted to stop, but was caught in a line of lorries, and there was nowhere to pull off the road that he could remember. He wiped his hands on his shirt. They became sticky again at once. There was a droning sound somewhere. He wasn’t sure if it was coming from the car engine or inside his skull.

He blinked and shook his head in consternation. He had been feeling uneasy all day, all week even, and there was plenty in his life to feel uneasy about, but he had thought he was fairly fit. Now, it seemed, his body was going to let him down, and play host to some sickness, on top of everything else. He slammed the steering wheel with the heel of his hand in disgust, wound down the side window a couple of inches, and leaned forward tensely against his seat-belt.

As he drove through the tight, dusty village of Dove Holes he started to experience a sensation of more general disorientation. He saw a narrow turning forking to his left and, on impulse, took it much too fast. The unfamiliar road curved and dipped between two low stone walls and, hardly slowing at all, he rocketed along it for a few hundred yards, feeling almost helpless, as though the car had taken possession of him. He made an effort of concentration, to gain control of the vehicle, but a square, dark shape sprang up to the right of him, as though it had pounced out of the earth, and plunged towards him. He swung the car to the left to avoid whatever it was – it seemed to be a huge black, windowless van – and rode wildly up and along a low, steep, grassy bank. He sensed, rather than saw, the other driver staring down at him. The car scraped against a wall and he had a vague impression of stones tumbling away into the field beyond. The car pulled up sharp at last, its front end pointing up to the sky.

Maurice glanced back to see what had happened to the other vehicle, but it had vanished. Could anything that size, travelling that fast, not have gone off the road?

Then he recalled that the van, or whatever it was, had made no attempt to avoid him. It had taken no evasive action in the seconds it had been visible, as though the driver had not even seen him! Thoughts of insurance bleeped on and off in his mind as he freed his seat-belt buckle, opened the door, and stumbled out onto the road.