Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

“If we don’t get a move on we won’t even make the summit before dark, let alone get back down to the car again.”

“We don’t need to go to the summit,” I pointed out. The idea filled me with exhausted horror. “Just to the fountain, and that shouldn’t be much farther, as far as I can make out from this map . . .” Squinting at it, it occurred to me that scale was not Janet’s strong point.

You were as baffled by me as I was by you. What was the point of going only halfway up a mountain? “Come on, it’s not that hard a climb.”

“But I don’t want to go to the top.” I couldn’t keep the irritating whine out of my voice. “Will, I’m worn out already. I want to stop at the fountain and have a picnic and a rest before we go back.”

Your face began to cloud, but then it cleared. “Okay. You stay at the fountain and rest. I’ll climb to the summit alone and then come back for you.”

I didn’t like the idea much, but sometimes you have to compromise.

We reached the fountain a few minutes later. First we heard the cool, gurgling sound of water, and then we found the source, hidden beneath a curtain of ferns and ground-ivy. I pulled back some of the greenery to reveal the smooth rim of a stone bowl that caught the water flowing up from underground. There was a channel that sent the overflow spilling into a small, bright stream that raced away over a rocky bed down the hillside.

“Want a drink?” I asked.

“From that?” You frowned.

“Better than recycled city water,” I tempted. “This is exactly the sort of stuff that gets bottled and sold to people like you in restaurants.”

“I might try it when I come back. I don’t want to stop just now. You’ll be all right?”

“What about our picnic?”

You sighed. “The sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back. You can eat some of this stuff while you’re waiting for me, if you want. I’ll just take a candy bar and my water flask.” Then you dropped a kiss on my head, determined not to be caught and delayed by anything as time-consuming as a real embrace.

For a while, I sulked, counting the minutes, wondering how long it would take you to get there and back again. I wished I’d brought a book. With nothing else to occupy me, I poked around the fountain, uncovering more of it from the encroaching plants. I scraped away the furry moss and found a figure carved in bas-relief : a cat, it looked like. Then there were markings that might have been writing, but the letters appeared to be Greek, which I can’t read. It could have been graffiti left by fraternity boys from Syracuse or Cornell.

I was thirsty. The trill of water made the feeling worse. I fetched my little plastic bottle of Evian and drank half of it. More out of boredom than hunger I ate lunch, and finished off the Evian. Then I filled the bottle from the spring: my insurance in case I couldn’t get you to drink in situ. Then I sat down in the sun with my back against a rock and waited for you.

I fell asleep and woke disoriented, hot and dry-mouthed. I thought that someone had been watching me and laughing, but that was only the music of the fountain. I was still alone, and really thirsty. I reached for the Evian bottle and then stopped, remembering that I had refilled it from the fountain. I licked dry lips and looked at my watch, which turned out to have stopped some hours earlier. The battery had been running down all day and I hadn’t noticed except to think how slowly time was passing.

Where were you? I felt as if I had been sleeping for hours. What if you had fallen and hurt yourself, what if something awful had happened? I called your name, but the sound of my own voice echoing off the rocks in the empty air gave me the creeps. I advised myself to sit quietly and wait for you. If only I wasn’t so thirsty!

It was late September and the day was pleasantly cool, but the sun blazed down, making me hot. I wondered if I could be suffering from sunstroke. I plunged my hands and arms up to the elbow in the fountain to cool myself, and dabbed water on my face. I had never been so thirsty in my life. What if I just wet my lips? But I needed a drink.

I longed for you to come back and save me with the dull, flat, safe city water in your flask. But you didn’t come and didn’t come and finally I couldn’t bear my thirst any longer and I drank.

That was the best water I ever tasted. I drank and drank until my stomach felt distended. I felt content and at peace with the universe, without worries. I was no longer thirsty and no longer too hot. The sun felt good. The smooth rock where I had rested before was still warm with the sun, so I curled up there and went to sleep.

I was awakened by the sound of you calling my name. I opened my eyes and stretched, and you turned and looked straight at me, but the worry didn’t leave your face, and you didn’t stop calling. Were you blind? I got down and went over and pressed myself against you.

“Well, hello. Where’d you come from?” You began to stroke me. “Have you seen my girlfriend? I guess she got fed up waiting and decided to hike back to the car alone. Only, if she did that, why’d she leave her stuff?”

I wanted to explain, but no matter how I purred and cried and stropped myself against your legs, you just didn’t get it. Are women more intuitive than men, or what? I followed you to your car but you wouldn’t have me.

One of the sheriffs men took me home with him after a day spent searching the mountainside for me. You did the decent thing, regardless of the trouble it would make for you, and reported me missing.

After many adventures I made my way back to Manhattan, and to Washington Square, and Lecia’s little apartment. I don’t think she recognized me; at any rate, she shooed me off with a shocking lack of compassion. I hung around anyway, to give her another chance. Maybe she’d put together my reported disappearance with the sudden appearance of a strange cat. I found a position on a fire-escape which gave me a view into her living-room window, and I hunkered down and waited. As soon as I saw her getting ready to go out I’d make for her door and strop her ankles and purr like an engine. She wouldn’t be able to resist me forever. So she had a cat already; why shouldn’t she have two?

I watched and waited and finally, after moonrise, I saw James the cat turn, in the magic circle of Lecia’s arms, into the man who was her lover.

Finally I understood the secret of the fountain, and knew that my only hope was to find you. If you want me, you can have me again. For you, I’ve left the city. For you, I’ll live in the suburbs. By day, I’ll be the family cat. But at night, in your arms, secretly, while your wife sleeps unknowing, I’ll be your lover. You can make me change, if only you want me.

RONALD CHETWYND-HAYES DIED in 2001. He started writing fiction in the early 1950s, and his first published book was the science fiction novel The Man from the Bomb in 1959. His second novel, The Dark Man (aka And Love Survived ), appeared five years later.

While looking on a bookstall in the early 1970s, Chetwynd-Hayes noticed the profusion of horror titles and submitted a collection of his own stories, which eventually appeared in paperback as The Unbidden. Becoming a full-time writer, he began producing a prolific number of ghost stories and sedate tales of terror, many tinged with his disarming sense of humour.

Known as “Britain’s Prince of Chill”, his stories were widely anthologized and collected in such volumes as Cold Terror, Terror by Night, The Elemental, The Night Ghouls and Other Grisly Tales, The Monster Club, The Cradle Demon and Other Stories of Fantasy and Horror, The Fantastic World of Kamtellar: A Book of Vampires and Ghouls, A Quiver of Ghosts, Tales from the Dark Lands, Ghosts from the Mist of Time, Tales from the Haunted House, Dracula’s Children, The House of Dracula and Shudders and Shivers. More recently his work has been compiled in The Vampire Stories ofR. Chetwynd-Hayes (aka Looking for Something to Suck and Other Vampire Stories), Phantoms and Fiends, Frights and Fancies and Ghosts and Ghouls: The Best Short Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes , while the anthology Great Ghost Stories is edited by Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones.