Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

I think: We are not supposed to be abk to read, or feel, or cry, or remember. But I do.

And if I do, big vat of steel below might be crucible not of rebirth, but of re-death. I am special case. Exception. Maybe exceptional enough to will my foot closer to edge. Drop isn’t far.

Very odd, to submerge in metal hot enough to instantly vaporize my eyes . . . and feel nothing. Hot solar light and shock of obliteration.

Then a voice, saying, “Welcome to Phase Three debriefing, Number 550713.”

KARL EDWARD WAGNER WAS one of the genre’s finest practitioners of horror and dark fantasy, and his untimely death in 1994 robbed the field of one of its major talents.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Wagner earned his M.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1974 and trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a multiple British Fantasy and World Fantasy Award-winning author, editor and publisher. His early writing included a series of fantasy novels and stories featuring Kane, the Mystic Swordsman. His first novel, Darkness Weaves With Many Shades (1970), introduced the unusually intelligent and brutal warrior-sorcerer, and Kane’s adventures continued in Death Angel’s Shadow, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and the collections Night Winds and The Book of Kane. More recently, the complete Kane novels and stories have been brought together in two volumes by Night Shade Books as Gods in Darkness and Midnight Sun.

He edited three volumes of Robert E. Howard’s definitive Conan adventures and continued the exploits of two of Howard’s characters, Conan and Bran Mak Morn respectively, in the novels The Road of Kings and Legion from the Shadows. He also edited three Echoes of Valor heroic fantasy anthologies and a collection of medical horror stories, Intensive Scare. He took over the editing of The Year’s Best Horror Stories in 1980 and for the next fourteen years turned it into one of the genre’s finest showcases.

Wagner’s own superior short horror tales were collected in In a Lonely Place, Why Not You and I ? and Unthreatened by the Morning Light. A tribute collection entitled Exorcisms and Ecstasies was published in 1997.

“Health is such a chancy thing,” explained the author. “And so precious.

“That’s why there are doctors.

“That’s why you go to them.

“But you are afraid of them. Afraid of their offices and hospitals. Afraid of their questions and examinations. Afraid of their poking and probing. Afraid of their pills and needles. Afraid of their scalpels and sutures. Afraid of lying helpless and naked beneath the sterile murmur of fluorescent lights.

“Helpless.

“Can you understand their jargon, their professional aloofness? The half-hearted words, distracted frowns, and flutter of charts and lab reports? The impersonal cluster of peering faces over your bed?

“Best not to try. Just lie there and trust. And pray. What’s your choice?

“But then . . .

“Suppose the doctor isn’t just what you imagined?

“You’re lying there on the bed, vulnerable and half-naked in a humiliating hospital gown.

“You see, scalpels don’t care who they cut.

“And no one ever gets well in a hospital.

“You’re never closer to death. Never more helpless. This is real terror.

“Trust me.

“I’m a doctor.”

I

“I HAD A FRIEND at St Johns you would have liked to have met,” observed Dr Metzger. “At least the idea you’ve brought up reminds me of some of our old undergraduate bull sessions.”

“Bull sessions?” responded Dr Thackeray, his frosty brows wavering askance.

Geoff laughed easily. “Never underestimate the value of a liberal arts background, Dr Thackeray. St Johns men could find loftier subjects to drain a keg of beer over than the matter of a cheerleader’s boobs – especially with cheerleaders in short supply.

“No, Kirk Walker was something of a medievalist – and certainly a romanticist. Fancied himself the last of the Renaissance men, or some such, I imagine. Anyway, he used to put away booze like a Viking raiding party, and often he’d kick around some impossibly half-assed ideas. Argue them with dignified tenacity through all our hooting – and you were never sure whether he was serious, or handing us another piece of outrageous whimsy.

“But one of the points he liked to bring up was this idea that modern science, as we call it, isn’t all that modern. Maintained that substantial scientific knowledge and investigation have existed on a recondite basis since early history – and not just as hocus-pocus and charlatanry.”

“As I have suggested,” Dr Thackeray nodded, drawing on his cigar and tilting his padded desk chair a fraction closer to overbalance.

“Pity Kirk isn’t here to talk with a kindred soul,” Geoff Metzger continued. “He used to drag out all manner of evidence to support his claim. Go on about Egyptian artifacts, Greek thinkers, Byzantine and later Roman writings, Islamic studies after the Roman Lake changed owners, Jewish cabalism, secret researches by certain monks, on through the Dark Ages and into the so-called Renaissance – even threw out bits of Chinese history. He’d go wild talking about the quattrocento and the cinquecento and dozens of Italian names no one else had heard of- then Central Europe and France and England, and people like Bacon and Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. That was really the astonishing thing. I mean, all of us at St Johns were supposed to be well read and well versed in the classics and those great and mouldy books, but Kirk was something else. God knows how much that guy must have read!”

“Your friend Walker sounds like a man I ought to meet,” Dr Thackeray broke in.

Metzger’s face saddened. “I’m sorry to say you can’t. Quite a tragic story about old Kirk. He went on to med school after St Johns, too – some big Southern school of notable reputation. Wasn’t happy there for some reason, and ran afoul of the administration. Left after a rather stormy scene. Died not long thereafter – Hodgkins, I believe. Everyone felt bad about it at the time.”

“A pity.”

“Yes, it was. I must say I’m surprised to find someone of your position giving credence to such similar ideas. Guess maybe we took Kirk more lightly than we might have. Still, he was always one for elaborate jokes. Strange guy.” Geoff s eye fell to wandering along the impressively filled shelves which lined Dr Thackeray’s office. These walls of conglomerate knowledge – concentrated to blocky solidity, properly bound and systematically shelved – exuded the weighty atmosphere of learned dignity that one expected for the sanctum of the Chairman of the Department of Medicine.

“And why did your friend believe this unsuspected depth of scientific knowledge was kept in secret?” the older man asked carefully.

“Kirk was vague,” returned Metzger, downing his acrid coffee before it got colder. A grimy residue stained the bottom of the Styrofoam cup, and he reflected bitterly that hospital coffee deteriorated with every medical center he came to.

“He had several reasons, though. For one thing, he’d argue that our basic conception of the past comes through writings of the past, and that these writers viewed their world from their own particular set of terms. The idea of progress – in fact, the conception of science as we understand it – is a relatively modern development of thought. In another age this was altogether different. To the bulk of the populace, scientific knowledge would have been no more than a pointless exercise, useless to them. What would a serf care about a microscope? It wouldn’t clothe and feed him. What would an intellectual care about the discovery of microorganisms? Plagues were the punishment of God or the work of Satan.