Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

“Hey, buddy, you look gloomy. Wife troubles, I bet. They don’t go for their man spending all his time with the test tubes, I should know. How about some coffee?” Dave Froneberger was grinning at him, already fiddling with the urn.

Geoff blinked at him dumbly. After the ordeal of these last few hours, Froneberger with his insinuating banalities and petty gossip seemed almost an ally. Perhaps he could be one.

“Thanks, Dave,” he muttered, accepting the Styrofoam cup. He was too shaken even to feel his customary disgust with the bitter coffee. Yes, Froneberger with his prying interest in his research might be an ally. At least he could be one other party to this new cancer data. They couldn’t murder and discredit the entire Center staff.

“You know, Dave,” Geoff began. “I’m glad you dropped by just now. It strikes me that your own research is similar to mine in enough aspects that you might have some fresh insight into some problems I’ve run into. If you’d care to take time, I’d like to go over some of my notes with you, and see what you think.”

“I don’t think you’ll have time,” smiled Froneberger. He reached for Geoff s empty coffee cup, dropped it into a pocket of his lab coat.

“What do you mean?” asked Geoff thickly, coughing suddenly. There was pain deep, deep in his throat. Another racking cough filled his mouth with blood.

And he knew what Froneberger meant.

TANITH LEE BEGAN WRITING at the age of nine and she published three children’s books with Macmillan in the early 1970s. She became a full-time author in 1975, when DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave and followed it with twenty-six other titles.

She has now written and published around seventy novels, nine collections and more than 200 short stories. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages and she also had four radio plays broadcast during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, and scripted two episodes of the cult BBC-TV series Blake’s 7. She has twice won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction and was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel Death’s Master. In 1998 she was short-listed for the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction for her novel Law of the Wolf Tower , the first volume in the “Claidi Journal” series.

Her more recent books include Piratica , a pirate novel for young adults, and its forthcoming sequel Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island. Lionwolf Cast a Bright Shadow and Here in Cold Hell are the first two volumes in an adult fantasy series set in a world ruled by magic and mysticism, while Metallic Love is a sequel to her 1981 novel The Silver Metal Lover.

Two works of lesbian fiction, Fatal Women and Thirty-Four are published by Egerton House, as is the detective novel, Death of the Day. She has also contributed a creepy, contemporary romance novella to When Darkness Falls , published by Harlequin.

Tanith Lee lives with her husband, the writer and artist John Kaiine, on the south-east coast of England.

“John and I haven’t written many stories actually together,” explains Lee. “We wrote our first, however, a macabre and colourful piece called ‘Iron City’ in 1987, although this has since been mysteriously misplaced . . .

“Anyone who has seen much of my work knows I often acknowledge plot or story ideas from John. In the instance of ‘Unlocked’, it began with John’s writing of the journal and grew further from my own abiding fascination with France, plus our mutual obsession with madness and/or asylums – see my Book oj the Mad and John’s metaphysical thriller Fossil Circus. ”

I kissed thee ere I kill’d thee, no way but this ,

Killing myself to die upon a kiss.

—Shakespeare: Othello

THE TOWER AND TURRETS of St Cailloux, so thin and dark against the terrible sky – I only saw them once. It was not possible to make out the bars, nor to hear the cries. The lawns were shaven, and the trees had the controlled shapes into which they had been carefully cut, restrained by wire. Behind, far off, the mountains, broken and unruly.

Some old chateau, so it looks to be, and must have been, once. No longer.

Now it houses the ones who scream and are kept in by bindings and bars and bolts.

I only saw it once. And that was in a photograph.

When they took me to see the land, they explained all over again, as the lawyer had in the town, that the house was “lost”. The land was a shambles too, under that bone-dry sun. Tares and weeds, as in the Bible. And the magnificent old cherry trees, all swarmed with serpents of ivy, although the little apple orchard had no snakes. There could be real snakes underfoot. They warned me. In the black ruin of the house, a glimmer of motion, sun catching something – pale, shimmering.

What a dreadful place. I want only to sell it, although I doubt it will bring in any money.

At the inn or hotel or whatever it thinks itself to be, an old man brought me a parcel, like a peculiar present.

“What’s this?” I tried to be pleasant, though he had suspiciously refused to sit down and ignored my offer of a glass of wine.

“Her book.”

“I see. Whose book?”

“Hers. Madame Ysabelle.”

“Ah – that’s the diary, then.”

“Her book,” he said, put it on the table, nodded angrily – they are all angry with me, the foreigner from the city who has inherited a piece of their landscape, which is the whole world. The two old servants had been sent away before her death. That is a blessing. I can imagine how they would have been with me.

“It was found under a stone?” I asked. “By the hearth.”

“What kept it,” he said.

After he had gone, I unwrapped the paper and took out the diary. It is black and stained, the binding flaking away. But the stone had protected it, as he said. Something ironic in that, almost a pun—

I opened the cover and saw, in a brownish ink, the characters of my distant relative, Ysabelle, the ornate handwriting so encouraged in her youth. But she had only been thirty-two when she died. No doubt a great age here in the country. An old maid. But I had seen her picture. Quite tall, full-figured, with tight corsetted waist. Hair very dark. Long-fingered hands, and an oval face on a long smooth throat. Dark eyes that gave nothing away, by which I mean gave nothing, pushed it toward one.

The writing said, My Book. Private, in the manner of a young girl. She had never married, “Madame” the rude courtesy of this primitive area, never allowed courtship, which was blamed on her father. After his death, alone in her white house, all wood, as they do it here, with only the thinnest veneer of dropping plaster. A grape vine growing over the terrace, and the cherry trees raising their gnarled hag’s arms, that in spring are clothed in blossom like a young girl’s skin.

By local standards too old then, Ysabelle, for wooing. At twenty, here, they gave up such hopes, unless she was a widow and wealthy, and really, despite the land, the two servants, there was no money in her family.

I flicked through the pages. I did not particularly want to know her. Although her diary had survived, and insistently they had awarded it to me.

Here and there a sentence: “Nightingale in cherry tree. It kept me awake all night. Exquisite song, save when it stops to imitate an owl it has heard in the woods.” Or, “Mireio says there are no eggs today.” Or, “The wind has been blowing. Has made my head ache and my eyes.” Then, this sentence: “I cut open an apple, seeds, the white flesh inside, the juices, white as wine, nobody has witnessed this before.”