The Mammoth Book of Terror (21 page)

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 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.”

“But we’d be
famous
, wouldn’t we?”

“No, we wouldn’t. You don’t think for one moment that
we’d
be allowed to dig it up, do you? Every medieval archeologist from every university in the western
hemisphere would be crawling all over this site like bluebottles over a dead hedgehog.”

“We’re perfectly well qualified.”

“No, darling, we’re not, and I think you’re forgetting what we do. We don’t get paid to find sites of outstanding archeological significance interest, we get paid
not
to find them. Bronze Age buckle? Shove it in your pocket and rediscover it five miles away, well away from the proposed new supermarket site. An Iron Age sheep pen, fine. We can call in
aJCB and have it shifted to the Ancient Britain display at Frome. But not Shalott, Katie. Shalott would bloody sink us.”

They struggled down the hill and across the meadow. The rain began to ease off, but the wind was still blustery. As they clambered down the ditch, and up the other side, Nigel stood up and took
off his helmet. He was very tall, Nigel, with tight curly hair, a large complicated nose, and a hesitant, disconnected way of walking and talking. But Mark hadn’t employed him for his looks
or his physical co-ordination or his people skills. He had employed him because of his MA Hist and his Dip Arch & Landscape, which were prominently displayed on the top of the company
notepaper.

“Nigel! How’s it going? Katie tells me you’ve found Shalott.”

“Well –
no
– Mark! I don’tlike to jump to – you know –
hah
! – hasty conclusions! Not when we could be dealing with –
pff
! I
don’t know! – the most exciting archeological find
ever
! But these
stones
, look!”

Mark turned to Katie and rolled up his eyes in exaggerated weariness. But Katie said, “Go on, Mark.
Look.
”

Nigel was circling around the rough grassy tussocks, flapping his hands. “I’ve cut back some of the turf, d’you see – and – underneath – well,
see
?” He had already exposed six or seven rectangular stones, the color of well-matured Cheddar cheese. Every stone bore a dense pattern of chisel-marks, as if it had been gnawed by a
giant stone-eating rat.

“
Bath
stone,” said Nigel. “Quarried from Hazlebury most likely, and look at that jadding . . . late thirteenth century, in my humble opinion. Certainly not cut by the
old method.”

Mark peered at the stones and couldn’t really see anything but stones. “The old method?”

Nigel let out a honk of laughter. “Silly, isn’t it? The
old
method is what quarrymen used to call the
new
method – cutting the stone with saws, instead of
breaking it away with bars.”

“What wags they were. But what makes you think this could be Shalott?”

Nigel shielded his eyes with his hand and looked around the meadow, blinking. “The
location
suggests it, more than anything else. You can see by the way these foundation-stones are
arranged that there was certainly a tower here. You don’t use stones five feet thick to build a single-story pigsty, do you? But then you have to ask yourself
why
would you build a
tower here?”

“Do you? Oh yes, I suppose you do.”

“You wouldn’t have picked the middle of a valley to build a fort,” said Nigel. “You would only build a tower here as a folly, or to keep somebody imprisoned,
perhaps.”

“Like the Lady of Shalott?”

“Well, exactly.”

“So, if there was a tower here, where’s the rest of it?”

“Oh, pilfered, most likely. As soon its owners left it empty, most of the stones would have been carried off by local smallholders, for building walls and stables and farmhouses.
I’ll bet you could still find them if you went looking for them.”

“Well, I’ll betyou could,” said Mark, blowing his nose. “Pity they didn’t take the lot.”

Nigel blinked at him through rain-speckled glasses. “If they’d done that,
hah
! we never would have known that this was Shalott, would we?”

“Precisely.”

Nigel said, “I don’t think the tower was standing here for very long. At a very rough estimate it was built just before 1275, and most likely abandoned during the Black Death, around
1340.”

“Oh, yes?” Mark was already trying to work out what equipment they were going to need to shift these stones and where they could dump them. Back at Hazelbury quarry, maybe, where
they originally came from. Nobody would ever find them there. Or maybe they could sell them as garden benches. He had a friend in Chelsea who ran a profitable sideline in ancient stones and 18th
century garden ornaments, for wealthy customers who weren’t too fussy where they came from.

Nigel took hold of Mark’s sleeve and pointed to a stone that was still half-buried in grass. There were some deep marks chiseled into it. “Look-you can just make out a cross, and
part of a skull, and the letters DSPM. That’s an acronym for medieval Latin, meaning ‘
God save us from the pestilence within these walls.
’”

“So whoever lived in this tower was infected with the Black Death?”

“That’s the most obvious assumption, yes.”

Mark nodded. “Okay, then . . .” he said, and kept on nodding.

“This is very, very exciting,” said Nigel. “I mean, it’s – well! – it could be
stupefying
, when you come to think of it!”

“Yes,” said Mark. He looked around the site, still nodding. “Katie told me you’d found some metal thing.”

“Well!
Hah
! That’s the clincher, so far as I’m concerned! At least it
will
be, if it turns out to be what I think it is!”

He strode back to the place where he had been digging, and Mark reluctantly followed him. Barely visible in the mud was a length of blackened metal, about a metre-and-a-half long and curved at
both ends.

“It’s a fireguard, isn’t it?” said Mark. Nigel had cleaned a part of it, and he could see that there were flowers embossed on it, and bunches of grapes, and
vine-tendrils. In the center of it was a lump that looked like a human face, although it was so encrusted with mud that it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman.

Mark peered at it closely. “An old Victorian fireguard, that’s all.”

“I don’t think so,” said Nigel. “I think it’s the top edge of a mirror. And a thirteenth century mirror, at that.”