The Mammoth Book of Terror (6 page)

Standing there in the small cloakroom shaking rain off myself, my eyes were growing more accustomed to the gloom. The cloakroom seemed just as I remembered it: several pieces of tall, dark
furniture, pine-panelled inner walls, the old grandfather clock standing in one corner. Except that this time . . . the clock wasn’t clucking. The pendulum was still, a vertical bar of brassy
fire when lightning suddenly brought the room to life. Then it was dark again – if anything even darker than before – and the windows rattled as thunder came down in a rolling, receding
drumbeat.

“Garth!” I called again, my voice echoing through the old house. “It’s me, Greg Lane. I said I’d drop in some time . . . ?” No answer, just the
hiss
of
the rain outside, the feel of my collar damp against my neck, and the thick, rising smell of . . . of what? And suddenly I remembered very clearly the details of my last visit here.

“Garth!” I tried one last time, and I stepped to the door of his living-room and pushed it open. As I did so there came a lull in the beating rain. I heard the floorboards creak
under my feet, but I also heard . . . a groan? My sensitivity at once rose by several degrees. Was that Garth? Was he hurt?
My God!
What had he said to me that time? “One of these days
the postman will find me stretched out in here, and he’ll think: ‘Well, I needn’t come out here any more.’”

I had to have light. There’d be matches in the kitchen, maybe even a torch. In the absence of a mains supply, Garth would surely have to have a torch. Making my way shufflingly, very
cautiously across the dark room towards the kitchen, I was conscious that the smell was more concentrated here. Was it just the smell of an old, derelict house, or was it something worse? Then,
outside, lightning flashed again, and briefly the room was lit up in a white glare. Before the darkness fell once more, I saw someone slumped on the old settee where Garth had served me coffee . .
.

“Garth?” the word came out half strangled. I hadn’t wanted to say it; it had just gurgled from my tongue. For though I’d seen only a silhouette, outlined by the
split-second flash, it hadn’t looked like Garth at all. It had been much more like someone else I’d once seen – in a photograph. That drooping right shoulder.

My skin prickled as I stepped on shivery feet through the open door into the kitchen. I forced myself to draw breath, to think clearly.
If
I’d seen anyone or anything at all back
there (it could have been old boxes piled on the settee, or a roll of carpet leaning there), then it most probably had been Garth, which would explain that groan. It
was
him, of course it
was. But in the storm, and remembering what I did of this place, my mind was playing morbid tricks with me. No, it was Garth, and he could well be in serious trouble. I got a grip of myself,
quickly looked all around.

A little light came into the kitchen through a high back window. There was a two-ring gas cooker, a sink and draining-board with a drawer under the sink. I pulled open the drawer and felt about
inside it. My nervous hand struck what was unmistakably a large box of matches, and – yes, the smooth heavy cylinder of a hand torch!

And all the time I was aware that someone was or might be slumped on a settee just a few swift paces away through the door to the living-room. With my hand still inside the drawer, I pressed the
stud of the torch and was rewarded when a weak beam probed out to turn my fingers pink. Well, it wasn’t a powerful beam, but any sort of light had to be better than total darkness.

Armed with the torch, which felt about as good as a weapon in my hand, I forced myself to move back into the living-room and directed my beam at the settee. But oh, Jesus – all that sat
there was a monstrous grey mushroom! It was a great fibrous mass, growing out of and welded with mycelium strands to the settee, and in its centre an obscene yellow fruiting body. But for
God’s sake, it had the shape and outline and
look
of an old woman, and it had Lily-Anne’s deflated chest and slumped shoulder!

I don’t know how I held on to the torch, how I kept from screaming out loud, why I simply didn’t fall unconscious. That’s the sort of shock I experienced. But I did none of
these things. Instead, on nerveless legs, I backed away, backed right into an old wardrobe or Welsh-dresser. At least, I backed into what had once been a piece of furniture. But now it was
something else.

Soft as sponge, the thing collapsed and sent me sprawling. Dust and (I imagined) dark red spores rose up everywhere, and I skidded on my back in shards of crumbling wood and matted webs of
fibre. And lolling out of the darkness behind where the dresser had stood – bloating out like some loathsome puppet or dummy – a second fungoid figure leaned towards me. And this time
it was a caricature of Ben!

He lolled there, held up on four fibre legs, muzzle snarling soundlessly, for all the world tensed to spring – and all he was was a harmless fungous thing. And yet this time I did scream.
Or I think I did, but the thunder came to drown me out.

Then I was on my feet, and my feet were through the rotten floorboards, and I didn’t care except I had to get out of there, out of that choking, stinking, collapsing –

I stumbled,
crumbled
my way into the tiny cloakroom, tripped and crashed into the clock where it stood in the corner. It was like a nightmare chain reaction which I’d started and
couldn’t stop; the old grandfather just crumpled up on itself, its metal parts clanging together as the wood disintegrated around them. And all the furniture following suit, and the very wall
panelling smoking into ruin where I fell against it.

And there where that infected timber had been, there he stood – old Garth himself! He leaned half out of the wall like a great nodding manikin, his entire head a livid yellow blotch, his
arm and hand making a noise like a huge puff-ball bursting underfoot where they separated from his side to point floppingly towards the open door. I needed no more urging.

“God! Yes! I’m
going!
” I told him, as I plunged out into the storm . . .

But in the newspapers I read how what was left of Easingham had gone into the sea in the night. The churchyard, Haitian timber, terrible dry rot fungus, the whole thing, sliding down into the
sea and washed away for ever on the tides.

And yet now I sometimes think: Where did all that wood
go
that Garth had been selling for years? And what of all those spores I’d breathed and touched and rolled around in? And
sometimes when I think things like that it makes me feel quite ill.

I suppose I shall just have to wait and see . . .

CHARLES
L. GRANT
’
S
CAREER
has spanned more than thirty-five years and
during that time he has won, among other honours, three World Fantasy Awards and two Nebulas from the Science Fiction-Fantasy Writers Association. A recipient of the British Fantasy Society’s
Special Award and the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, he was also named Grand Master at the 2002 World Horror Convention.

A prolific short story writer and novelist, he has cultivated his unique style of “quiet horror” in many novels and collections, including
The Curse, The Hour of the Oxrun Dead,
The Sound of Midnight, The Grave, The Bloodwind, The Soft Whisper of the Dead, The Nestling, The Tea Party, The Orchard, The Pet, For Fear of the Night, In a Dark Dream, Dialing the Wind, Stunts,
Something Stirs, Jackals, The Black Carousel, Tales from the Nightside, A Glow of Candles
and
Nightmare Seasons.
More recent titles include the first two
X Files
novelizations,
Goblin
and
Whirlwind
, the “Millennium Quartet” inspired by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the “Black Oak” series about a security team of paranormal
investigators. Grant has also published a number of books under the pseudonyms “Geoffrey Marsh” and “Lionel Fenn”.

As an editor he is responsible for two dozen anthologies, including the influential
Shadows
series (twelve volumes) along with
Nightmares, Midnight, Greystone Bay, The Dodd Mead
Gallery of Horror
and
Gothic Ghosts
(with Wendy Webb).

With his wife, editor and novelist Kathryn Ptacek, Grant lives in a century-old haunted Victorian house in Sussex County, New Jersey.

“I also write and edit books like this one,” explains the author, “ones that if all goes well will give their readers a good dose of the chills, the shudders, and the outright
shrieks now and then. After all, if the truth be known, we haven’t grown up all that much; the fears we have now aren’t the same as they were when we were children, but they’re
fears just the same. They make our palms sweat, they give us nightmares, and they’re sometimes powerful enough to alter our characters.”

He stared instead at the walls and the pictures there of his father’s favorite game birds. Then he tried to count the floor’s black-and-white tiles, but his eyes blurred and he had
to shake his head to clear his vision. A fly, perhaps the last of the year, darted across the room, swerved toward him, and made him duck. Automatically, his hands unclenched, remembered, and
settled again. His knees ached where he had scraped them the day before. Caren sighed.

Through the two windows above the couch he could see the brown-edged leaves of a ribbon of flowers his mother had planted along the front of the house. They had been green once, like all the
others in the neighborhood; watered, dusted with aerosol sprays, and caressed with eyes that loved and appreciated them. By stretching very slightly he could see beyond the single row of faded
bricks that separated the garden from the lawn. The grass was hidden, but he knew it was dying anyway, a perfect camouflage for the leaves that sailed from the elms and willows.

I wish I knew what I was doing, he thought as he lowered his gaze to Caren again. I never killed no one before. But I guess it’s got to be done or she’ll kill us all first. I know
it. I know she will.

Visions of his parents, of Caren’s, of all the others, lying in the street like so much discarded trash.

Visions of television shows, of movies, of twisted evil women burning at the stake and laughing, having their heads cut off and their mouths stuffed with garlic, fading to corpse-grey dust at
the first touch of daylight.

Visions, and it was all supposed to be make-believe, and the witch/vampire/werewolf wounds just makeup that washed off with soap.

A strong gust of wind drummed twigs against the windows, and Caren moaned softly in her sleep. As she rolled over onto her back, Eric wondered if he should have talked to some of the others. But
he knew most of them would have been too frightened to do anything but call for their mothers. In fact, Caren was the only one who believed all that he said, and was the only one who was willing to
join in the fight.

Maybe, he thought, we’re both a little nuts. Even in the stories, vampires only drink blood.

But his father, he recalled, had been complaining about something called deterioration, depreciation, and plummeting values just before he had been hospitalized, and perhaps if Eric understood
it more he might be convinced that this was what was killing the street, and all the other streets in all the other towns. He frowned, scratched at his chin, and rhythmically, lightly, thumped his
head back against the wall. Maybe. And maybe his father was so involved in just being an adult that he couldn’t see what was real anymore. That’s what Caren had said after her spaniel
puppy had been killed by a driver who hadn’t even bothered to stop to say he was sorry.