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Synopsis
Monsterrific stories by top names in horror writing
Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies, Ghouls . . . these and many other Creatures of the Night are featured in this bumper collection of stories by such authors as Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Tanith Lee, Michael Marshall Smith, Kim Newman, Joe R. Lansdale, Lisa Tuttle, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Basil Copper and many others. Here you'll discover creatures both unnatural and manmade, as the walking dead rise from their graves, immortal bloodsuckers seek human nourishment, deformed monstrosities pursue their victims across the countryside, and the ugliest of nightmares is revealed to have a soul. Drawn from the pages of legend and literature, these stories feature Things that slither, stagger, swoop, stomp and scamper. So bolt the doors, lock the windows and shiver in the shadows, because no-one is safe when the Monsters are loose .
Release date: August 4, 2011
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 160
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The Mammoth Book of Monsters
Stephen Jones
STEPHEN JONES lives in London, England. He is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, four Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards and
three International Horror Guild Awards as well as being a seventeen-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award and a Hugo Award nominee. A former television producer/director and genre movie
publicist and consultant (the first three Hellraiser movies, Night Life, Nightbreed, Split Second, Mind Ripper, Last Gasp etc.), he is the co-editor of Horror: 100 Best Books,
Horror: Another 100 Best Books, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Gaslight & Ghosts, Now We Are Sick, HP. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural,
Secret City: Strange Tales of London, Great Ghost Stories, Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories and the Dark Terrors, Dark Voices and Fantasy Tales series. He has
written Stardust: The Film Companion, Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide, The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie
Guide, The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide and The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide, and compiled The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series, The Mammoth Book of Terror,
The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By
Women, The Mammoth Book of New Terror, The Mammoth Book of Monsters, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, Dark Detectives, Dancing with the Dark, Dark of the Night, White of the
Moon, Keep Out the Night, By Moonlight Only, Don’t Turn Out the Light, HP. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Travellers in Darkness, Summer Chills, Exorcisms and Ecstasies by
Karl Edward Wagner, The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Phantoms and Fiends and Frights and Fancies by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, James Herbert: By Horror Haunted, The Complete
Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard, The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett, The Mark of the
Beast and Other Fantastical Tales by Rudyard Kipling, Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror, Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles and the
Hellraiser Chronicles. He was a Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the 2004 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. You can visit his
web site at www.herebedragons.co.uk/jones
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Pete Duncan, Dorothy Lumley, Randy Broecker, Val and Les Edwards, Pam Brooks, Hugh Lamb, Jo Fletcher, Mandy Slater and Michael Marshall Smith for all
their help and support.
“Introduction: How to Make a Monster” copyright © Stephen Jones 2007.
“Visitation” copyright © David J. Schow 1981. Originally published in Seeing Red. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Down There” copyright © Ramsey Campbell 1981. Originally published in Weird Tales #1. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.
“The Man He Had Been Before” copyright © Scott Edelman 2007.
“Calling All Monsters” copyright © Mercury Press, Inc. 1973. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1973. Copyright assigned to the
author. This version copyright © Dennis Etchison 1982. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Shadmock” copyright © R. Chetwynd-Hayes 1975. Originally published in The Monster Club. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the author’s
agent.
“The Spider Kiss” copyright © Christopher Fowler 2007.
“Café Endless: Spring Rain” copyright © Nancy Holder 1994. Originally published in Love in Vein. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Medusa” copyright © Thomas Ligotti 1994. Originally published in Noctuary. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“In The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise” copyright © Gemma Files 2003. Originally published in The Worm in Every Heart. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Downmarket” copyright © the estate of Sydney J. Bounds 2007.
“The Horror from the Mound” by Robert E. Howard. Originally published in Weird Tales, May 1932.
“Fat Man” copyright © Joseph E. Lake, Jr. 2007.
“The Thin People” copyright Brian Lumley 1987. Originally published in The Third Book of After Midnight Stories: A Kimber Ghost Book. Reprinted by permission of the
author.
“The Hill” copyright © Tanith Lee 2007.
“Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program” copyright © Joe R. Lansdale 1994. First published in Writer of the Purple Rage. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“.220 Swift” copyright © Karl Edward Wagner 1980. Originally published in New Terrors 1. Reprinted by permission of The Karl Edward Wagner Literary Group.
“Our Lady of the Sauropods” copyright © Agberg, Ltd. 1980. Originally published in Omni, September 1980. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Flabby Men” copyright © Basil Copper 1977. Originally published in And Afterward, the Dark. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Silvering” copyright © Robert Holdstock 1992. Originally published in Narrow Houses. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Someone Else’s Problem” copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1996, 2007. Originally published in a different version in Chills, Issue 10, 1996. Reprinted by
permission of the author.
“Rawhead Rex” copyright © Clive Barker 1984. Originally published in Books of Blood Volume III. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Chill Clutch of the Unseen” copyright © Kim Newman 2004. Originally published in Quietly Now: An Anthology in Tribute to Charles L. Grant. Reprinted by permission of
the author.
INTRODUCTION:
How to Make a Monster
SO WHAT, EXACTLY, constitutes a “monster”? That’s the question I had to ask myself before I started compiling this latest “Mammoth” anthology.
Having previously edited such titles as The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein and The Mammoth Book
of Dracula, to name just a few, my publishers initially suggested that I put together an omnibus volume containing some of the best stories in those books.
That’s something that may happen in the future. However, I felt that because those books had already appeared in various editions and numerous printings around the world, it would be more
fun to assemble an entirely new selection of tales, while at the same time introducing readers to some unique and unusual monstrosities.
After careful consideration, I decided not to include stories dealing with demons, ghosts or human monsters (such as psychopaths), as these may – and in some cases, already – have
“Mammoth” titles of their own. After that decision was made, any type of creature was up for grabs – the more obscure or original the better.
That is not to say that we don’t have all the classic monsters represented in this volume. You would expect nothing less than a vampire story from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
best-seller Nancy Holder, but it is the unfamiliar location of “Café Endless: Spring Rain” that makes it stand out in my mind. While the resurrected vampire of Robert E.
Howard’s classic weird tale, “The Horror from the Mound,” also originates from a different milieu than that usually associated with the undead.
Scott Edelman’s “The Man He Had Been Before” is a contemporary view of a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies that has something else to say about growing up, Gemma Files
gives the werewolf myth a fairytale twist in “In The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise”, and Tanith Lee’s “The Hill” is set in and around the creepy home of a missing
scientist.
An academic goes in search of the eponymous mythological creature in Thomas Ligotti’s “The Medusa”, a stone gargoyle is brought to life in “Downmarket” by Sydney J.
Bounds, a Big Footlike creature attacks a town’s children in Jay Lake’s “Fat Man”, and a reclusive islander shares his world with shape-chaging selkies in Robert
Holdstock’s haunting tale “The Silvering”.
The ancient cave-dwellers of Karl Edward Wagner’s novella “.220 Swift” have more than a common heritage in the stories of Arthur Machen and Manly Wade Wellman, which
can’t be said for the nasty little critters found on an InterCity railway train in “Someone Else’s Problem” by Michael Marshall Smith.
The King of the Monsters himself turns up in “Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program” which, being by hisownself Joe R. Lansdale, is about much more than its humorous title would at
first suggest, and the dinosaurs are bio-engineered on the prehistoric planet of Robert Silverberg’s “Our Lady of the Sauropods”. Reincarnated insects are the problem in
“The Spider Kiss” by Christopher Fowler.
Late-night office workers are menaced by hungry horrors from the basement in Ramsey Campbell’s claustrophobic “Down There”, while the monsters of both Brian Lumley’s
“The Thin People” and Basil Copper’s “The Flabby Men” share only a semblance with humanity.
R. Chetwynd-Hayes’ “The Shadmock” and Clive Barker’s “Rawhead Rex” are genuinely new monsters who have both benefited from movie adaptations, and there are
multiple monstrosities on display in David J. Schow’s exuberant “Visitation” and Dennis Etchison’s hallucinatory “Calling All Monsters”.
Which brings us, finally, to Kim Newman’s melancholy coda, “The Chill Clutch of the Unseen”, in which the last monster-fighter and the last classic monster confront each other
with surprising results. It is a story that brings this collection full circle while speaking to all of us who grew up on monsters – especially those iconic cinematic characters from
Universal Studios.
So there you are: twenty-two stories about all kinds of different monsters. Not all are horrific, but that is only to be expected given the scope of this book and the collective talent of the
authors represented.
And if your favourite creature isn’t featured this time, then don’t worry – as we all know, when it comes to monsters there’s usually a sequel . . .
—Stephen Jones
London, England
February, 2007
DAVID J. SCHOW
Visitation
DAVID J. SCHOW IS A SHORT STORY WRITER, novelist, screenwriter (teleplays and features), columnist, essayist, editor, photographer and winner of the World Fantasy and
International Horror Guild Awards (for short fiction and non-fiction, respectively).
His association with New Line Cinema began with horror icons Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy’s Nightmares), Leatherface (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre
III) and the eponymous Critters (Critters 3 and Critters 4). In 1994 he wrote the screenplay for The Crow and has since worked with such directors as Alex Proyas, James
Cameron, E. Elias Merhige, Rupert Wainwright, Mick Garris and William Malone.
For the premiere season of Showtime’s Masters of Horror TV series he adapted his own short story “Pick Me Up” for director Larry Cohen, and for Season Two he scripted
“We All Scream for Ice Cream” (based on a John Farris story) for director Tom Holland.
Among his many books are his fourth novel, Bullets of Rain, and seventh short story collection, Havoc Swims Jaded. The author’s popular “Raving & Drooling”
columns for Fangoria magazine were collected in Wild Hairs.
“Arēs was a gaming magazine put out roughly 1980–84 by an outfit called Simulations Publications, Inc.,” explains Schow, “then famous
for producing Strategy & Tactics. The ‘simulations’ hook was the inclusion of an actual board game into each issue, whole and entire, including die-cut cardboard tokens and
pieces.
“They solicited a ‘media’ column from me, and after a year or so of fending off my story submissions, editor Michael Moore (no relation to the guy who did Roger &
Me) finally caved and bought a story – the first in the magazine’s history having absolutely nothing to do with that issue’s game or theme. Michael’s replacement, Roger
Moore (no relation to Michael or the guy who once played James Bond) gave me the concept for a future issue – ‘Nightmare Hotel’ – and I gave him ‘Visitation’ in
addition to so much peripheral material that he dubbed the result the ‘Dave Schow Memorial Issue’ of Arēs. (They even incorporated some of the
story’s characters and settings into the game.)
“Thus the story could be considered as a written-to-order piece, yet done with an extremely free hand. It was most recently adapted to graphic story form for Doomed #3 (September,
2006).”
ANGUS BOND CHECKED INTO THE HERMITAGE ALONE, under an assumed name. He had been recognised in consort with too many
fanatics to risk a traveling companion, though having Nicholas along would have been comforting. Nicholas was dead.
“Room 713,” said the deskman, handing over a bronze key. “One of our suites, mister . . . ah, Orion, yes. Heh.” The man’s smile looked like a mortician’s joke
on a corpse, and Angus restrained himself from looking to see if the natty, three-piece clerk’s suit was split up the back. The deskman was no zombie.
Close, Angus thought as he hefted his bags. But no.
The Hermitage was as Gothically overstated as Angus had expected it to be. Nothing he saw really surprised him – the ornamental iron gargoyles guarding the lobby doors, the unsettling,
Bosch-like grotesques hanging in gilt frames beneath low-wattage display lamps, the Marie Antoinette chandeliers, their hexagonal prisms suggesting the imprisonment of lost souls like dragonflies
stuck in amber. None of it moved Angus one way or the other. It was all rather standard haunted house crap; occult chintz to get a rise out of the turistas.
The wine-red carpeting absorbed his footfalls (greedily, he thought). The Hermitage seemed to be the place. At the door to 713, Angus held his key to the feeble light. He knew how to tilt it so
the embossed metal threw down the shadow impression of a death’s-head.
Satisfied, he unlocked the door and moved his baggage inside, in order that he might unpack and await the coming of the monsters.
The knock on the door jolted him to instant wariness. Angus took a bite out of a hard roll and left it behind on the leather-topped table with the sausage and cheese he had brought.
It was the zombie clerk, carrying a tarnished salver bearing a brilliantly white calling card, face down. Angus noted that the clerk seemed to smell like the sachets tucked into wardrobes by
grandmothers to fend off mildew. The stark whiteness of the card cast deathly shadows on the man’s pale features. It seemed to light up the hallway much more efficiently than the guttering
yellow bulbs in the brass sconces.
“A gentleman to see you, sir,” he said, with all the verve of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Angus picked up the card. It bore two words:
IMPERATIVE.
BRAY.
The clerk stood fast. When Angus realised why, he decided to test the water a little.
“Just a minute.” He hurried off to fumble briefly through the depths of his greatcoat. There was the telltale clink of change, and he returned to the door with a silver dollar.
Instead of placing it on the salver, he contrived to drop it, apparently accidentally, so that the clerk caught it, smoothly interrupting its fall with his free hand. He wore dusty butler’s
gloves that were going threadbare at the fingertips. He weighed the coin in the palm of his hand.
The air in the draftless hallway seemed to darken and roil thickly, like cream in hot coffee, for just a second. The clerk’s features darkened, too, making his eyes appear to glow, the way
a lightbulb flares just before it burns out. He sucked a quick gulp of air, as though dizzied by an abrupt stab of nausea. His features fought to remain whole, shifting like lard in a skillet, and
Angus heard a distant, mad wail. It all took less than a second.
The clerk let the tip slide from the palm of his hand to rattle in the bowl of the metal dish. The queasy, death-rictus smile split across his face again, and he said “Thank you.
Sir.”
He left. Angus closed his door and nodded to himself in affirmation.
The stranger was swaddled in fog-dampened tweeds, and crowned with a road-weary homburg that had seen better days a few decades earlier. The initial impression left by the
bearing of the man was that he was very old – not withered, or incapacitated in the way of those who wore years gracelessly, but old in the sense of worldly experience. An old man.
Angus felt a stab of kinship here, deep in the midst of hazardous and alien territory.
“You are Angus Bond?” said the old man, arching a snow-white eyebrow. “I am Turquine Bray.”
“Nicholas Bray’s father?” said Angus, ignoring that no one at the Hermitage knew his real name. The stranger had obviously just arrived.
“Grandfather. Paternal. His father was a null spiritual quantity, neither evil, nor good, like most in the world. He lived out his merchant’s life and desired nothing but material
things. He led a life of tawdriness and despair; but for seeding Nicholas, no residue of his passage, save the grief he caused others, endures. His fate was a well-deserved insignificance. Nicholas
superseded him. Blotted him out. Nicholas once told me you were his closest friend.”
The words bit Angus lightly, and the way Bray pulled off his glove advised that the late Nicholas had not dispensed his friendship or loyalty frivolously. The two men shook hands in the dank
lobby of the Hermitage, the understanding already shared by them in no need of further words concerning Nicholas.
“I cannot say I am pleased to meet you at last, sir, under such circumstances,” said Bray. “But I am relieved. Shall we walk outside? The atmosphere in here could make a
vulture’s eyes water . . . as it is no doubt intended to do.”
The basilisk gaze of the clerk tracked them until they passed through the cataracted glass of the lobby’s imposing double doors. Outside, the slate grey bulk of the Hermitage’s
castellated architecture monitored them dispassionately. It diminished behind them as they walked into the dense southern Kentucky woodland that made up the grounds.
“Gloomy,” said Bray. “All this place needs is a tarn.”
“Notice how the foliage grows together in tangles?” said Angus. “It meshes, with no nutritional support from the earth. The soil is nearly pure alkaline; I checked it. The
stuff grows, and yet is dead. It laces together to keep out the sunlight – see? It’s always overcast here.”
“The appointments of that hotel are certainly Grand Guignolish. Like a Hollywood set for a horror film.”
“Rather like the supposed ‘ambience’ one gains by patronizing a more expensive restaurant,” said Angus. “I suspect you hit it on the head when you mentioned
‘atmosphere.’ That seems to be the purpose of all this theatrical embroidery – supernatural furniture. Atmosphere.”
“Hm.” Bray stepped laboriously over a rotting tree trunk. “Sinister chic.”
The iron-colored mud stole dark footprints from them as they walked, their breath condensing whitely in the late January chill. Frost still rimed the dead vegetation, even in late afternoon.
Angus was glad he had trotted out his muffler. If Poe could have seen this place, he mused, he would have been scared into a writing diet of musical comedy.
“Have you a room?” said Angus, after both men had stood in contemplative silence for a moment.
“I wanted to assure myself of your presence here, first.”
“You followed me, then?” said Angus. “For whatever purpose? You certainly know of Nicholas’ death already.”
“I need you, Mr Bond, to tell me the manner in which he died.”
Angus sighed with resignation. “Mr Bray,” he said in a tone often rehearsed, “do you know just who I am?”
Bray’s steely, chrome-colored eyes shot up to meet with Angus’ watery blue ones, and he smiled a cursory smile. “You are Angus Gwyllm Orion Bond. Until roughly two years ago
your profession was that of occult debunker – exposer of supernatural hoaxes. Absolute bane of fraudulent mediums, scamming astrologers, warlocks who were more conmen than sorcerers, and all
the pop salesmen of lizard’s tooth and owlet’s wing. Until two years ago.”
Bray’s breath plumed out as he spoke. His speech was almost a recitation; Angus was impressed with the research.
“Two years ago, you vanished from the considerable media time and space you commanded. You evaporated from the airwaves, the talk shows. Rumor had you seeking the counsel of spiritualists
and dabbling in magic yourself. Though you wound up debunking yourself, your books and other franchised items sold better than ever. I presume you’ve been supporting your now-private life
with royalties?”
“Something like that.”
“It was at precisely that time that you met up with my grandson. Nicholas was the antithesis of his father – a fantastic intellect and capacity for change. You know how he
died.”
“It ties together. The change in my life. Nick’s death. I’m not sure you’d—”
“I am prepared for the outrageous, Mr Bond. But I’m only interested in the truth. If the truth is merely outrageous, fire away.”
“Nicholas came to my estate one night. He was frantic, pounding on the door, sweating, panicked. He couldn’t tell me why. He had just moved into his new home at the time – do
you recall it?”
“It was next to your estate. The Spilsbury mansion. Where all those actors were slaughtered by the religious cultists in the mid-1960s.”
“Yes,” said Angus. “Of course, by the time Nick moved in, that was ancient history. That place’s allotted fifteen minutes of pop fame had been used up years
before.”
Bray smiled again.
“He was unnerved. When a horse ‘smells’ a tornado, it gets skittish; the closest Nicholas could speculate was that the house ‘felt wrong,’ and skittish was the word
to describe him. I returned with him, to sit and drink by the fireplace. About forty-five minutes later . . .” Angus regretted his dramatic tone. But what occurred had been bloody
dramatic.
“It was the first time I ever witnessed an interface,” he said simply. “Mr Bray, are you aware how supernatural agencies function physically? What enables the paranormal to
coexist with the normal universe – yours and mine?”
“Assuming its reality,” said Bray, “I’d speculate that it would be like an alternate dimension.”
“Good. But not a physical dimension, not like a parallel world just staggered out of sync with our own. The supernatural is a matter of power potentials. It accumulates, in degrees, like a
nuclear pile approaching critical mass. When there’s too much, it blows off steam, venting into the real world, our world, becoming a temporary reality, sometimes only for a second or
two.”
“Accumulates? Like dust?” Bray said incredulously. “How?”
“It happens every time someone knocks on wood. Or crosses their fingers for luck, or says gesundheit. Every time one avoids walking under a ladder or lighting three on a match.
Every time someone makes a joke about ghosts and doesn’t disbelieve what he’s saying one hundred percent; every time somebody uses a superstitious expression as a reflex cliché
– let the sandman come and take you away; don’t let the boogeyman get you. Every time some idiot in a church mentions the Devil. Anytime anyone seriously considers any of
millions of minor-league bad-luck totems. It compounds itself exactly like dust, Mr Bray – each of those things is a conscious, willful act that requires a minute portion of physical
energy in some way. The paranormal energy simultaneously prompted by such action remains unperceived, but it is there, and it stacks up, one imperceptible degree at a time. Just like dust. And when
you get an extra infusion of high potency metaphysical force –”
“Like that Jim Jones thing?” said Bray. “Or the Spilsbury murders?”
“Precisely. You boost the backlog of power that much more. Whenever it reaches its own critical mass, it discharges into our reality. The house that Nicholas had moved into was a
metaphysical stress point; it was still weak, thanks to the Spilsbury thing. A break point that had not completely healed.”
“And during this – this interface, all that accumulated power blew through into my grandson’s living room?” Bray shook his head. “I find that difficult to
believe.”
“Too outrageous?” said Angus, stopping suddenly.
Bray’s expression dissolved to neutral. “Go on.”
“That night, the ‘weakness’ was not only at the juncture point of that house, but elsewhere. Temporally, it was a ‘weak’ time period. Nick was in an agitated fear
state – a ‘weak’, receptive mental condition. But this phenomenon has no regular characteristic save that of overload – you can’t count on it venting itself at any
regular time, or place, or under any regular conditions. It vented somewhere else that night, and because of the weakened conditions we caught a squirt of it – bam! Two or three
seconds; a drop of water from a flood. The flood went somewhere else.”
Now Bray was frankly interested. “What was it like?”
“I got an impression of tremendous motive force,” said Angus. “Blinding black light; a contradictory thing, I know, but there. The air felt pushed out of my lungs by a giant
hand. Everything loose in the living room was blown like summer chaff in a hurricane. Overpowering nausea. Vertigo. Disorientation. I was afraid, but it was a vague unfocused kind of terror. It was
much worse for Nicholas.
“You see, he – like most people – held latent beliefs in supernatural things. I did not. Too many years debunking special effects led to an utter skepticism for things that go
bump in the night – for me. I saw raw, turbulent energy. Nicholas saw whatever he did not totally disbelieve. You might see demons, ghouls, vampire lycan-thropes, the Old Ones all hungering
for your flesh and soul, dragons gobbling you up and farting brimstone, Satan browsing through your body with a hot fondue fork. Or the Christian God, for that matter.”
Bray was taken aback, obviously considering what such an experience would mean for him, given his life’s collection of myth and superstition, of fairytale monsters and real-life guilts.
All of it would manifest to his eyes. All of it, at once. He said “You mean that every superstitious fear I’ve ever had is waiting to eat me, on the other side of a paranormal
power overload?”
“Not as such,” said Angus. “Your belief is what makes it real. True disbelief renders it unreal, back into energy – which is what I saw. But that energy, filtered through
Nick’s mind, made a monster. He said he was trying to hold the doorway to Hell shut, and something horrifying was pulling from the other side. It gave a good yank and the doorway cracked open
for a split instant before the briefness of the squirt closed it for good – but Nick, in that instant, saw what was trying to get him. It scared him white.”
Bray was quiet for a long moment. Then: “He moved in with you shortly afterward?”
“Yes.”
“You could not debunk the supernatural after that?”
“Not and do it with anything like conviction. Investigating the nature of the phenomenon became paramount.”
“Nicholas helped you?”
“He was just the ally I needed. He had a propensity for pure research and a keen mind for deduction. We collected data and he indexed it. Using a computer, we were able to produce
flowcharts. One of the first things we discovered was the presence of ‘pressure points’ in the time flow – specific dates that were receptive to the power burst, as the Spilsbury
house had been. Lammas, Beltane, Candlemas, Hallowe’en. Almost all holidays. There are short bursts, long bursts, multidirectional bursts, weak and strong ones. Sometimes the proximity of a
weak date will magnetize the power, attracting it to a particular time. But most of it concentrates at one physical place. Of course, there might be a dozen such outbursts in a day. Consider Jack
the Ripper’s reign over Spitalfields, or World War II – the phenomenon would damn near become cyclical, feeding on itself.”
“I see,” said Bray. “But what about—”
“Nicholas?” Angus interrupted his meandering walk, hands in pockets. “I think the road is just above us, there. Shall we climb up out of this muck and make our way back? I have
a flask of arrack in my room, to help cut the chill.”
“Thank you,” Bray said as Angus helped him through a web of creepers.
“Nicholas was very good at charts,” said Angus. “He crossmatched all the power bursts – he was the one who called them ‘squirts,’ by the way – to ebb
and flow grids, and to longitudes and latitudes. He calculated in ‘weak spots’ and compensated for them. He synthesized a means whereby he could predict, with reasonable accuracy, the
location and date of a future ‘squirt’. Sometimes he was wrong.”
“But he was right for at least one,” said Bray.
“In Manhattan,” said Angus, “i
three International Horror Guild Awards as well as being a seventeen-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award and a Hugo Award nominee. A former television producer/director and genre movie
publicist and consultant (the first three Hellraiser movies, Night Life, Nightbreed, Split Second, Mind Ripper, Last Gasp etc.), he is the co-editor of Horror: 100 Best Books,
Horror: Another 100 Best Books, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Gaslight & Ghosts, Now We Are Sick, HP. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural,
Secret City: Strange Tales of London, Great Ghost Stories, Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories and the Dark Terrors, Dark Voices and Fantasy Tales series. He has
written Stardust: The Film Companion, Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide, The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie
Guide, The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide and The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide, and compiled The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series, The Mammoth Book of Terror,
The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By
Women, The Mammoth Book of New Terror, The Mammoth Book of Monsters, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, Dark Detectives, Dancing with the Dark, Dark of the Night, White of the
Moon, Keep Out the Night, By Moonlight Only, Don’t Turn Out the Light, HP. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Travellers in Darkness, Summer Chills, Exorcisms and Ecstasies by
Karl Edward Wagner, The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Phantoms and Fiends and Frights and Fancies by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, James Herbert: By Horror Haunted, The Complete
Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard, The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett, The Mark of the
Beast and Other Fantastical Tales by Rudyard Kipling, Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror, Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles and the
Hellraiser Chronicles. He was a Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the 2004 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. You can visit his
web site at www.herebedragons.co.uk/jones
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Pete Duncan, Dorothy Lumley, Randy Broecker, Val and Les Edwards, Pam Brooks, Hugh Lamb, Jo Fletcher, Mandy Slater and Michael Marshall Smith for all
their help and support.
“Introduction: How to Make a Monster” copyright © Stephen Jones 2007.
“Visitation” copyright © David J. Schow 1981. Originally published in Seeing Red. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Down There” copyright © Ramsey Campbell 1981. Originally published in Weird Tales #1. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.
“The Man He Had Been Before” copyright © Scott Edelman 2007.
“Calling All Monsters” copyright © Mercury Press, Inc. 1973. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1973. Copyright assigned to the
author. This version copyright © Dennis Etchison 1982. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Shadmock” copyright © R. Chetwynd-Hayes 1975. Originally published in The Monster Club. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the author’s
agent.
“The Spider Kiss” copyright © Christopher Fowler 2007.
“Café Endless: Spring Rain” copyright © Nancy Holder 1994. Originally published in Love in Vein. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Medusa” copyright © Thomas Ligotti 1994. Originally published in Noctuary. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“In The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise” copyright © Gemma Files 2003. Originally published in The Worm in Every Heart. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Downmarket” copyright © the estate of Sydney J. Bounds 2007.
“The Horror from the Mound” by Robert E. Howard. Originally published in Weird Tales, May 1932.
“Fat Man” copyright © Joseph E. Lake, Jr. 2007.
“The Thin People” copyright Brian Lumley 1987. Originally published in The Third Book of After Midnight Stories: A Kimber Ghost Book. Reprinted by permission of the
author.
“The Hill” copyright © Tanith Lee 2007.
“Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program” copyright © Joe R. Lansdale 1994. First published in Writer of the Purple Rage. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“.220 Swift” copyright © Karl Edward Wagner 1980. Originally published in New Terrors 1. Reprinted by permission of The Karl Edward Wagner Literary Group.
“Our Lady of the Sauropods” copyright © Agberg, Ltd. 1980. Originally published in Omni, September 1980. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Flabby Men” copyright © Basil Copper 1977. Originally published in And Afterward, the Dark. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Silvering” copyright © Robert Holdstock 1992. Originally published in Narrow Houses. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Someone Else’s Problem” copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1996, 2007. Originally published in a different version in Chills, Issue 10, 1996. Reprinted by
permission of the author.
“Rawhead Rex” copyright © Clive Barker 1984. Originally published in Books of Blood Volume III. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Chill Clutch of the Unseen” copyright © Kim Newman 2004. Originally published in Quietly Now: An Anthology in Tribute to Charles L. Grant. Reprinted by permission of
the author.
INTRODUCTION:
How to Make a Monster
SO WHAT, EXACTLY, constitutes a “monster”? That’s the question I had to ask myself before I started compiling this latest “Mammoth” anthology.
Having previously edited such titles as The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein and The Mammoth Book
of Dracula, to name just a few, my publishers initially suggested that I put together an omnibus volume containing some of the best stories in those books.
That’s something that may happen in the future. However, I felt that because those books had already appeared in various editions and numerous printings around the world, it would be more
fun to assemble an entirely new selection of tales, while at the same time introducing readers to some unique and unusual monstrosities.
After careful consideration, I decided not to include stories dealing with demons, ghosts or human monsters (such as psychopaths), as these may – and in some cases, already – have
“Mammoth” titles of their own. After that decision was made, any type of creature was up for grabs – the more obscure or original the better.
That is not to say that we don’t have all the classic monsters represented in this volume. You would expect nothing less than a vampire story from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
best-seller Nancy Holder, but it is the unfamiliar location of “Café Endless: Spring Rain” that makes it stand out in my mind. While the resurrected vampire of Robert E.
Howard’s classic weird tale, “The Horror from the Mound,” also originates from a different milieu than that usually associated with the undead.
Scott Edelman’s “The Man He Had Been Before” is a contemporary view of a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies that has something else to say about growing up, Gemma Files
gives the werewolf myth a fairytale twist in “In The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise”, and Tanith Lee’s “The Hill” is set in and around the creepy home of a missing
scientist.
An academic goes in search of the eponymous mythological creature in Thomas Ligotti’s “The Medusa”, a stone gargoyle is brought to life in “Downmarket” by Sydney J.
Bounds, a Big Footlike creature attacks a town’s children in Jay Lake’s “Fat Man”, and a reclusive islander shares his world with shape-chaging selkies in Robert
Holdstock’s haunting tale “The Silvering”.
The ancient cave-dwellers of Karl Edward Wagner’s novella “.220 Swift” have more than a common heritage in the stories of Arthur Machen and Manly Wade Wellman, which
can’t be said for the nasty little critters found on an InterCity railway train in “Someone Else’s Problem” by Michael Marshall Smith.
The King of the Monsters himself turns up in “Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program” which, being by hisownself Joe R. Lansdale, is about much more than its humorous title would at
first suggest, and the dinosaurs are bio-engineered on the prehistoric planet of Robert Silverberg’s “Our Lady of the Sauropods”. Reincarnated insects are the problem in
“The Spider Kiss” by Christopher Fowler.
Late-night office workers are menaced by hungry horrors from the basement in Ramsey Campbell’s claustrophobic “Down There”, while the monsters of both Brian Lumley’s
“The Thin People” and Basil Copper’s “The Flabby Men” share only a semblance with humanity.
R. Chetwynd-Hayes’ “The Shadmock” and Clive Barker’s “Rawhead Rex” are genuinely new monsters who have both benefited from movie adaptations, and there are
multiple monstrosities on display in David J. Schow’s exuberant “Visitation” and Dennis Etchison’s hallucinatory “Calling All Monsters”.
Which brings us, finally, to Kim Newman’s melancholy coda, “The Chill Clutch of the Unseen”, in which the last monster-fighter and the last classic monster confront each other
with surprising results. It is a story that brings this collection full circle while speaking to all of us who grew up on monsters – especially those iconic cinematic characters from
Universal Studios.
So there you are: twenty-two stories about all kinds of different monsters. Not all are horrific, but that is only to be expected given the scope of this book and the collective talent of the
authors represented.
And if your favourite creature isn’t featured this time, then don’t worry – as we all know, when it comes to monsters there’s usually a sequel . . .
—Stephen Jones
London, England
February, 2007
DAVID J. SCHOW
Visitation
DAVID J. SCHOW IS A SHORT STORY WRITER, novelist, screenwriter (teleplays and features), columnist, essayist, editor, photographer and winner of the World Fantasy and
International Horror Guild Awards (for short fiction and non-fiction, respectively).
His association with New Line Cinema began with horror icons Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy’s Nightmares), Leatherface (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre
III) and the eponymous Critters (Critters 3 and Critters 4). In 1994 he wrote the screenplay for The Crow and has since worked with such directors as Alex Proyas, James
Cameron, E. Elias Merhige, Rupert Wainwright, Mick Garris and William Malone.
For the premiere season of Showtime’s Masters of Horror TV series he adapted his own short story “Pick Me Up” for director Larry Cohen, and for Season Two he scripted
“We All Scream for Ice Cream” (based on a John Farris story) for director Tom Holland.
Among his many books are his fourth novel, Bullets of Rain, and seventh short story collection, Havoc Swims Jaded. The author’s popular “Raving & Drooling”
columns for Fangoria magazine were collected in Wild Hairs.
“Arēs was a gaming magazine put out roughly 1980–84 by an outfit called Simulations Publications, Inc.,” explains Schow, “then famous
for producing Strategy & Tactics. The ‘simulations’ hook was the inclusion of an actual board game into each issue, whole and entire, including die-cut cardboard tokens and
pieces.
“They solicited a ‘media’ column from me, and after a year or so of fending off my story submissions, editor Michael Moore (no relation to the guy who did Roger &
Me) finally caved and bought a story – the first in the magazine’s history having absolutely nothing to do with that issue’s game or theme. Michael’s replacement, Roger
Moore (no relation to Michael or the guy who once played James Bond) gave me the concept for a future issue – ‘Nightmare Hotel’ – and I gave him ‘Visitation’ in
addition to so much peripheral material that he dubbed the result the ‘Dave Schow Memorial Issue’ of Arēs. (They even incorporated some of the
story’s characters and settings into the game.)
“Thus the story could be considered as a written-to-order piece, yet done with an extremely free hand. It was most recently adapted to graphic story form for Doomed #3 (September,
2006).”
ANGUS BOND CHECKED INTO THE HERMITAGE ALONE, under an assumed name. He had been recognised in consort with too many
fanatics to risk a traveling companion, though having Nicholas along would have been comforting. Nicholas was dead.
“Room 713,” said the deskman, handing over a bronze key. “One of our suites, mister . . . ah, Orion, yes. Heh.” The man’s smile looked like a mortician’s joke
on a corpse, and Angus restrained himself from looking to see if the natty, three-piece clerk’s suit was split up the back. The deskman was no zombie.
Close, Angus thought as he hefted his bags. But no.
The Hermitage was as Gothically overstated as Angus had expected it to be. Nothing he saw really surprised him – the ornamental iron gargoyles guarding the lobby doors, the unsettling,
Bosch-like grotesques hanging in gilt frames beneath low-wattage display lamps, the Marie Antoinette chandeliers, their hexagonal prisms suggesting the imprisonment of lost souls like dragonflies
stuck in amber. None of it moved Angus one way or the other. It was all rather standard haunted house crap; occult chintz to get a rise out of the turistas.
The wine-red carpeting absorbed his footfalls (greedily, he thought). The Hermitage seemed to be the place. At the door to 713, Angus held his key to the feeble light. He knew how to tilt it so
the embossed metal threw down the shadow impression of a death’s-head.
Satisfied, he unlocked the door and moved his baggage inside, in order that he might unpack and await the coming of the monsters.
The knock on the door jolted him to instant wariness. Angus took a bite out of a hard roll and left it behind on the leather-topped table with the sausage and cheese he had brought.
It was the zombie clerk, carrying a tarnished salver bearing a brilliantly white calling card, face down. Angus noted that the clerk seemed to smell like the sachets tucked into wardrobes by
grandmothers to fend off mildew. The stark whiteness of the card cast deathly shadows on the man’s pale features. It seemed to light up the hallway much more efficiently than the guttering
yellow bulbs in the brass sconces.
“A gentleman to see you, sir,” he said, with all the verve of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Angus picked up the card. It bore two words:
IMPERATIVE.
BRAY.
The clerk stood fast. When Angus realised why, he decided to test the water a little.
“Just a minute.” He hurried off to fumble briefly through the depths of his greatcoat. There was the telltale clink of change, and he returned to the door with a silver dollar.
Instead of placing it on the salver, he contrived to drop it, apparently accidentally, so that the clerk caught it, smoothly interrupting its fall with his free hand. He wore dusty butler’s
gloves that were going threadbare at the fingertips. He weighed the coin in the palm of his hand.
The air in the draftless hallway seemed to darken and roil thickly, like cream in hot coffee, for just a second. The clerk’s features darkened, too, making his eyes appear to glow, the way
a lightbulb flares just before it burns out. He sucked a quick gulp of air, as though dizzied by an abrupt stab of nausea. His features fought to remain whole, shifting like lard in a skillet, and
Angus heard a distant, mad wail. It all took less than a second.
The clerk let the tip slide from the palm of his hand to rattle in the bowl of the metal dish. The queasy, death-rictus smile split across his face again, and he said “Thank you.
Sir.”
He left. Angus closed his door and nodded to himself in affirmation.
The stranger was swaddled in fog-dampened tweeds, and crowned with a road-weary homburg that had seen better days a few decades earlier. The initial impression left by the
bearing of the man was that he was very old – not withered, or incapacitated in the way of those who wore years gracelessly, but old in the sense of worldly experience. An old man.
Angus felt a stab of kinship here, deep in the midst of hazardous and alien territory.
“You are Angus Bond?” said the old man, arching a snow-white eyebrow. “I am Turquine Bray.”
“Nicholas Bray’s father?” said Angus, ignoring that no one at the Hermitage knew his real name. The stranger had obviously just arrived.
“Grandfather. Paternal. His father was a null spiritual quantity, neither evil, nor good, like most in the world. He lived out his merchant’s life and desired nothing but material
things. He led a life of tawdriness and despair; but for seeding Nicholas, no residue of his passage, save the grief he caused others, endures. His fate was a well-deserved insignificance. Nicholas
superseded him. Blotted him out. Nicholas once told me you were his closest friend.”
The words bit Angus lightly, and the way Bray pulled off his glove advised that the late Nicholas had not dispensed his friendship or loyalty frivolously. The two men shook hands in the dank
lobby of the Hermitage, the understanding already shared by them in no need of further words concerning Nicholas.
“I cannot say I am pleased to meet you at last, sir, under such circumstances,” said Bray. “But I am relieved. Shall we walk outside? The atmosphere in here could make a
vulture’s eyes water . . . as it is no doubt intended to do.”
The basilisk gaze of the clerk tracked them until they passed through the cataracted glass of the lobby’s imposing double doors. Outside, the slate grey bulk of the Hermitage’s
castellated architecture monitored them dispassionately. It diminished behind them as they walked into the dense southern Kentucky woodland that made up the grounds.
“Gloomy,” said Bray. “All this place needs is a tarn.”
“Notice how the foliage grows together in tangles?” said Angus. “It meshes, with no nutritional support from the earth. The soil is nearly pure alkaline; I checked it. The
stuff grows, and yet is dead. It laces together to keep out the sunlight – see? It’s always overcast here.”
“The appointments of that hotel are certainly Grand Guignolish. Like a Hollywood set for a horror film.”
“Rather like the supposed ‘ambience’ one gains by patronizing a more expensive restaurant,” said Angus. “I suspect you hit it on the head when you mentioned
‘atmosphere.’ That seems to be the purpose of all this theatrical embroidery – supernatural furniture. Atmosphere.”
“Hm.” Bray stepped laboriously over a rotting tree trunk. “Sinister chic.”
The iron-colored mud stole dark footprints from them as they walked, their breath condensing whitely in the late January chill. Frost still rimed the dead vegetation, even in late afternoon.
Angus was glad he had trotted out his muffler. If Poe could have seen this place, he mused, he would have been scared into a writing diet of musical comedy.
“Have you a room?” said Angus, after both men had stood in contemplative silence for a moment.
“I wanted to assure myself of your presence here, first.”
“You followed me, then?” said Angus. “For whatever purpose? You certainly know of Nicholas’ death already.”
“I need you, Mr Bond, to tell me the manner in which he died.”
Angus sighed with resignation. “Mr Bray,” he said in a tone often rehearsed, “do you know just who I am?”
Bray’s steely, chrome-colored eyes shot up to meet with Angus’ watery blue ones, and he smiled a cursory smile. “You are Angus Gwyllm Orion Bond. Until roughly two years ago
your profession was that of occult debunker – exposer of supernatural hoaxes. Absolute bane of fraudulent mediums, scamming astrologers, warlocks who were more conmen than sorcerers, and all
the pop salesmen of lizard’s tooth and owlet’s wing. Until two years ago.”
Bray’s breath plumed out as he spoke. His speech was almost a recitation; Angus was impressed with the research.
“Two years ago, you vanished from the considerable media time and space you commanded. You evaporated from the airwaves, the talk shows. Rumor had you seeking the counsel of spiritualists
and dabbling in magic yourself. Though you wound up debunking yourself, your books and other franchised items sold better than ever. I presume you’ve been supporting your now-private life
with royalties?”
“Something like that.”
“It was at precisely that time that you met up with my grandson. Nicholas was the antithesis of his father – a fantastic intellect and capacity for change. You know how he
died.”
“It ties together. The change in my life. Nick’s death. I’m not sure you’d—”
“I am prepared for the outrageous, Mr Bond. But I’m only interested in the truth. If the truth is merely outrageous, fire away.”
“Nicholas came to my estate one night. He was frantic, pounding on the door, sweating, panicked. He couldn’t tell me why. He had just moved into his new home at the time – do
you recall it?”
“It was next to your estate. The Spilsbury mansion. Where all those actors were slaughtered by the religious cultists in the mid-1960s.”
“Yes,” said Angus. “Of course, by the time Nick moved in, that was ancient history. That place’s allotted fifteen minutes of pop fame had been used up years
before.”
Bray smiled again.
“He was unnerved. When a horse ‘smells’ a tornado, it gets skittish; the closest Nicholas could speculate was that the house ‘felt wrong,’ and skittish was the word
to describe him. I returned with him, to sit and drink by the fireplace. About forty-five minutes later . . .” Angus regretted his dramatic tone. But what occurred had been bloody
dramatic.
“It was the first time I ever witnessed an interface,” he said simply. “Mr Bray, are you aware how supernatural agencies function physically? What enables the paranormal to
coexist with the normal universe – yours and mine?”
“Assuming its reality,” said Bray, “I’d speculate that it would be like an alternate dimension.”
“Good. But not a physical dimension, not like a parallel world just staggered out of sync with our own. The supernatural is a matter of power potentials. It accumulates, in degrees, like a
nuclear pile approaching critical mass. When there’s too much, it blows off steam, venting into the real world, our world, becoming a temporary reality, sometimes only for a second or
two.”
“Accumulates? Like dust?” Bray said incredulously. “How?”
“It happens every time someone knocks on wood. Or crosses their fingers for luck, or says gesundheit. Every time one avoids walking under a ladder or lighting three on a match.
Every time someone makes a joke about ghosts and doesn’t disbelieve what he’s saying one hundred percent; every time somebody uses a superstitious expression as a reflex cliché
– let the sandman come and take you away; don’t let the boogeyman get you. Every time some idiot in a church mentions the Devil. Anytime anyone seriously considers any of
millions of minor-league bad-luck totems. It compounds itself exactly like dust, Mr Bray – each of those things is a conscious, willful act that requires a minute portion of physical
energy in some way. The paranormal energy simultaneously prompted by such action remains unperceived, but it is there, and it stacks up, one imperceptible degree at a time. Just like dust. And when
you get an extra infusion of high potency metaphysical force –”
“Like that Jim Jones thing?” said Bray. “Or the Spilsbury murders?”
“Precisely. You boost the backlog of power that much more. Whenever it reaches its own critical mass, it discharges into our reality. The house that Nicholas had moved into was a
metaphysical stress point; it was still weak, thanks to the Spilsbury thing. A break point that had not completely healed.”
“And during this – this interface, all that accumulated power blew through into my grandson’s living room?” Bray shook his head. “I find that difficult to
believe.”
“Too outrageous?” said Angus, stopping suddenly.
Bray’s expression dissolved to neutral. “Go on.”
“That night, the ‘weakness’ was not only at the juncture point of that house, but elsewhere. Temporally, it was a ‘weak’ time period. Nick was in an agitated fear
state – a ‘weak’, receptive mental condition. But this phenomenon has no regular characteristic save that of overload – you can’t count on it venting itself at any
regular time, or place, or under any regular conditions. It vented somewhere else that night, and because of the weakened conditions we caught a squirt of it – bam! Two or three
seconds; a drop of water from a flood. The flood went somewhere else.”
Now Bray was frankly interested. “What was it like?”
“I got an impression of tremendous motive force,” said Angus. “Blinding black light; a contradictory thing, I know, but there. The air felt pushed out of my lungs by a giant
hand. Everything loose in the living room was blown like summer chaff in a hurricane. Overpowering nausea. Vertigo. Disorientation. I was afraid, but it was a vague unfocused kind of terror. It was
much worse for Nicholas.
“You see, he – like most people – held latent beliefs in supernatural things. I did not. Too many years debunking special effects led to an utter skepticism for things that go
bump in the night – for me. I saw raw, turbulent energy. Nicholas saw whatever he did not totally disbelieve. You might see demons, ghouls, vampire lycan-thropes, the Old Ones all hungering
for your flesh and soul, dragons gobbling you up and farting brimstone, Satan browsing through your body with a hot fondue fork. Or the Christian God, for that matter.”
Bray was taken aback, obviously considering what such an experience would mean for him, given his life’s collection of myth and superstition, of fairytale monsters and real-life guilts.
All of it would manifest to his eyes. All of it, at once. He said “You mean that every superstitious fear I’ve ever had is waiting to eat me, on the other side of a paranormal
power overload?”
“Not as such,” said Angus. “Your belief is what makes it real. True disbelief renders it unreal, back into energy – which is what I saw. But that energy, filtered through
Nick’s mind, made a monster. He said he was trying to hold the doorway to Hell shut, and something horrifying was pulling from the other side. It gave a good yank and the doorway cracked open
for a split instant before the briefness of the squirt closed it for good – but Nick, in that instant, saw what was trying to get him. It scared him white.”
Bray was quiet for a long moment. Then: “He moved in with you shortly afterward?”
“Yes.”
“You could not debunk the supernatural after that?”
“Not and do it with anything like conviction. Investigating the nature of the phenomenon became paramount.”
“Nicholas helped you?”
“He was just the ally I needed. He had a propensity for pure research and a keen mind for deduction. We collected data and he indexed it. Using a computer, we were able to produce
flowcharts. One of the first things we discovered was the presence of ‘pressure points’ in the time flow – specific dates that were receptive to the power burst, as the Spilsbury
house had been. Lammas, Beltane, Candlemas, Hallowe’en. Almost all holidays. There are short bursts, long bursts, multidirectional bursts, weak and strong ones. Sometimes the proximity of a
weak date will magnetize the power, attracting it to a particular time. But most of it concentrates at one physical place. Of course, there might be a dozen such outbursts in a day. Consider Jack
the Ripper’s reign over Spitalfields, or World War II – the phenomenon would damn near become cyclical, feeding on itself.”
“I see,” said Bray. “But what about—”
“Nicholas?” Angus interrupted his meandering walk, hands in pockets. “I think the road is just above us, there. Shall we climb up out of this muck and make our way back? I have
a flask of arrack in my room, to help cut the chill.”
“Thank you,” Bray said as Angus helped him through a web of creepers.
“Nicholas was very good at charts,” said Angus. “He crossmatched all the power bursts – he was the one who called them ‘squirts,’ by the way – to ebb
and flow grids, and to longitudes and latitudes. He calculated in ‘weak spots’ and compensated for them. He synthesized a means whereby he could predict, with reasonable accuracy, the
location and date of a future ‘squirt’. Sometimes he was wrong.”
“But he was right for at least one,” said Bray.
“In Manhattan,” said Angus, “i
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