The Mammoth Book of Zombies

Book 342: Mammoth Books

by Stephen Jones

Genres: Horror; Science Fiction

Synopsis

The zombie - a soulless corpse raised from the grave to do its master's bidding - may have had its factual basis in the voodoo ceremonies of the West Indies, but it is in fiction, movies, video games and comics that the walking dead have flourished. What makes a zombie?

This Twentieth Anniversary Edition of one of the first and most influential zombie anthologies answers that question with 26 tales of rot and resurrection from classic authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James and J. Sheridan Le Fanu, along with modern masters of the macabre Clive Barker, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Hugh B. Cave, Joe R. Lansdale, Brian Lumley, Graham Masterton, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, Lisa Tuttle, Karl Edward Wagner and many more.

From Caribbean rituals to ancient magic, mesmerism to modern science, these terrifying tales depict a wide range of nefarious methods and questionable reasons for bringing the dead back to life again.

Release date: April 18, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

 

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 twenty-one 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, H. P. 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 Coraline: A Visual Companion, Stardust: The Visual 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 record-breaking 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, The Very Best of Best New Horror, 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, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Travellers in Darkness, Summer Chills, Brighton Shock!, the Zombie Apocalypse! trilogy, Visitants: Stories of Fallen Angels & Heavenly Hosts, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead and A Book of Horrors, along with books by or about Clive Barker, Leigh Brackett, David Case, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Basil Copper, Charles L. Grant, James Herbert, Robert E. Howard, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Karl Edward Wagner. A Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the 2004 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, he has been a guest lecturer at UCLA in California and London’s Kingston University and St Mary’s University College. You can visit his website at www.stephenjoneseditor.com.

Special thanks to Sue and Lou Irmo for their generosity, and to Jo Fletcher for helping me meet the deadlines (twice). Thanks also to Dorothy Lumley, Duncan Proudfoot, Max Burnell and Carlos Castro for all their help with this twentieth-anniversary edition.

“Introduction: The Dead that Walk” © Stephen Jones 1993, 2013.

“Sex, Death and Starshine” © Clive Barker 1984. Originally published in Books of Blood Volume 1. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Rising Generation” © Ramsey Campbell 1975. Originally published in World of Horror, no. 4, January 1975. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Song of the Slaves” by Manly Wade Wellman © Weird Tales 1940. Originally published in Weird Tales, March 1940. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

“The Ghouls” © R. Chetwynd-Hayes 1975. Originally published in The Night Ghouls. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s estate.

“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe. Originally published in American Review: A Whig Journal, December 1845, and Broadway Journal, 20 December 1845.

“Sticks” © Stuart David Schiff 1974. Originally published in Whispers, March 1974. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s estate.

“Quietly Now” © Charles L. Grant 1981. Originally published in The Arbor House Necropolis. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s estate.

“The Grey House” © Basil Copper 1966. Originally published in Not After Nightfall. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“A Warning to the Curious” by M. R. James. Originally published in London Mercury, Vol.XII, no. 70, August 1925. The text has been slightly re-punctuated for this new edition.

“The Crucian Pit” © Nicholas Royle 1993.

“The Disapproval of Jeremy Cleave” by Brian Lumley © Terminus Publishing Company, Inc. 1989. Originally published in Weird Tales, no. 295, Winter 1989/90. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.

“Herbert West – Reanimator” by H. P. Lovecraft. Originally published as “Grewsome Tales” in Home Brew, nos 1–6, February–July 1922.

“Treading the Maze” © The Mercury Press, Inc. 1981, © 1983 by Lisa Tuttle. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1981. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Out of Corruption” © David A. Riley 1993.

“The Taking of Mr Bill” © Graham Masterton 1993.

“Schalken the Painter” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 1839. Originally published in Dublin University Magazine, and revised for Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, 1851.

“Clinically Dead” © David A. Sutton 1993.

“They’re Coming for You” © Les Daniels 1986. Originally published in The Cutting Edge. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s estate.

“Mission to Margal” © Hugh B. Cave 1993.

“Later” © Michael Marshall Smith 1993.

“Marbh Bheo” © Peter Tremayne 1993.

“The Blood Kiss” © Dennis Etchison 1987. Originally published in The Blood Kiss. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Night After Night of the Living Dead” © Christopher Fowler 1993.

“The Dead Don’t Die!” © Robert Bloch 1951. Originally published in Fantastic Adventures, July 1951. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s estate.

“Patricia’s Profession” © Kim Newman 1985. Originally published in Interzone, no. 14, Winter 1985/1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks” © Joe R. Lansdale 1989. Originally published in Book of the Dead. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Homo Coprophagus Somnambulus” © Jo Fletcher 2013.

The Dead That Walk

ZOMBIES . . . OR ZOMBIS . . . The Walking Dead . . . soulless automatons risen from the grave to do the bidding of their masters. They have their factual basis in the voodoo ceremonies of Haiti and other Caribbean islands, and accounts of the real-life phenomenon range from William Seabrook’s 1929 study The Magic Island to Wade Davis’s more recent bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985).

However, despite blending many of horror fiction’s major thematic archetypes – witchcraft, a mindless monster, the living dead – the zombie has rarely made a successful transition to the novel form (in the same way as, say, the vampire has). Although there are, of course, a number of exceptions (Breer, the appalling Razor-Eater in Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game, and Hugh, the reanimated lover of Gordon Honeycombe’s Neither the Sea Nor the Sand come to mind), the true home of the zombie has always been the movies.

Ever since Bela Lugosi’s sinister “Murder” Legendre ordered the revived corpses of his plantation workers to shamble across the screen in White Zombie (1932), it has been the cinema which has most influenced our perception of the walking dead. From Bob Hope’s comedic capers in The Ghost Breakers (1940) and producer Val Lewton’s atmospheric reworking of Jane Eyre, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), through to George Romero’s original dystopian trilogy (Night of the Living Dead [1969], Dawn of the Dead [1978] and Day of the Dead [1985]) and the numerous European rip-offs, the zombie finally reached a level of identification in the horror pantheon equal to that of its generic companions: the vampire, the Frankenstein monster, the werewolf and the mummy. Yet, despite these and other memorable titles, the walking (dancing?) dead probably reached a commercial pinnacle in 1983 with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

Zombies continued to shamble across the screen and occasionally appear in print until, in 2003, something unexpected happened. TV writer Max Brooks (the son of comedian Mel) published a satirical “how to” volume entitled A Zombie Survival Guide, which sold extremely well. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War appeared three years later from the same author. A serious, multi-viewpoint novel depicting a worldwide zombie pandemic, the book quickly became a publishing phenomenon.

Pretty soon, zombies began replacing vampires as the horror genre’s new “hot” property! But it was with the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), Seth Grahame-Smith’s “mash-up” novel with Jane Austin’s literary classic, that the floodgates opened and the reanimated dead quickly became a staple of novels, young adult fiction, paranormal romance and increasingly silly “collaborations” with long-dead authors.

An area in which the zombie has always thrived is the short story. In 1989, editors John Skipp and Craig Spector commemorated the twentieth anniversary of George Romero’s seminal film with Book of the Dead, an anthology of new zombie stories nominally inspired by Night of the Living Dead. The editors followed it three years later with Still Dead: Book of the Dead II, and the zombie anthology briefly flourished with such titles as Byron Preiss and John Betancourt’s The Ultimate Zombie (1993) and my own The Mammoth Book of Zombies in the same year.

More recently, since the boom in all things reanimated, there has been a glut of zombie anthologies, from John Skipp’s Mondo Zombie and John Joseph Adams’s bestselling The Living Dead and The Living Dead II, through Christopher Golden’s The New Dead, Otto Penzler’s Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! and Paula Guran’s Extreme Zombies, to my own The Dead That Walk and Zombie Apocalypse! trilogy.

Apparently you can no longer keep a good zombie down, and these days the walking dead can be found in video games, comics, movies, TV shows and stage productions. There are zombie apps for your phone, zombies are used to advertise everyday products, and you can now even take part in “zombie walks” and urban chase games in which participants assume the roles of zombie-attack survivors trying to reach a final sanctuary before they are “infected”.

Although modern audiences are familiar with the brain-eating, gut-munching variety of living corpses, this present anthology brings together twenty-six stories featuring various ways of resurrecting the dead, ranging from traditional Haitian rituals to scientific breakthroughs. Within these pages you’ll discover such classic tales of the macabre as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, M. R. James’s “A Warning to the Curious” and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Schalken the Painter”, plus memorable stories from the pulp magazines by Manly Wade Wellman (“The Song of the Slaves”), H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch (with their respective novellas “Herbert West – Reanimator” and “The Dead Don’t Die!”, both the basis for movie adaptations).

Also collected together here are stories from such established masters as Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Karl Edward Wagner, Dennis Etchison, Lisa Tuttle, Les Daniels, Charles L. Grant, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Basil Copper, Kim Newman and Joe R. Lansdale, while Graham Masterton, Hugh B. Cave, Christopher Fowler, Michael Marshall Smith, Peter Tremayne, Nicholas Royle, David A. Sutton and David A. Riley contribute original work. Jo Fletcher’s poem, which is unique to this edition, forms a poignant coda to these eclectic tales.

As with my other anthologies, the main criterion for choosing many of these stories is because they are particular favourites of mine. However, they also present the discerning reader with a gamut of very different kinds of zombies, ranging from the traditional to the outré.

So listen to the sound of ragged nails scraping against hard wood, while cold fingers claw up through the damp earth and mist-shrouded graveyards once more give up their long-silent tenants. As Bela Lugosi gleefully explained to one hapless victim back in 1932, “For you, my friend, they are the Angels of Death . . .”

Stephen Jones

London, England

CLIVE BARKER WAS born in Liverpool, England, where he went to all the same schools as John Lennon before attending Liverpool University. For more than two decades he has lived in California.

The author of around thirty books, including the six Books of Blood collections, The Damnation Game, Weaveworld, Cabal, The Great and Secret Show, Imajica, The Thief of Always, Everville, Sacrament, Galilee, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story, Mister B. Gone, The Adventures of Mr Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus, and the New York Times bestselling Arabat series, he is one of the leading authors of contemporary horror and fantasy, as well as being an acclaimed artist, playwright, film producer and director.

As a film-maker, he created the hugely influential Hellraiser franchise in 1987 and went on to direct Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions. Barker also executive produced the Oscar-winning Gods and Monsters, while the Candyman series, along with Underworld, Rawhead Rex, Quicksilver Highway, Saint Sinner, The Midnight Meat Train, Book of Blood, Dread and the video games Undying, Demonik and Jericho, are all based on his concepts.

“Sex, Death and Starshine” was originally published in Barker’s ground-breaking Books of Blood series, and comes out of the author’s early career in the theatre. “Zombies are the ideal late-20th century monsters,” according to Barker. “A zombie is the one thing you can’t deal with. It survives anything. Frankenstein and Dracula could be sent down in many ways. Zombies, though, fall outside all this. You can’t argue with them. They just keep coming at you.

“Zombies are about dealing with death. They represent a specific face of death. And the fact that we can even talk like this about a horror movie creation puts down the theory that the genre can’t be taken seriously.”

I’m not sure that the story which follows takes the genre very seriously, but prepare to meet some of the sexiest and most urbane walking dead you’re ever likely to find in modern horror fiction . . .

DIANE RAN HER scented fingers through the two days’ growth of ginger stubble on Terry’s chin.

“I love it,” she said, “even the grey bits.”

She loved everything about him, or at least that’s what she claimed.

When he kissed her: I love it.

When he undressed her: I love it.

When he slid his briefs off: I love it, I love it, I love it.

She’d go down on him with such unalloyed enthusiasm, all he could do was watch the top of her ash-blonde head bobbing at his groin, and hope to God nobody chanced to walk into the dressing-room. She was a married woman, after all, even if she was an actress. He had a wife himself, somewhere. This tête-à-tête would make some juicy copy for one of the local rags, and here he was trying to garner a reputation as a serious-minded director; no gimmicks, no gossip; just art.

Then, even thoughts of ambition would be dissolved on her tongue, as she played havoc with his nerve-endings. She wasn’t much of an actress, but by God she was quite a performer. Faultless technique; immaculate timing: she knew either by instinct or by rehearsal just when to pick up the rhythm and bring the whole scene to a satisfying conclusion.

When she’d finished milking the moment dry, he almost wanted to applaud.

The whole cast of Calloway’s production of Twelfth Night knew about the affair, of course. There’d be the occasional snide comment passed if actress and director were both late for rehearsals, or if she arrived looking full, and he flushed. He tried to persuade her to control the cat-with-the-cream look that crept over her face, but she just wasn’t that good a deceiver. Which was rich, considering her profession.

But then La Duvall, as Edward insisted on calling her, didn’t need to be a great player, she was famous. So what if she spoke Shakespeare like it was Hiawatha, dum de dum de dum de dum? So what if her grasp of psychology was dubious, her logic faulty, her projection inadequate? So what if she had as much sense of poetry as she did propriety? She was a star, and that meant business.

There was no taking that away from her: her name was money. The Elysium Theatre publicity announced her claim to fame in three inch Roman Bold, black on yellow:

“Diane Duvall: star of The Love Child.”

The Love Child. Possibly the worst soap opera to cavort across the screens of the nation in the history of that genre, two solid hours a week of under-written characters and mind-numbing dialogue, as a result of which it consistently drew high ratings, and its performers became, almost overnight, brilliant stars in television’s rhinestone heaven. Glittering there, the brightest of the bright, was Diane Duvall.

Maybe she wasn’t born to play the classics, but Jesus was she good box-office. And in this day and age, with theatres deserted, all that mattered was the number of punters on seats.

Calloway had resigned himself to the fact that this would not be the definitive Twelfth Night, but if the production were successful, and with Diane in the role of Viola it had every chance, it might open a few doors to him in the West End. Besides, working with the ever-adoring, ever-demanding Miss D. Duvall had its compensations.

Calloway pulled up his serge trousers, and looked down at her. She was giving him that winsome smile of hers, the one she used in the letter scene. Expression Five in the Duvall repertoire, somewhere between Virginal and Motherly.

He acknowledged the smile with one from his own stock, a small, loving look that passed for genuine at a yard’s distance. Then he consulted his watch.

“God, we’re late, sweetie.”

She licked her lips. Did she really like the taste that much?

“I’d better fix my hair,” she said, standing up and glancing in the long mirror beside the shower.

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

“Couldn’t be better,” he replied. He kissed her lightly on the nose and left her to her teasing.

On his way to the stage he ducked into the Men’s Dressing Room to adjust his clothing, and dowse his burning cheeks with cold water. Sex always induced a giveaway mottling on his face and upper chest. Bending to splash water on himself Calloway studied his features critically in the mirror over the sink. After thirty-six years of holding the signs of age at bay, he was beginning to look the part. He was no more the juvenile lead. There was an indisputable puffiness beneath his eyes, which was nothing to do with sleeplessness and there were lines too, on his forehead, and round his mouth. He didn’t look the wunderkind any longer; the secrets of his debauchery were written all over his face. The excess of sex, booze and ambition, the frustration of aspiring and just missing the main chance so many times. What would he look like now, he thought bitterly, if he’d been content to be some unenterprising nobody working in a minor rep, guaranteed a house of ten aficionados every night, and devoted to Brecht? Face as smooth as a baby’s bottom probably, most of the people in the socially-committed theatre had that look. Vacant and content, poor cows.

“Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice,” he told himself. He took one last look at the haggard cherub in the mirror, reflecting that, crow’s feet or not, women still couldn’t resist him, and went out to face the trials and tribulations of Act III.

On stage there was a heated debate in progress. The carpenter, his name was Jake, had built two hedges for Olivia’s garden. They still had to be covered with leaves, but they looked quite impressive, running the depth of the stage to the cyclorama, where the rest of the garden would be painted. None of this symbolic stuff. A garden was a garden: green grass, blue sky. That’s the way the audience liked it north of Birmingham, and Terry had some sympathy for their plain tastes.

“Terry, love.”

Eddie Cunningham had him by the hand and elbow, escorting him into the fray.

“What’s the problem?”

“Terry, love, you cannot be serious about these fucking (it came trippingly off the tongue: fuck-ing) hedges. Tell Uncle Eddie you’re not serious before I throw a fit.” Eddie pointed towards the offending hedges. “I mean look at them.” As he spoke a thin plume of spittle fizzed in the air.

“What’s the problem?” Terry asked again.

“Problem? Blocking, love, blocking. Think about it. We’ve rehearsed this whole scene with me bobbing up and down like a March hare. Up right, down left – but it doesn’t work if I haven’t got access round the back. And look! These fucking things are flush with the backdrop.”

“Well they have to be, for the illusion, Eddie.”

“I can’t get round though, Terry. You must see my point.”

He appealed to the few others on stage: the carpenters, two technicians, three actors.

“I mean – there’s just not enough time.”

“Eddie, we’ll re-block.”

“Oh.”

That took the wind out of his sails.

“No?”

“Um.”

“I mean it seems easiest, doesn’t it?”

“Yes . . . I just liked . . .”

“I know.”

“Well. Needs must. What about the croquet?”

“We’ll cut that too.”

“All that business with the croquet mallets? The bawdy stuff?”

“It’ll all have to go. I’m sorry, I haven’t thought this through. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Eddie flounced.

“That’s all you ever do, love, think straight . . .”

Titters. Terry let it pass. Eddie had a genuine point of criticism; he had failed to consider the problems of the hedge-design.

“I’m sorry about the business; but there’s no way we can accommodate it.”

“You won’t be cutting anybody else’s business, I’m sure,” said Eddie. He threw a glance over Calloway’s shoulder at Diane, then headed for the dressing-room. Exit enraged actor, stage left. Calloway made no attempt to stop him. It would have worsened the situation considerably to spoil his departure. He just breathed out a quiet “oh Jesus”, and dragged a wide hand down over his face. That was the fatal flaw of this profession: actors.

“Will somebody fetch him back?” he said.

Silence.

“Where’s Ryan?”

The Stage Manager showed his bespectacled face over the offending hedge.

“Sorry?”

“Ryan, love – will you please take a cup of coffee to Eddie and coax him back into the bosom of the family?”

Ryan pulled a face that said: you offended him, you fetch him. But Calloway had passed this particular buck before: he was a past master at it. He just stared at Ryan, defying him to contradict his request, until the other man dropped his eyes and nodded his acquiescence.

“Sure,” he said glumly.

“Good man.”

Ryan cast him an accusatory look, and disappeared in pursuit of Ed Cunningham.

“No show without Belch,” said Calloway, trying to warm up the atmosphere a little. Someone grunted: and the small half-circle of onlookers began to disperse. Show over.

“Okay, okay,” said Calloway, picking up the pieces, “let’s get to work. We’ll run through from the top of the scene. Diane, are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Shall we run it?”

He turned away from Olivia’s garden and the waiting actors just to gather his thoughts. Only the stage working lights were on, the auditorium was in darkness. It yawned at him insolently, row upon row of empty seats, defying him to entertain them. Ah, the loneliness of the long-distance director. There were days in this business when the thought of life as an accountant seemed a consummation devoutly to be wished, to paraphrase the Prince of Denmark.

In the gods of the Elysium, somebody moved. Calloway looked up from his doubts and stared through the swarthy air. Had Eddie taken residence on the very back row? No, surely not. For one thing, he hadn’t had time to get all the way up there.

“Eddie?” Calloway ventured, capping his hand over his eyes. “Is that you?”

He could just make the figure out. No, not a figure, figures. Two people, edging their way along the back row, making for the exit. Whoever it was, it certainly wasn’t Eddie.

“That isn’t Eddie, is it?” said Calloway, turning back into the fake garden.

“No,” someone replied.

It was Eddie speaking. He was back on stage, leaning on one of the hedges, cigarette clamped between his lips.

“Eddie . . .”

“It’s all right,” said the actor good-humouredly, “don’t grovel; I can’t bear to see a pretty man grovel.”

“We’ll see if we can slot the mallet-business in somewhere,” said Calloway, eager to be conciliatory.

Eddie shook his head, and flicked ash off his cigarette.

“No need.”

“Really—”

“It didn’t work too well anyhow.”

The Grand Circle door creaked a little as it closed behind the visitors. Calloway didn’t bother to look round. They’d gone, whoever they were.

“There was somebody in the house this afternoon.”

Hammersmith looked up from the sheets of figures he was poring over.

“Oh?” his eyebrows were eruptions of wire-thick hair that seemed ambitious beyond their calling. They were raised high above Hammersmith’s tiny eyes in patently fake surprise. He plucked at his bottom lip with nicotine stained fingers.

“Any idea who it was?”

He plucked on, still staring up at the younger man; undisguised contempt on his face.

“Is it a problem?”

“I just want to know who was in looking at the rehearsal that’s all. I think I’ve got a perfect right to ask.”

“Perfect right,” said Hammersmith, nodding slightly and making his lips into a pale bow.

“There was talk of somebody coming up from the National,” said Calloway. “My agents were arranging something. I just don’t want somebody coming in without me knowing about it. Especially if they’re important.”

Hammersmith was already studying the figures again. His voice was tired.

“Terry: if there’s someone in from the South Bank to look your opus over, I promise you, you’ll be the first to be informed. All right?”

The inflexion was so bloody rude. So run-along-little-boy. Calloway itched to hit him.

“I don’t want people watching rehearsals unless I authorize it, Hammersmith. Hear me? And I want to know who was in today.”

The Manager sighed heavily.

“Believe me, Terry,” he said, “I don’t know myself. I suggest you ask Tallulah – she was front of house this afternoon. If somebody came in, presumably she saw them.”

He sighed again.

“All right . . . Terry?”

Calloway left it at that. He had his suspicions about Hammersmith. The man couldn’t give a shit about theatre, he never failed to make that absolutely plain; he affected an exhausted tone whenever anything but money was mentioned, as though matters of aesthetics were beneath his notice. And he had a word, loudly administered, for actors and directors alike: butterflies. One day wonders. In Hammersmith’s world only money was forever, and the Elysium Theatre stood on prime land, land a wise man could turn a tidy profit on if he played his cards right.

Calloway was certain he’d sell off the place tomorrow if he could manoeuvre it. A satellite town like Redditch, growing as Birmingham grew, didn’t need theatres, it needed offices, hypermarkets, warehouses: it needed, to quote the councillors, growth through investment in new industry. It also needed prime sites to build that industry upon. No mere art could survive such pragmatism.

Tallulah was not in the box, nor in the foyer, nor in the Green Room.

Irritated both by Hammersmith’s incivility and Tallulah’s disappearance, Calloway went back into the auditorium to pick up his jacket and go to get drunk. The rehearsal was over and the actors long gone. The bare hedges looked somewhat small from the back row of the stalls. Maybe they needed an extra few inches. He made a note on the back of a show bill he found in his pocket: Hedges, bigger?

A footfall made him look up, and a figure had appeared on stage. A smooth entrance, up-stage centre, where the hedges converged. Calloway didn’t recognize the man.

“Mr Calloway? Mr Terence Calloway?”

“Yes?”

The visitor walked down stage to where, in an earlier age, the footlights would have been, and stood looking out into the auditorium.

“My apologies for interrupting your train of thought.”

“No problem.”

“I wanted a word.”

“With me?”

“If you would.”

Calloway wandered down to the front of the stalls, appraising the stranger.

He was dressed in shades of grey from head to foot. A grey worsted suit, grey shoes, a grey cravat. Piss-elegant, was Calloway’s first, uncharitable summation. But the man cut an impressive figure nevertheless. His face beneath the shadow of his brim was difficult to discern.

“Allow me to introduce myself.”

The voice was persuasive, cultured. Ideal for advertisement voice-overs: soap commercials, maybe. After Hammersmith’s bad manners, the voice came as a breath of good breeding.

“My name is Lichfield. Not that I expect that means much to a man of your tender years.”

Tender years: well, well. Maybe there was still something of the wunderkind in his face.

“Are you a critic?” Calloway enquired.