The Mammoth Book of Terror (16 page)

He glanced at his watch surreptitiously; his nerves were raw and it would not do to let the child see his rising agitation. Children missed nothing; she might persuade her mother not to come
down below this evening. That would throw out the whole timetable. He had spent six months screwing himself to this point. He could not go through it again.

The steel tank had been filled that morning. He could not keep its contents there indefinitely. The vapour given off would start to corrode material in the workshop. It had to be this evening.
He would have an hour at least. The housekeeper had gone to the cinema and would not be back until at least ten-thirty.

Martin shifted violently in his chair as a faint screaming came from the boulevard. An open tourer drifted by, its rear seats filled with weirdly attired teenagers. Kathy was kneeling up
excitedly on the window seat now.

“Hallowe’en! Hallowe’en!” she chanted.

Martin swallowed, fighting to control his nerves. The child got up and came toward him. Her eyes seemed to fill the whole immensity of the room and he felt dizzy for a moment. He was becoming
overwrought. He must watch his nerves. Especially in the difficult days to come. There were bound to be police inquiries; there always were in the case of missing persons.

Martin had a plausible story prepared; Charlotte would be visiting relatives, which would give him time enough. Time to drain the contents of the tank; he would not make the mistake of emptying
it into the drains. He would convey the sludge in the original drums to a garbage tip at the edge of the city and empty it out gallon by gallon, making sure there were no identifiable remains. He
had thought it through very carefully.

He frowned at the child, who watched him with those large accusing eyes. Martin was vaguely aware that she had never liked him. He did not care for her if the truth were known; she was too much
like Charlotte in her nature. Vindictive and spiteful; even a child could show these traits in a dozen ways without displaying open hostility. Kathy was a strange, deceitful child. Martin would
have to watch her. Someone with her alertness and gift for being in the wrong place at the wrong time could upset all his plans.

She leaned toward him, her head on one side.

“It will soon be Hallowe’en!” she breathed.

The man was startled by the sudden staccato beat of footsteps at the side of the house. The child had heard them too and glanced quickly at a shadow passing the window.

“You’d better hurry! Mummy is going down to the workroom!”

Martin went down the steps hurriedly, his heart thumping irregularly in his chest, a dull rage against the child in his heart. He had sent her to bed quickly. The plan was not
working. It might even have to be postponed. Firstly, Kathy had seen her mother on her way to the outside steps. Perhaps Charlotte had gone out without him knowing.

And she was almost an hour early. Everything was falling apart and his nerves were ragged as he got to the shadowy corridor at the foot of the stairway. He had left the lights off. For his own
purposes, of course. But one had to be careful here; the steps branched off to the old wood-store at the right.

There was a sheer drop to concrete here which was dangerous. He had been meaning to have it railed off for years but had never gotten around to it. It would have been the ideal solution to his
problems but Charlotte would never come this way to the cellar; she always went around to the side of the house and down the shallow flight of steps to the outside door there.

He hoped she would not go through into the main laboratory; then he remembered he had kept it locked. He suddenly felt giddy again. He leaned against the wall for a moment. He recalled
Kathy’s eyes. Their strange, violet gaze seemed to haunt him. He pulled himself together, descending the remaining steps carefully. He was himself once more by the time he found his way to
the room where he worked on his experimental theories.

The door was ajar and the small radio he kept there was playing dance music loudly. That was one of the things which irritated him about Charlotte. Even in small matters her habits made his
nerves raw. But things could not have been more propitious this evening. Apart from the problem of Kathy. He looked in quickly. Charlotte was sitting at the desk with her back to him, going through
some papers he kept there. He was committed now.

He had the iron bar from the bench. In two steps he was at her side. Before she could turn the heavy metal was descending. He caught her at the nape of the neck, as he had planned. She was
already dead before he began dragging the body out to the laboratory. It was the work of a few moments to carefully immerse her, still fully clothed, in the tank, making sure none of its lethal
contents slopped.

He did not stop but fled from the place, locking the door behind him. He did not know how he came there but presently he awoke to find himself at his desk in the living room. He was perspiring
heavily, his pulse racing, his face white and curiously elongated in the mirror. He glanced at his watch, saw with a shock that only some two minutes had passed since he went to the cellar.

He held the dial to his ear. It had not stopped. Then he heard the brittle clatter of footsteps passing along the concrete path at the side of the house. His heart froze. Had he slept then and
dreamed of the horrible event in the workroom below? Had he to go through it all again? He got to his feet, conscious of Kathy’s strange eyes boring into his own.

No, he had not been mistaken. His wife’s footsteps were real enough; the clock in the corner went on ticking gently. It showed the same time as his watch. He almost expected to see his
daughter’s ethereal-looking form huddled in the window seat but there was nothing there. He remembered then she had gone to bed.

He crossed the room quickly, made his way to the door which led to the cellars, his brain confused and bewildered. Charlotte was dead; there was no doubt about that. There were cobwebs on the
front of his suit where he had descended the steps some time ago. But it could not have taken less than two minutes. The thing was impossible.

He must have been mistaken about the footsteps. Perhaps some child on a Hallowe’en prank had passed on the sidewalk. That must have been it. He was halfway down the steps now, the light
from the hall door above sending yellow beams down the wooden stairway. He had forgotten the light switch in his agitation.

“Martin! Martin. Where are you?”

His heart turned to stone in his chest. There was no mistaking Charlotte’s voice. His mind must be going. He knew her body was already dissolving within the tank. The blow alone would have
killed her instantly.

The voice went on calling his name imperatively. He went down hurriedly, his nerves aflame as though the acid were eroding them too. He had to know whether he had been dreaming or something
unexplainable had happened in the cellar. He ran down quickly, careless now, a great roaring in his ears.

Too late he realised he had mistaken his direction on the landing in the dark. His feet encountered empty space. He had time only for a mumbled cry as he descended into the darkness where the
concrete floor awaited.

“It’s Hallowe’en tonight,” Kathy said.

She sat on the floor in front of the window seat, busy with her preparations for the evening, intent on the contents of a big cardboard box. On the boulevard outside the dusk was falling almost
imperceptibly on the facades of the houses opposite; the automobiles cutting red trails with their rear-lights in the gathering darkness.

Charlotte sat at her husband’s desk, uneasily conscious of her daughter’s strange violet eyes regarding her from beneath the mass of blonde hair.

“What did Daddy say?” she asked impatiently for perhaps the tenth time that day.

Martin’s inexplicable disappearance was only one of several things that were disturbing her thoughts. She had been through the wardrobe and none of his clothes or his suitcases were
missing. When he was called away on urgent business he usually left a note or telephoned her from the office.

“Perhaps Daddy and Auntie Janet have run off together,” the child said maliciously.

Charlotte was shocked at the vehemence and the understanding in her daughter’s tones. It was evident that she knew a great deal more of what went on around her than her parents had ever
guessed.

But she gave a bright, false smile that matched her daughter’s own.

“What an extraordinary thing to say! What makes you think that, dear.”

The child went on fiddling with something in the big cardboard box by her side. Around were spread the strange paraphernalia of the Hallowe’en ritual. White sheets that looked at though
they had been taken from her narrow bed; some stumps of red wax candles; an old lantern from the garage that had been tied with string to the end of a broken-off tree-branch.

Charlotte looked on absently, her thoughts elsewhere. Her lips curved bitterly. It would solve a good many of her problems if Martin and Janet had run off somewhere. She had forgotten how many
weary years the problems involved in his treachery had flourished like a rank weed in their marriage.

She again caught a faint thread in the child’s prattle, prompted by a band of youngsters passing the window, lanterns already lit. The blurred chant of “Trick or treat!” died
off round the next corner, chopped into segments by the rising wind that gusted at the windows. The fire flickered, sending weird shadows over the furniture until she got up to switch on the
ceiling lights.

All Hallows’ Eve. It was a strange custom, she reflected, her calm gaze fixed on her daughter’s deliberate and methodical actions. A small rose of fire came to life in the corner by
the window seat, made a warm glow in which Kathy’s absorbed face was silhouetted against the darkening window panes. The child had lit one of the red candles in its metal holder.

“Be careful,” Charlotte warned.

Her daughter turned innocent eyes upon her and once again the mother was struck by the strange, almost baleful glance that had the power to draw even an adult up short.

There was an ethereal quality about Kathy sometimes that was a little unnerving. Charlotte’s interest aroused, she walked over from the light switch.

“What have you got there?”

Kathy smiled one of her sweetest smiles.

“A skull. I’m going to put a candle in it.”

Charlotte gave the girl an incredulous look.

“A skull! Where did you get it? Is it made of candy?”

Kathy ignored her questions. She was again absorbed in the cardboard box, her fingers rustling mysteriously among folded twists of paper. She held up the candle, dripping the burning tallow
below the edge of the box.

Charlotte was held halfway across the room, her attention focused on the child’s intent activity. Kathy lifted the object now. Charlotte gave a gasp. The thing was certainly – she
was going to say lifelike – but that was absurd under the circumstances. It was a small, beautiful, highly polished skull; delicately made and apparently that of a woman.

Charlotte waited breathlessly as the girl fixed the candle, manipulating it delicately through one of the eye-sockets.

“Don’t you think it looks like Auntie Janet?” the child said.

Charlotte was astonished; she supposed the exquisitely modelled artefact was made of spun sugar, probably purchased at some establishment which specialised in such macabre aspects of
Hallowe’en. Her throat tightened and her breath came fast and shallow.

There was an amazing resemblance to Janet now that the child came to mention it. Janet had a small, delicate head, almost like some ancient Egyptian queen. There was one tiny blemish which would
have revealed the absurdity of the suggestion, but Charlotte remained where she was; pinned there by some sudden, overmastering emotion.

Kathy had lit the candle again now, the skull a subtle shell of growing radiance through which the eye-sockets and the teeth gleamed eerily.

“It gives a lovely light!” the child piped excitedly.

Charlotte fought down her nervous qualms. She recalled Edna St Vincent Millay’s lines. It did give a lovely light.

Kathy had twisted the skull, so that the light gleaming from the jagged orifices threw uneven shadows on the wall. She cradled her soft cheek against the white bone, posing for her
mother’s approval.

Charlotte stared at the candle in the skull, its small halo of orange flame making little fretwork patterns on the girl’s cheek, shimmering on the golden mass of hair.

“It’s Hallowe’en tonight!” Kathy said.

RAMSEY CAMPBELL HAS BEEN
named Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horrors Writers
Association.

His latest supernatural novel,
The Overnight
, is now available from PS Publishing, Tor Books has reprinted his landmark collection
Alone With the Horrors
, and a new edition of his
Arkham House collection
The Height of the Scream
was recently reissued by Babbage Press. An original ghost story, “The Decorations”, appeared in a limited edition from Sutton Hoo
Press of Winona for Christmas 2004, and the author is currently at work on a new novel,
Secret Stories.