The Mammoth Book of Terror (39 page)

Mother gave me a wonderful smile and motioned me to a deep fat armchair, while Father stood in the doorway and called out:

“Cathy, come down, dear. Your friend has arrived.”

I did not hear her descend the stairs, neither did it seem possible she had time to do so, for almost at once my moonlight girl was following her father into the room, her face enhanced by a
faint blush. She said: “Hello, how is your ankle?” and promptly sat down in a chair opposite mine. Without hesitation I replied: “Much better thank you. It was so kind of you to
help me,” and actually seemed to remember having my swollen ankle bound with a large silk handkerchief. But from then on I began to experience great concern about what I had done and said
since entering the house, and what I might do in the immediate future. For example: I could remember Father stretching out his hand, but I could not remember if I had shaken it or not. For some
reason this seemed to be very important. Maybe because Jenkins’ instruction kept crashing across my brain. “
Make no contact . . . whatsoever.
”

Was sitting on a chair making contact? I gently pounded the arm of my chair with a clenched fist. It seemed solid enough, and that which the senses record must be real. Three pairs of eyes
watched me; Mother kindly, father expectantly, Cathy lovingly. Father spoke:

“We are so glad you came. It is very lonely sometimes.”

Mother expelled a deep sigh. “We could not live without Cathy, but she needs new material. I think that’s what I mean.”

Cathy’s lilting voice made me start.

“What is the use of a book unless it has printed pages? Would you like to stay with us forever?”

Truth wore a shroud as she hammered on the door of my brain, but I refused to admit her; face the grotesque dream. That lilting voice went on and on.

“Fiction can only flourish in the garden of fact. Even my genius cannot snatch fantasy out of the air. And there must be romance. A beautiful young man who comes walking down the lane.
He’s lost I think and is limping. Or maybe he’s escaped from a prison in which he was unjustly confined, or jilted by a girl in that cruel outside world. But here – in this refuge
from ugly reality – he will find his true love. They will make unsullied love in the melancholy purple twilight and send beautifully composed dialogue drifting up to the dark dome of heaven.
They will never grow old, not even when the sun reaches out and consumes its children.”

Mother and Father had become as two wax statues that sat perfectly still with kindly smiles etched on their flawless faces. But Cathy moved. She stood up and stretched out slender arms. I did
not surrender immediately for were there not three words blazoned across my brain in letters of fire? do not touch. But why? Could it be that long ago the original Cathy used to torment those
gentlemen callers;
flirt, tantalize, promise with her eyes, then draw back in pretended or real fear when they stepped over the line which separates reality from make believe?
“
Don’t touch me. Don’t ruin the dream.
”

Sex creates. Frustrated sex still creates.

Fear made the hair of the back of my neck bristle; anger, unreasoning rage drove me forward – straight into those outstretched arms.

That lovely face was transformed into a mask of naked terror and my God how she screamed. For a brief moment I clasped a slender body in my arms, gazed into wide, wide open eyes and tried to
smother that unending scream with my mouth. Then suddenly it seemed as if a mighty cold wind came roaring through the woods; it blew away the cottage walls, turned the furniture into scattered
rocks; and sent me hurtling down into a bottomless pit.

The old house basked in the afternoon sun, its upper windows gleaming slabs of light, that to the fanciful might have resembled the eyes of a mythological monster newly awakened from a
century-long sleep. When I emerged from the woods and began to cross the drive, my shadow elongated and went streaking out before me, as though it could not wait for me to enter the house. It was
then that I realized what had been so dreadfully wrong with Cathy when she crossed the drive in moonlight.

She had not cast a shadow.

Even from the hall I could hear the harsh sobbing, punctuated by an occasional wailing cry. I walked slowly up the stairs, then entered the room where the remains of Caroline Fortescue, Lady
Bramfield lay upon the great four-poster bed. Jenkins was on his knees beside it, mourning his dead.

I said quietly: “When did she really die, Jenkins?”

He looked at me reproachfully with tear filled eyes.

“When you broke the dream, sir. When you touched. I warned you, sir. Do not touch, I said. Do not touch. You killed a living legend.”

I went over to the bed and looked down at the thing attired in a rusty black gown. Where the eyes had been there were now two gaping holes. A wave of anger made me shout:

“You lie, Jenkins. Lie to me – lie to yourself. She died long ago.”

He shook his head violently and pounded the bed with clenched fists. “No . . . no . . . you’re wrong. She was more alive than you or I, or anyone who walks the earth today. She
created her own world . . .”

I grabbed his coat collar and pulled him to his feet. I placed my mouth within a few inches of his ear and whispered the awful truth. “Listen to me . . . don’t pull away, shut your
eyes or plug your ears. That lovely creature that roamed this house at night, ran laughing along the passages, lived with make believe parents in a woodland cottage – that wasn’t the
real ghost. Was it, Jenkins? Eh? That was how Caroline Fortescue saw herself-as maybe she once was. No, the real ghost was somewhere else. Where was that, Jenkins? Tell me.”

When he struggled and cried out I released him and he fell across the bed. Suddenly I was very tired and wanted to be far away from this house of death. I spoke quietly.

“Her dream world was so real she could not leave it, not even after death. So . . . so . . . she haunted her own corpse. Some personality fragment was able to delay decomposition, simulate
the need for nourishment and dominate you, the necessary attendant. I don’t know how much longer this pretence could have gone on. Until you died possibly, for only you could maintain the
great illusion. But before I go, satisfy my curiosity. How long has she been dead?”

Jenkins got up and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “Thirty years, I think. Her decline was gradual, but I have not detected a heart beat for at least twenty years. But I never
really admitted that, sir. I couldn’t.”

I left Bramfield Manor and made my way towards the main gates without so much as a backward glance. I did not pay a visit to the inquisitive post mistress, but caught the first train to town. I
told Frazer the truth: Caroline Fortescue had been dead for years and there was no story worth writing.

A week later Bramfield Manor burnt to the ground. Whether this was the result of an accident, or Jenkins had decided to turn the house into one vast pyre, including himself as a funerary
sacrifice, is a matter for interesting conjecture. Certainly two charred skeletons were laid side by side in Bramfield churchyard.

I sometimes wonder if Jenkins would have considered this arrangement disrespectful.

DAVID J. SCHOW
’
S COLLECTION
of essays from
Fangoria
magazine,
Wild Hairs
, won the 2001 International Horror
Guild Award for Best Non-fiction.

The author’s more recent books include a new collection of living dead stories entitled
Zombie Jam
, the short novel
Rock Breaks Scissors Cut
, and a new mainstream suspense
novel,
Bullets of Rain.
His earlier collections
Seeing Red
and
Crypt Orchids
have been reissued in new editions, and he edited
Elvisland
, a landmark collection of John
Farris’s short fiction for Babbage Press.

Schow lives in the Hollywood hills and continues to collect anything and everything to do with The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

As the author observes: “Zombie fiction has become a subgenre. People know zombies, now, the way everybody knew what a vampire was, twenty years ago. Zombie fiction, like it or not, for
better or worse, has arrived . . . and this probably isn’t the last you’ll see of it.”

Here is my last memory:

Not drunk, and in compute possession of my senes, I perform the ritual. That’s what it feels like – a ritual. Thousands before me have executed similar moves under comparable
circumstances, in an equivalent state of mind. First consideration: hardware. I had chosen a classic, the military-issue Colt. 45 semi-auto, a golden oldie with a venerated history. For those of
you who don’t know much about firearms, this pistol, originally made for the US Army, is designated the Ml 911Al. The standard clip is seven-plus-one, though larger magazines are obtainable.
“Seven-plus-one” means seven cartridges in the clip with an extra round already chambered. If you wish to find out more about the damage index of various bullet types or need a lot of
tech stuff, that information is abundantly available; I know enough to make the device work. Second consideration: The note. The inevitable note. The who, what, why and where of suicide. I had a
single glass of white Bordeaux while composing it. Whoever discovered my reeking corpse, exsanguinated, cheesy clumps of hair and brain stuck to the walls and hardening on the carpet, would have to
reconcile the ghastly display with my carefully-considered farewell memo. The stench of evacuated bowels and exposed organs, the nakedness of decay. Humidity and maggots. What farewell prose could
out-vote that sad horror? I checked my gun a dozen times, finished my wine, and completed my note, blaming no one. Then I stuck the muzzle in my mouth and blew off most of the back of my head with
a soft-nosed hollow point, for maximum reliability.

Then I woke up.

“Mr Maxwell? Ah. Glad to see you’re back with us. My name is – it’s okay, Mr Maxwell, you can open your eyes. It might sting a little bit. But it won’t harm
you.”

I tried to track the voice and realized I was strapped into a sort of dentist’s chair, reclined, with a lot of leads trailing to beeping machines. But this was not a hospital. I could
taste blood in the back of my throat.

“You’re probably a little bit thirsty, too,” said the voice. Sitting on a stool overseeing my position was a young woman in a smock. She had brilliant grey eyes, strawberry
blonde hair, and an abundance of freckles. Her face was compressed and her haircut was not complimentary – she was more of a sidekick type, short and a bit stocky, cute instead of attractive.
Eyeglasses on a chain. A bar-coded ID tag dangled from her pen pocket. “My name is Bonnie and I’m your caseworker. This is your preparation for what’s called a Phase Two
debriefing; you might have heard of it, or read about it.”

She tipped a pleated paper cup of water to my lips. My wrists were restricted. The water tasted too cold and invasive. I felt weary.

“I know you feel like you want to go to sleep Mr Maxwell—” she consulted her clipboard. “Orson. But you can’t become unconscious as long as you’re hooked up,
and we need to review a few details before we move on.”

“I don’t understand.” My voice felt arid and abraded. I felt around inside my mouth with my tongue. No hole. I fancied I could still taste the lubricant and steel of the gun
barrel. The egress where it had spit a bullet into my head was patched with something smooth and artificial.

“That’s why we’re here,” said Bonnie. “Standard orientation for wake-ups. That’s what we call revised suicides – wake-ups.”

“Revised?”

“Yes. All wake-ups are selected on the basis of their stats and records. I’m not here to judge, just to prepare you for your reinsertion into the work force. You’ll have a
meeting with an actual counselor later.”

“Excuse me, Miss . . . Bonnie, I haven’t heard about this, or read about it, and I don’t know what you’re talking about. I do know that I feel terrible; I feel worse than
I’ve ever felt in my life, and I don’t want to answer any questions.”

She smiled and attempted to soften her manner by about a third of one degree. “Please try to understand. I know this is confusing and you probably are in some bona fide physical pain. But
by killing yourself – committing suicide – you have forfeited any protest. You
have to
co-operate. It’ll seem difficult, for example, when you walk for the first time. But
if you don’t want to walk, they’ll
force you
to walk, anyway. It helps to think of yourself as a newborn, not whatever person you used to be. You do not retain rights, as you
understood them.”