Read The Spectral Book of Horror Stories Online
Authors: Mark Morris (Editor)
Tags: #Horror, #suspense, #Fiction / Horror, #anthology
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories
Table of Contents
CARRY WITHIN SOME SMALL SLIVER OF ME
SOMETHING SINISTER IN SUNLIGHT
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories
- A SPECTRAL PRESS PUBLICATION
All stories and biographical notes are Copyright © 2014 their respective authors
All other text and Spectral Press logo is Copyright © 2011 - 2104 Spectral Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owners.
The rights of all authors contained herein to be identified as the Author of their work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First edition, September 2014
Editor: Mark Morris
Publisher: Simon Marshall-Jones
Layout by John Oakey Design
Cover art by Vincent Chong © 2014
Ebook created by Graeme Reynolds of Horrific Tales Publishing
Spectral Press, 13 Montgomery Crescent, Bolbeck Park, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK14 6HA
Website:
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Email:
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THE SPECTRAL BOOK OF
HORROR STORIES
Edited by
MARK MORRIS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My heartfelt thanks to Simon Marshall-Jones at Spectral Press for having the vision, enthusiasm and sheer guts to give this project the green light. Thanks to all the writers who responded with enthusiasm to the idea of a new annual non-themed horror anthology, especially those who backed the project further by sending me stories. Thanks too to all those editors who have gone before me, and in particular to those whose anthologies have inspired me over the years: Herbert Van Thal, Mary Danby, Robert Aickman, Rosemary Timperley, Christine Bernard, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, August Derleth, Peter Haining, Richard Davis, John Burke, Ramsey Campbell, Karl Edward Wagner, Charles L. Grant, Kirby McCauley, Dennis Etchison, Peter Crowther, Stephen Jones, David Sutton and Ellen Datlow. A special mention must go to Johnny Mains, who for the past decade or so has tirelessly campaigned to keep
The Pan Book of Horror Stories
in the public eye, and who is now the proud editor of the (hopefully long-running)
Best British Horror
at Salt Publishing.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the memory of Joel Lane (1963-2013) and Lucius Shepard (1943-2014). Both consummate storytellers, both on my original list of potential contributors to this volume, and both very much missed by their families, friends and fans.
INTRODUCTION
Mark Morris
I’m pretty sure that the first horror anthology I read—possibly even the first one I saw—was
The 7th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories
, edited by Mary Danby, in late 1972. I was nine years old, and I was back in England for the first time since 1968, having spent the previous three and a half years living in Hong Kong with my parents and younger sister.
The Fontana anthology belonged to my cousin, and I remember being as fascinated by it, and as drawn to it, as I had been by copies of the magazine
Famous Monsters of Filmland
and by the Gold Key title
Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery
, both of which occasionally appeared on the magazine rack in the mini supermarket we frequented in Kowloon Tong. Now and again I had even been allowed to buy one or other of these magazines with my pocket money, and to this day can still recall the dry-mouthed dread I experienced as I slowly and carefully turned each page of
Famous Monsters
, fearful of encountering an image so terrifying that it might worm its way irretrievably into my mind and haunt my nightmares.
I don’t know what it was that drew me to the dark and scary stuff as a kid, but drawn I certainly was. As soon as my eyes alighted on
The 7th Fontana Book of Horror Stories
I knew I had to have it—or at least, I had to borrow it from my cousin, and read it.
As I write this introduction, I have a copy of the very edition of the book on my desk, and—as with
The Eleventh Pan Book of Horror Stories
, which frightened me so much that it gave me my first genuinely sleepless night on New Year’s Eve 1975—the cover still provokes in me a delicious
frisson
of shivery fear. With hindsight the bubbly and cartoonish ‘Horror Stories’ logo is somewhat less than sinister, and yet I love it because I associate it with (almost certainly erroneous) memories of being curled up in bed on many a cold and rainy winter’s night, reading by torchlight until well past the point at which I should have gone to sleep, and frightening myself silly with stories of cannibals and living mannequins and man-eating plants.
Below the ‘Horror Stories’ logo the photographic cover image is washed with a sickly yellowish-green hue, and depicts a rat skulking between glass bottles on a laboratory bench, its beady black eyes fixed on the reader. It’s not a particularly inspiring or well-designed cover, to be honest, and yet, for me, nostalgia lends it a power and an elegance that far transcends the sum of its rather lacklustre parts.
The same is true of many of the anthologies I owned—and indeed, still own. Back in the 1960s and ‘70s the cover art for mass market genre anthologies was often shabby, the paper the books were printed on cheap, the print itself eye-strainingly small—and yet in the four years or so between 1972-1976 I devoured dozens and dozens of such anthologies, and developed a love for them which endures to this day. During that time I worked my way voraciously through a great many of the Pan and Fontana Books of Horror and Ghost Stories, most of the Armada Books of Ghost, Monster and SF Stories, and through numerous stand-alone anthologies, many of whose titles are now lost in the mists of time, which I borrowed on a regular basis from the local library. By the time I read my first ‘proper’ horror novel, which (if you don’t include
Jaws
by Peter Benchley) was probably James Herbert’s
The Fog
round about 1976, I had read hundreds, perhaps thousands, of short horror and ghost stories, many of them by established masters of the form such as M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Robert Aickman, Roald Dahl, Elizabeth Bowen, Ambrose Bierce, Joan Aiken and L.P. Hartley.
I have often maintained that short fiction is the lifeblood of the horror genre, and as such it will probably come as no surprise to learn that I have harboured an ambition to edit my own non-themed anthology of horror and/or ghost stories ever since my career began over twenty-five years ago. Now, with
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories
, I have finally fulfilled my ambition, and my hope is that there is enough of an interest among readers for
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories
to become not only an annual fixture in the horror calendar, but to continue to prosper and grow in the years ahead.
My ambition, in fact, is for
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories
to become a watchword for genre excellence. I hope that each year’s new volume will provide a showcase for the very best short fiction that this wonderful genre has to offer.
With this in mind, I was determined to make as much of an impact with this first volume as possible, and so contacted all the writers I could think of working within the field whose short fiction I particularly admired. I explained my vision for the book and invited each of them to submit a story for consideration. I had no idea what sort of feedback I would get, and so was extremely heartened not only by the enthusiastic response I received, but by the amount and sheer excellence of the stories that immediately began to fill my inbox. Such was the quality of the stories, in fact, that I found myself quickly faced with the onerous task of having to turn down good stories by established writers—even, in some instances, having to say no to personal friends. In the end, though, it was worth it, because I’m delighted not only with the line-up for volume one, but with the quality and range of fiction that the contributors have produced.
You’ll find supernatural and non-supernatural stories within these pages; you’ll find stories of madness, of dread, of warped longing and twisted love. You’ll find humour juxtaposed with gore; you’ll find forbidden rites and ancient forces, and moments of surreal terror. Most of all, you’ll find that the horror genre has very wide parameters—and very sharp teeth.
The journey begins. Tread carefully.
– 15th July 2014
ON THE TOUR
Ramsey Campbell
As soon as Stu looked into Yesterday’s he saw Jaz sitting near the bar. “They’ve remembered me,” Stu told him. “They’ve got me on the bus.”
The smallest man at Jaz’s table took a mouthful of bitter and wiped his wry lips with the back of his fist. “Which one’s that, pops?”
“The tour bus. The Beatles tour that goes past my house.”
“Are we supposed to know who you are?”
“He used to be with Scotty and the Scousers,” Jaz said. “He was the drummer.”
“Ever meet the Beatles?”
“We were on with them,” Stu declared. “Ringo bought us a drink, only John pinched mine and made out it was a joke. Scotty said he should buy me another but John wanted to settle it outside, and then Paul said it wasn’t worth it and George got me one instead. We always thought John knew the others wouldn’t let him fight and that’s why he was safe to start it.”
“That’s your claim to fame, is it? That’s what they’ll be saying about you on the tour.”
Jaz made to intervene until Stu said “I don’t know what they’re saying yet. I’m off home to hear.”
“Sounds like you’re taking after your friend Lennon, not getting us a round.”
“I never said he was a friend. He didn’t like us being bigger on the bill than they were.”
The man was opening his mouth when Jaz said “Stu’s right. I’ve seen his poster.”
Just the same, as Stu made for the street he heard the man laugh. The fellow seemed determined to stay unimpressed, and Stu called to Jaz “You know about the band. You tell him.”
Early partygoers were already heading for the clubs. All the girls were dressed for a hot night, though it was April. On Church Street, where a police van was the solitary vehicle exempted from the ban on traffic, a musician was picking coins out of his guitar case. Everybody waiting at the bus station appeared to be on their own, and the line Stu joined was as silent as a photograph. At least the homeward bus arrived before the wind through the glass shelter could start his knees clapping together. The downtown hotels gave way to tall Victorian houses that had fissured into apartments, and then the buildings set about shrinking almost as small as his house.
The bus left him at the end of the road next to his. The house where he’d grown up was just his now, and looked as dilapidated as he felt when he let himself. The tree outside the gap-toothed wooden fence smeared the dusty brownish bricks with twilit shadow, which sprawled on the dead leaves strewn across the untended token garden and had settled in both front rooms. Like its neighbours, the house was boxed in by the pair that flanked it, from one of which came the mumble of a television. Stu twisted the key in the rusty lock and barely paused to slam the door on the way to tramping up the variously resonant stairs to his bedroom. He shoved the sash of the window high and dragged the sheet over the corner of the mattress before pulling the quilt up to the pillow as a preamble to throwing clothes off the chair onto the bed. He brought the chair hobbling to the window and propped his elbows on the sill.
At first he wasn’t sure that he was hearing the tour guide, especially since he couldn’t see the bus. Was the blurred voice coming from the television next door? When the small white single-decker coach appeared at the end of the road Stu succeeded in making out some words, and rubbed his bruised stomach as he sat down from craning over the sill. One of the quirkiest Liverpool bands of the sixties… Their only album was a collector’s item… People used to say the drummer was the star. Once Ringo had said he was the better musician, and here was his house.