Fortnight of Fear Read online

  FORTNIGHT OF FEAR

  Graham Masterton

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Hurry Monster

  Changeling

  Laird of Dunain

  Ever, Ever After

  Pig’s Dinner

  Heart of Stone

  The Woman in the Wall

  Making Belinda

  Eric the Pie

  Rococo

  5a Bedford Row

  Saint Joan

  The Sixth Man

  Beijing Craps

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  The horror writer is cursed with one terrible curse. No matter where he travels, no matter how blissful the scenery or how congenial the accommodation, he soon begins to think of darker possibilities.

  The sun may be shining, the sea may be sparkling. But in the horror writer’s mind, a chilly shadow is already passing across the landscape.

  Imagine your two weeks’ vacation … fourteen nights of relaxation and fun. But wherever you are, some terrible doubt is always lurking.

  Look at this picturesque Yorkshire village, with its mellow stone walls and its cobbled steps. Who would think that a dark, rushing, carnivorous creature could be waiting around the next corner?

  Look at this warm, curving bay on the island of Jersey. Who would guess that something nameless could rise from the very sand beneath your feet?

  Look at this peaceful farm in Connecticut, or this handsome Scottish estate. Look at this tasteful apartment on Central Park South, in New York, or this brash and glittering casino in Las Vegas.

  Who would guess that here, night after night, for fourteen nights, there are heart-clutching terrors?

  Come with me now on a two week holiday, with each night spent in a different locale. Each of these stories is set in a different location – a place that I have lived in or visited. Each story is a study in how my imagination slowly distorted each visit into something nightmarish.

  From California to Northern England, from Nevada to the South Pole, this is a travel-guide to the uncivilized terrors of the civilized world.

  You are invited to join me for a fortnight’s travelling – a fortnight without sleep.

  You need no luggage. You need no passport. The runway is deserted, and the dock has long since fallen into disrepair.

  You will need only the courage to take my hand, and let me lead you into the darkness. To paraphrase Chairman Mao, the journey into two weeks of total terror begins with a single step.

  Graham Masterton.

  Hurry Monster

  Great Ayton, Yorkshire, England

  Beneath the northern ridges of the Yorkshire Moors nestles the village of Great Ayton (pronounced, locally, “Yatton”), one of the prettiest in Cleveland. A shallow river flows through the middle of the village, spanned by stone and wooden bridges; and it is this river, where my three sons played and fished, that gave me the dark inspiration for Hurry Monster.

  Captain James Cook went to school in Great Ayton. The cottage where he once lived was shipped stone by stone to Australia in 1934, to be replaced by an obelisk chiseled out of the rocks close to Point Hicks, the first point in Australia to be sighted by Cook on his voyage of discovery (1768–71).

  Hurry Monster was originally commissioned by Bill Munster, as an illustrated chapbook for his Footsteps Press, based at Roundtop, New York. Since then, it has appeared in many different forms – most notably in comic format, illustrated by the incomparable Dan Day.

  HURRY MONSTER

  Under a sky the color of corroded copper Kevin came running down the path beside the river, his school satchel slap-slap-slapping against the back of his gaberdine raincoat. Spots of rain were beginning to rustle threateningly into the grass, and to draw hundreds of compass-circles on the surface of the river.

  But Kevin wasn’t running because of the rain. He was running because of the Hurry Monster, which was hurrying close behind him. He thought that he could hear the echoing castanets of its claws, as it rushed shapeless and dark through the alleyways and down the narrow steps, and along the muddy track beside the river.

  Just behind him, just out of sight – just behind the pie-shop, just behind the bushes.

  Hurrying, with nothing on its mind but blood.

  Kevin was already gasping for breath, but he knew what would happen if he slowed down. The Hurry Monster would snatch hold of him and bite into his body, and worry him ferociously from side to side, the same way that Orlando worried the mice she caught. Screaming – then pumping blood; then tearing muscle and stringy guts; then crunch-crunch-crunch and ggllommp! – swallowed.

  He didn’t dare to look back. He had left the playground more than five minutes late because he had been playing a last-minute game of cigarette-cards with Herbert Thorpe. The Hurry Monster had gained all that time already, and if he hesitated even for a second to look back –

  He passed the sweetie-shop on the corner. He hesitated for one agonizing second, because he still had tuppence in his pocket from this morning, and he could see through the window that the sweetie-shop lady had opened up a fresh box of flying saucers.

  But there wasn’t time. He couldn’t risk it. The Hurry Monster might catch up with him, and be lying in wait for him when he came out of the sweetie-shop. Then – gnarrgghh! – and his blood would be spattered all over the York-stone pavement.

  He rushed across the main road. A coal-lorry honked its horn at him, and the driver said something he couldn’t hear. It was ten past four already! Ten past four! His cheeks burned with the panic of being so late.

  His mother had warned him about the Hurry Monster, last October, after Robert Browne had disappeared. Her face had been white and serious. That calm, almost featureless face, with black eyes that always reminded him of fresh glittering raisins. Boys who dawdle on their way home from school get eaten by the Hurry Monster. So hurry, when you’re coming home! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

  The first day after she had told him about the Hurry Monster, Kevin hadn’t been sure whether he ought to believe it or not. After all, he had never seen the Hurry Monster, even when he had taken off his shoes and socks and fished under the footbridge for frogspawn, for almost an hour.

  But on the second day, after he had crossed the main road, and walked past the gates to Ayton Hall, he was sure that he had heard footsteps very close behind him. Scratchy footsteps, like a large dog walking on stone; and breathing.

  He had stopped; and he had turned around, but there had been nobody there. No dogs, no Hurry Monster. Only the shadows of the elderly oaks; only the whispering of the afternoon wind and the hollow-jar rushing of the river.

  He had shivered, and then he had run on; across the narrow wooden footbridge that took him past the pub and down the lane and home.

  But every day since then, on his way home from school, he had gradually become convinced that the Hurry Monster was close behind him. He had heard it, just out of sight. It had taken its shape from shadows and stray reflections. It had taken its breathing from the wind and the trees and the sound of the traffic. He hadn’t dared to mention it to his schoolfriends, because it wasn’t true in the same way that aniseed balls were true, or school dinners were true. But it wanted him. He knew that it wanted him. It was waiting every afternoon behind the high stone wall opposite Captain Cook’s old schoolroom, and when he ran for home it came after him.

  Every day he ran home faster. He ran like the wind. The Hurry Monster was after him! And he knew that it must be real because his mother had never lied to him ever; she had always told him that lying was the gravest sin of all. And didn’t she always turn and smile with such warm relief when he came bursting out of breath through the kitchen door, into that safe aroma of past
ry and lardy-cakes?

  Didn’t she always hug him tight, as if he had just managed to escape from the most vicious of demons?

  The Hurry Monster even began to lurk on the edges of his nightmares. He dreamed he was running home from school and it caught up with him, and savaged him to death. The tearing of sinews; the crackling of pulled-apart fat.

  It was after him today, and he was five minutes late.

  School sandals pattering along the river-bank; torn-off grass catching in the metal buckles. He was sure that he could hear the Hurry Monster’s claws, ripping into the earth as it ran. He was sure that he could feel its urgent breath. Hah! hah! hah! hah!

  Once he reached the footbridge, he would be safe. The Hurry Monster was too heavy to cross the footbridge.

  He was only five or six yards away from the footbridge when he thought he heard somebody shout. Kevin! the smallest of cries, as small as a man shouting into an empty tin mug. He stopped, panicking, hesitated, turned. The day was so dark that he could scarcely see.

  Kevin! the voice cried out.

  There was something in the shadows by Ayton Hall. Something black; something that flickered. He ran on, and reached the footbridge, and rushed halfway across it before he dared to stop.

  Then he turned around again, a small boy in a school cap and short trousers, on a wooden footbridge, with the shallow river sliding beneath his feet. Only a few yards away, vans and lorries passed on their way to Guisborough or Harrogate. North Yorkshire, on a thundery night in March.

  The Hurry Monster had gone. Vanished, as it always did, when he reached the footbridge. He had outrun it again; and he was safe.

  He was just about to continue on his way home when he saw something floating towards him in the river. It was dark, and heavy, and it left behind a trail of arrow-shaped ripples. He climbed up on the wooden handrail to stare at it. He didn’t like the river that ran through Great Ayton, even though he often fished in it. All he had ever caught was frogspawn and peculiar fish that looked as if they had arms and legs.

  But this was different, this thing that was floating towards him this afternoon. This was sinister and dark and very big. He stepped down from the handrail, and unconsciously retreated from it.

  It slid slowly beneath the footbridge. As it passed through the shadow of the bridge itself, Kevin could see for the first time what it was. He was chilled with terror, but all he could do was utter the tiniest of whimpers.

  It was the body of a man, floating face up, staring. Behind him he stained the water with a deep crimson fog; and Kevin could see that the front of his suit had been torn open, and that bloody coils were lazily floating in the man’s lap.

  Worst of all, though, the man was still alive. Only just. But enough to look up at Kevin and give him the wannest of smiles. Then the current had carried him away, and he was gone, over the weir, through the deeper pools where Kevin usually swam, over the second weir, and round the bend in the river between the pollards.

  Kevin was still standing on the footbridge when his mother appeared in her apron, her hands dusty-white with flour.

  “Kevin?”

  He stared at her as if he didn’t know who she was. “There was a man. He was floating in the river and he smiled at me.”

  He sat on the high wooden stool in the police-station for nearly an hour. He had described the man, and even drawn him, in crayon. At half-past six his mother took him home. They walked hand-in-hand beside the river, and across the footbridge. Round the bend in the river, two policemen in shirt-sleeves were still poking at the weeds with long sticks, watched by a crowd of Kevin’s schoolfriends and some old men who had come across from the pub with their pints of beer.

  After tea, one of the old men came and knocked at their kitchen door. “Thought you’d like to know that they found ’im, poor bugger. Two miles down the river, caught in the weeds. They can’t work out who ’e is, though. No wallet, nothin’. And nobody’s ever seen ’im before. But ’e was fair ripped to pieces, no mistake. Stummick ripped out. Terrible. That tea still fresh?”

  Kevin sat at the kitchen table. He felt very cold, very compressed, as if the shock of seeing the dying man had somehow made him smaller than he already was.

  Why had the man smiled at him? What can a drowning man with his stomach all ripped out – what can he possibly find to smile about?

  He went into the sweetie-shop for twenty Rothman’s and he was pleasantly surprised how little it had changed. The glass-fronted counter with the flying saucers and the aniseed-balls and the licorice-whips was still there; much lower down and much tinier than he remembered; but still the same.

  There was a different woman behind the counter – red-haired, this one, with freckles all over her arms; and there was a television on the back shelf, switched to racing from Redcar. But the smell was the same; and even though the main road was ten times busier, they hadn’t widened it; and the river still ran as dark and reflective as it always had when he was a boy.

  “I used to live here, years ago,” he told the red-haired woman. “Just across the river, Number Three Brownlow Lane.”

  The red-haired woman smiled. “I’m from Barnsley, myself.”

  He left the sweetie-shop and the doorbell jangled behind him. Outside he smelled rain in the air. He crossed the road and stood beside the river, and lit a cigarette. He wondered if those peculiar fish that looked as if they had arms and legs still bred beneath the weir.

  Thirty years, first time back to Great Ayton in thirty years. His mother had met the captain of a merchant-ship soon after he had left home, and she had died in Hull of all places. He had stood beside the captain while his mother had disappeared into the crematorium furnace to the strains of The Old Rugged Cross. The captain had smelled strongly of Vick chest-rub. They had shaken hands, and then Kevin had taken the first train back to London, and his job at Pearl Assurance, and his single flat in Islington, just round the corner from the Angel.

  This week, he had been taking care of an insurance claim in Middlesborough. He hated Middlesborough, a gray dreary industrial wasteland, butcher’s shops with nothing but belly-pork and working-men’s clubs with off-key rock’n’roll groups and pints of bitter in straight-sided glasses. He had driven out to Great Ayton for the afternoon just to smell the moors and feel the creamy warmness of the Yorkshire village stone.

  He finished his cigarette and flicked it into the river. He looked at his watch. He had a final meeting with the assessors at five, he’d better be getting back. Besides, it was beginning to rain quite hard now, whispering in the grass, drawing compass-circles on the surface of the river.

  He was about to cross the road when he saw a small boy running along the pavement, really running. The boy was wearing a school cap and flannel shorts, and a school satchel joggled up and down on his back. Look at that poor little chap, he thought to himself. Running home at full steam just like I used to.

  The boy passed the sweetie-shop, hesitated for a second, then darted across the main road. A coal-lorry blew its horn at him, and the driver shouted out of the window, “Silly young bugger! You could have been killed!”

  It was then – to Kevin’s horror – that he saw the reason why the boy was running so fast. Out of a shadowy alleyway not far behind him rushed a huge dark creature that billowed like a conjuror’s cape. It flew along the pavement with a soft clashing noise, crossed the road, and began to pursue the boy along the bank of the river.

  Kevin froze. Then he started running, too. He was out of condition, he had been smoking too much, but he sprinted as hard and as fast as he could. The creature had almost caught up with the boy, and one dark arm was lifted, with claws that gleamed in the coppery gloom like razors.

  “Kevin!” Kevin shouted out. “Kevin!”

  The creature rumbled and billowed and immediately turned around. Kevin ran headlong into it. It was black and it was cold and its breath hit him like opening up a freezer.

  Kevin saw eyes that were malevolent and narrow and ye
llow as pus. Eyes which had stared at him before, in nightmares. He heard a soft roar of triumph; a scissoring of teeth.

  “Oh God,” he said. “It’s true.”

  The claws sliced through waistcoat, shirt, Aertex vest, skin, fat, muscle. They were so sharp that Kevin didn’t even feel them. He was hooked up in the air, sickeningly spun around. He dropped heavily on to the river bank, on to the grass. Rolled, blindly, helpless, into the river.

  The water was intensely cold. He was glad of that, because it anesthetized the pain, although he didn’t like the feeling of it pouring into his sliced-open abdomen.

  He was lying on his back. He knew that he was dying. He floated gradually downstream, hearing the river gurgle in his ears.

  He passed under the footbridge. A horizontal bar of darkness in front of his eyes. Then he saw a small face staring down at him, wide-eyed, horrified.

  Don’t be frightened, he thought to himself, as the current carried him away. You will do the same one day. You will save Kevin yet again. And yet again. And yet again.

  He closed his eyes. He slid over the weir as lifeless as a sack. Then he floated around the bend of the river where his mother was waiting for him.

  He was sure that he could hear her whisper, Hurry, Kevin. Hurry!

  Changeling

  Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  Amsterdam is always best out of season, when the wind cuts along the grachten (canals) like a craft knife. The chill always give me a good excuse to stop at a cafe for steaming mussels and fried fish, or an Indonesian restaurant for rijstafel. In March, the light in Amsterdam is strange and gray, so that you have a sense of being in a black-and-white movie about the life of Rembrandt. They still have hippies in Amsterdam, and trams. They also have the Nieuwe Kerk with its stunning stained-glass windows; and the Rijksmuseum, which is crammed with Flemish and Dutch masters. Less than an hour south of Amsterdam is the seaside resort of Scheveningen, with flat sandy beaches and a pier, and a curiously 1950s atmosphere, even today. During World War Two, captured German spies who were pretending to be Dutchmen were always asked by their British inquisitors to pronounce “Scheveningen” as a test of their Dutchness. Almost all of them failed.