The Ruins

This year's first movie in the ‘young Americans in peril abroad’ subgenre is currently scheduled for a UK release on 18 April. Based on the best-selling novel by Scott Smith, The Ruins is about a group of backpackers in Mexico stumbling across an ancient evil. Whether the book's downbeat mood and ending will survive the reaction of preview audiences remains to be seen, but at least they seem to have avoided the temptation to relocate the action to a tropical lagoon and have everybody flounce about in swimwear.

Year's Best

Editor emeritus Ellen Datlow has announced the stories which made the cut for the horror half of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror #21. Among those who get the nod for work produced in 2007 and have a TTA connection are Nathan Ballingrud, Gary McMahon, Tim Nickels and Chaz Brenchley.

The Eye

Hollywood has cottoned on to the fact that there are other countries in the Far East beside Japan producing movies which they can make over and sanitise for the folks back home. Having given the Chinese Pang brothers a chance at Western fame and fortune with The Messengers, studio chiefs have now gone back to the motherlode with a remake of their 2002 classic The Eye. The film, due for a 25 April release in the UK, stars Jessica Alba as a woman who has an eye transplant that brings unforeseen, not to mention horrific, repercussions. Alba, who also stars in Awake (4 April release), seems to be following a similar career trajectory to Sarah Michelle Gellar, having started out as a serious butt kicker in the TV series Dark Angel, and then taken the oriental route to the land of the card carrying scream queens.

The Frolic

Wonder Entertainment have produced a 22 minute DVD based on Thomas Ligotti's story The Frolic. The film is directed by Jacob Cooney, stars Maury Sterling, Michael Reilly Burke and Jennifer Aspen, and the script was cowritten by Ligotti himself. The collector's edition DVD has a limited run of 1,000 copies and comes with an exclusive book containing Ligotti's newly revised version of the story.

Alt.Fiction

The 2008 Alt.Fiction event takes place at the Assembly Rooms, Derby on Saturday 26 April. Doors open at 11am for a midday start and the event runs until 9pm, with a packed day of panels, readings, discussions etc. Tickets are (British Pounds) 20

((British Pounds) 16 concessions) and writers attending include Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshall Smith, Simon Clark, Conrad Williams...

Trendsetters

2008 is shaping up as the year of the shaky cam with films masquerading as home made documentaries the latest gimmick in horror circles. First we had Cloverfield and then we had Romero's Diary of the Dead. Next out of the starting gate is Spanish shocker [Rec] which gets a UK release on 11 April, and if that's a little too early for you, then the

Hollywood version is already in the pipeline and will be released in October under the title Quarantine.

Poe Bicentennial

It's perhaps a little early (or a lot late, depending on your viewpoint) to crack open a bottle of bubbly, but 2009 sees the bicentennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. To mark the occasion Solaris are to publish Poe, described as ‘an anthology of remixed and reimagined tales inspired by his work and edited by multi-award winner Ellen Datlow'. Contributors include Kim Newman, Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem, Glen Hirshberg, Nicholas Royle and Lucius Shepard. And if you want to nip out and get the party favours and poppers in ahead of the rush, then you need to know that Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 19 January 1809.

Mixed Messages at the Multiplex

Due for UK release on 4 April and probably bound for the DVD bargain basket by the time you read this, is One Missed Call. No prizes for guessing that it is a remake of a Japanese film, 2003's Chakushin ari, which with its plot device of using phones to deliver ominous messages sounds very much like a Ringu derivative. The trailer for One Missed Call is currently being shown in cinemas along with Orange urgings not to let a cell phone ruin your film. So what exactly are they trying to tell us?

Williams, Campbell, Ligotti etc

Virgin Books have hit the ground running with their new Horror imprint. They launch in April with a trade paperback edition of Conrad Williams’ International Horror Guild Award winning novel The Unblemished (check out this issue's Case Notes for more on that), following up with one title a month through till August. The delights awaiting horror fans are The Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell, Banquet for the Damned by Adam L.G. Nevill, Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti and The Perils and Dangers of the Night by Stephen Gregory.

The Mist

The latest collaboration between writer Stephen King and director Frank Darabont, the same team that brought us Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, appears to have got lost somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Despite being released in the US last November, and going to DVD in March, regardless of the fact that it's been screened in just about every other country you can think of and trailers were being shown in UK cinemas last year, at the time of writing The Mist has still to be given a UK release date. It's hard to see who this benefits, other than those pesky DVD pirates, so come on Hollywood. Finger. Arse. Extract.

COMPILED BY PETER TENNANT

Send your news to whitenoise@ttapress.demon.co.uk

Copyright © 2008 Peter Tennant

"You know, I wouldn't ask you this if there was anybody else."

"It's all right, Roger. Don't worry about it."

Roger removed his rumpled black baseball cap and worked the brim back and forth in his hands, looking more like an uncertain schoolboy than a seasoned fisherman. “I'd do it myself, but see...” He trailed off, his craggy features creasing into a frown. “I ever tell you about my buddy Steve? Fished off the Queen Charlottes back in the day?"

I nodded. He'd told me about Steve a bunch of times—but I let him tell me again because he needed to, by way of explanation.

"Took on too big a load one season, overfilled his holds with herring. Went down in Puget Sound.” His eyes, fading blue on rheumy whites, gazed at a point above my head. “We found him braced against his bunk—like so.” Roger lifted his arms to demonstrate, showing me the starfish position of Steve's death. Then he shrugged. “So I'm not so good in places like that. Get the heebie-jeebies, you know?"

"I know, Roger. It's cool.” I checked myself, remembering the generation gap my words and idioms had fallen in so often. “I mean, I understand. I'll do it. I don't mind."

I didn't, either. I'd cleaned dozens of boats in my two years with Roger. There was no reason why this one should have been any different. It wasn't as if I believed in ghosts.

Each year after herring season, our ice barge—the Arctic King—moored up at an isolated dock along the Lake Washington Canal near Queen Anne's Hill. While the rest of the crew went home to their wives and families, I stayed on for a few weeks to empty the ice bins, and help Roger out with any odd jobs that came our way. The majority of the fleet was kept at the company shipyards on Harbour Island, except for the handful of boats in need of cleaning and repairs. That year we'd been charged with the Pacific Pilgrim, the Chief Seattle, and the Western Kittiwake. I'd heard of the Kittiwake, of course—everybody in the city had heard of it by then—but I'd managed to avoid it until Roger told me it was due for cleaning.

After breakfast that morning, I went down to assess the nature of my task. A thick winter mist had oozed up the canal overnight, and now sat curled like a monstrous grey maggot around our barge. Walking down the dock to the Kittiwake was like wading through a swamp. As I drew near, I noticed that the boat was listing slightly to starboard. It had probably sustained permanent damage in the accident. The new aluminium seine boats were known for being less resilient than the older, sturdier wooden models favoured by most fishermen, including Roger. Yet as far as I could tell, the Kittiwake was no different than the countless other vessels we'd serviced at sea. The wheelhouse sat towards the bow, perched atop a cabin that consisted of a galley, lounge, and bunk berths. There was room for a small hold beneath the fore deck, and a larger one in the stern. It was a simple, standard design.

Grabbing hold of the gunnel, I hauled myself aboard.

I checked the aft hold first, prying the hatch off with both hands. The stench within was enough to make me retch. A soupy mess of fish scales, guts, brine and herring roe covered the bottom, six inches deep. I'd been afraid of that. Cleaning the holds was typically left to the crew after the season finished. For obvious reasons, that hadn't been possible.

I left both hatch covers off. A little fresh air couldn't hurt—especially considering I'd be the one working down there. Next I went to check the galley and living area. A layer of murky seawater coated the floor, sucking at my boots. The cupboards must have burst open when the boat capsized. Cutlery and smashed crockery poked out of the water, mingling with waterlogged paperbacks, magazines and DVD cases. A television set lay beneath the table, the screen spiderwebbed with cracks. Sea scum had gathered against the baseboards, and a black mould was creeping halfway up the walls.

I had my work cut out for me.

Further back a small vestibule led to the sleeping berths. The water there was deeper and reached halfway up my calves. Something bumped against my boots. Looking down, I saw a pair of child's sunglasses—the kind with lenses in the shape of stars—bobbing in the brine. I couldn't help thinking about it, then—about where they'd been when the boat went over. The father must have been at the wheel, which would explain his escape. His wife and kids and the engineer would have been below decks, maybe watching a film or playing cards. I imagined those last minutes of panic as their whole world turned over: the animal terror, the desperate confusion, and the brutal end—coughing and choking and gagging on icy water.

"Jesus,” I muttered, shaking myself.

Doorways on either side of the hall opened into the sleeping berths. The first contained three bunks with matching chequered bedspreads. Laminated maps and charts adorned the walls. A ripe, mouldy stench of wet feathers emanated from within. The room opposite was smaller, with just enough space for a set of bunk beds. The sheets on the top bunk were patterned with baseball bats and gloves, and plain blue bedcovers, stained by mould, covered the bottom bunk. On the walls, water-damaged skateboarding photos faced off against tattered Seattle Mariners posters. The boys had been so young. Too young to be much help during herring season. Too young, some people had insinuated, to be out there at all.

I shut the door. The hall ended in a solid metal hatch with a wheel-lock. The engine room. The water had already played hell with the hinges—I had to put my full weight into the hatch to force it open. A black pit yawned at me from within. I hadn't thought to bring a flashlight. I took a tentative step inside, feeling for the stepladder with my foot. On the second rung, my boot slipped and I fell forward. I hit water. I don't know what was more terrifying: the shock or the cold. I floundered for a moment, trying to orientate myself in the blackness. Then my feet found the steel floor and I stood up, sputtering.

The water was only about four feet deep.

A fit of giddy laughter seized me. Damn. What an idiot. No wonder the boat was listing. The entire engine room was filled with water. I'd have to bring out the pump and drain it before cleaning in here. As I calmed down, a watery silence replaced the echoes of my laughter. I stood listening to the steady dripping, the dark strangeness. I knew it was just the fear, and the aftermath of adrenaline, but something about the room didn't sit easy with me. It was only once I was out, with the hatch safely shut, that the truth occurred to me. The engine room was the deepest section of the boat, which meant—when it had capsized—that it would have been the last spot to fill up with water. Anybody trapped within would have scrambled in there, hoping that rescuers would come before the waters reached them.

That was where they would have died.

After checking in with Roger, who was replacing the pipes on our ice-making machines, I went down to the barge's storage hold to get the gear I needed: hydraulic pump, hoses, bilge cleaner, mop and bucket, scrub brush, garbage bags, ladder, sponges, gators, gloves, power washer and extension cords. Several trips later I was ready to get started.

I hauled the hydraulic pump into the dilapidated cabin of the Kittiwake. I lowered the intake hose into the darkened engine room, and stuffed the output hose through an open window. When I plugged in the pump, I felt a sense of childish vindication. There. I was getting rid of it. The water would be gone, along with the fatal associations it contained.

Outside, the morning mist had cleared and white sunlight dazzled off the fast-moving Ship Canal, swollen by spring currents. My plan was to work on the holds while the engine room drained. I told myself that this was because I wanted to get the dirty work out of the way. In truth, I didn't know if I was quite ready to handle cleaning up the departed family's living space. Both holds were a filthy, stinking, rotting mess, and scouring them took me most of the day. Come five-thirty, the reek of dead herring had saturated my pours. I was grateful when Roger waved to me from up on the barge, signalling that dinner was ready.

After a quick shower, I hustled over to our galley and shovelled back mouthfuls of leftover stew—my appetite miraculously unaffected by the day's revolting task. It wasn't until halfway through the meal that I noticed Roger's expression. He was no good at hiding his emotions. His face had clouded over and his frown was harsh enough to melt iron.

"What's eating you, big guy?"

He grabbed the ladle and slopped more stew angrily into his bowl. “Got a phone call from head office. They want the Kittiwake finished by the day after tomorrow—they've got some buyers that are coming down to take a look."

I nodded. “I'm making good progress. That won't be a problem."

He looked at me, hard. “The problem is that they shouldn't be selling that boat at all. Not after what happened. I knew it was a goddamn deathtrap. Poorly made tin can. Hull's too deep.” He broke a piece of crusty baguette from the end of the loaf, crushing it like you might throttle a snake, and muttered, “Didn't take much to flip it, especially with a full load."

I swore. “What was he doing taking his family out in a boat like that, anyways?"

Roger glanced at me, startled a little by the anger in my tone. The question, which so many fishermen had been thinking, hung awkwardly between us like an accusation.

"Well,” Roger said, “we've got the benefit of hindsight, don't we?” He levelled me with a look of admonishment. “Mike Lowe has suffered enough for his mistake. Besides, the company shouldn't have leased the boat to him, or anybody else. It ought to be scuttled."

I nodded, feeling guilty for my outburst. The poor bastard. I knew he'd lost everything: his boat, his job, his loved ones. And it had been an accident. Nobody doubted that. But it was one of those accidents that smacked of overconfidence, of carelessness. As I cleared the table and started the dishes, I thought back to the various news articles I'd read, which had managed to imply negligence without ever stating it explicitly. I couldn't help but agree. If Roger had taught me one thing in two years, it was to treat the ocean like a wild animal—by turns docile as a rabbit or dangerous as a wounded grizzly. All fishermen knew better than to take her for granted, let alone when they had their wife and children on board.

Dreams of death and water woke me early the next morning.

I'd been trapped in an undersea cave, swimming in circles like a frantic frog, looking for an invisible exit. I glanced at my bedside clock. It was only five-thirty, but there was no use trying to go back to sleep. I trudged next door to the galley instead. Roger, who rarely slept more than a few hours at a time, already had bagels in the toaster and coffee on the hob.

"Morning, greenhorn,” he said cheerily. “Want some starter fluid?"

I grunted at him. His coffee tasted like crude oil, but it blasted the ugly dream images from my brain. I told Roger that I'd risen early to get a head start on the Kittiwake's cabin. Taking a second cup of his brew to go, I loaded our garbage skip onto a wheel cart and rolled it down the frosty dock to the where the boat was moored. Stars still studded the sooty sky, and dawn felt a long way off. I hadn't devised a game plan, but it seemed sensible to start with the largest debris: the chairs, television, DVD player and stereo system. There was something incredibly satisfying about throwing expensive mechanical components carelessly into a skip. Glass smashed and plastic cracked. The destruction invigorated me.

Next I moved onto the smaller refuse. With a garbage bag in one hand, I fished through the thin layer of water, gathering books and magazines and CDs and smashed crockery. I worked mechanically, detaching myself from the objects, ignoring the human connection that my mind instinctively tried to evoke. Their taste in movies, music, literature, the board games they preferred—none of that mattered any longer. They were gone.

Soon enough this junk would be, too.

I crammed a family's entire life into two plastic garbage bags, and tossed them ruthlessly into the skip. Then I went to get my mop and bucket. The layer of water was too thin to clean with the pump. I was forced to swab it up, mopful by mopful, emptying the bucket over the side every ten minutes or so. An hour oozed by before the linoleum floor began to show through, yellow and garish as a sickly seashell. I went over it with a mix of soap and Mr Clean, mopping up the dirt, then opened all the windows to air the place out.

I skipped lunch, grabbing a sandwich on the go instead. I knew that the bedrooms would be harder, and didn't want to lose my momentum. Without dwelling on practicalities, I barged into the main berth and attacked the mess. The sopping carpet tore away from the floor easily. I hauled it out on my shoulder like a limp corpse, followed by the soggy bedclothes, water-laden mattresses, and tattered wall charts. That accomplished, I turned the full force of my assault on the children's bedroom, and that was where I ran into problems.

It crept up on me slowly. I removed the mattresses and bedclothes first, as I had done in the master bedroom, followed by the posters and pictures on the walls. But I found it harder to remain detached: the sense of their personalities was stronger there than anywhere else onboard. When I reached the dismal mess of toys, comics and baseball cards littering the floor, I could feel the weight of all that debris bogging me down, miring me in sentiment. The place reminded me too much of my own room at that age. I started out by grabbing handfuls of the waterlogged junk, shovelling it en masse into a garbage bag, but my momentum dwindled as the reality of what I was doing settled on me like a yoke. I plodded on obstinately, until I was brought up short by a seemingly innocuous notebook beneath the bed. Written in childish scrawl across the cover were the words my diary.

I opened the garbage bag, ready to dunk the book, but couldn't bring myself to do it. Instead I settled on the bed, removed my gloves, and peeled open the soggy cover. It took me some time to decipher the words, which had bled into the paper with water damage. But with consideration some of the sentences and paragraphs became clear: This is my diary of everything that will happen to us on the boat ... Mrs Thompson says I can read it to the class when we get back ... Today we are loading all the food and books. I am very excited ... Dad says he will take all of us to a Mariners game for helping him fish ... It went on like that, in snatches and fragments. Each day had been dutifully logged and recorded, complete with childish anecdotes and occasionally accompanied by little drawings. I read everything that was still legible, compelled by a mixture of dread and fascination. The naivety and optimism of the young diarist were almost unbearable. The last entry was dated February twenty-first. We're going home today! We have tonnes and tonnes of fish ... I can't wait to see everybody...

Hands trembling, I carefully shut the diary and placed it to one side. I don't know how long I sat there, not thinking anything, just feeling empty and withered as a mummy. Eventually I stood up and forced myself to finish the bedroom before taking a break. I had some weed in our bunkhouse on the barge. I went to get it, rolled a joint, then slipped back to the Kittiwake to light up. Usually I avoided smoking on the dock—Roger hated the stuff—but under the circumstances I felt justified. A few scalding tokes banished my despondency, spinning me off into giddiness. With my lungs full of smoke, and the joint in hand, I went back below deck to check on the engine room. Overnight, the hydraulic pump had done its job. Only a few inches of oily water remained on the floor. I exhaled. All I had to do was mop up the rest, scrub down the walls, and my work on the Kittiwake would be complete.

Encouraged by those thoughts, I finished my joint and descended into the engine room with a mop, bucket, work lamp, and extension cord. The lamp didn't give off much light, and a chill oppression permeated the gloom, clinging to me like invisible spider webs. I worked my way around the cramped space with hurried, erratic movements, wanting only to be finished. Strange shadows, cast by the dangling work lamp, encircled me like rows of robed figures. My initial high wore off, leaving me parched and pasty-mouthed—and increasingly paranoid. Surrounded by the steady drip of water, and the eerie echo of my own movements, I found myself imagining their deaths, as real and vivid as any horror movie. I saw the tears in their eyes and the terror on their faces, and I heard their feeble cries for help.

Gritting my teeth, I traded my mop for the scrub-brush and attacked the engine room walls—trying to lose myself in the work. But it was futile. Again and again my thoughts returned to that day. Sympathy for their plight sparked a slow simmering rage in my belly. I didn't have a wife and kids of my own, but if I had, I sure as hell wouldn't have let them die like that—cold and alone and trapped like panicked animals. No. I would have dived back under. I would have fought my way inside and saved them—or I would have died trying.

It was the least a father could do.

That thought, so final and unforgiving, snapped me out of my trance like a rifle shot. Despite the sweat coating me beneath my rain slicker, I was chilled to the bone and shivering uncontrollably. It seemed darker than it had been, too, as if shadows had enshrouded my work lamp. Instinctively, and feeling slightly ridiculous, I pulled out my penlight and shone the pale beam around the confined space. The spot of light danced and jerked like a sprite across camshafts, gears, and dials. Nothing else. I was alone, of course. Yet still I stood listening. My short, shallow breaths sounded in my ears, like the panting of a dog.

Then something brushed my arm.

I jerked away, pivoting to check behind me. Nobody was there. Yet the sensation came again—like a gentle tug on my sleeve. I'd barely had time to register that when I felt a strange warmth on my cheek, soft and tender. Feminine. I froze, more from shock than terror. The scent of perfume was in the air, faint as distant music. There was pressure on both my sleeves, now, gentle but insistent. My breath caught in my throat, and tears stung my eyes. It was more than their presence I felt. It was their confusion, their need. It opened an ache in my chest like a raw wound, and as I stood there—churning with emotion—a childish voice filled the darkness, filled my head, with a single, heart-wrenching plea.

Daddy?

I sobbed, unable to help myself, and shook my head. “No,” I whispered hoarsely, “I'm not the one you need.” I took a step back, breaking their fragile embrace. Water splashed against my boots. I glanced down in surprise. Somehow, while I'd been scrubbing the walls, seawater had seeped in to cover the floor again—at least an inch deep. I sloshed quietly through the brine, my eyes leaking tears, still overwhelmed by their suffering. At the hatch, I glanced back once. I saw the grimy guts of the engine, lit by a low-watt work lamp.

I shut the door behind me.

I didn't eat much at dinner, and excused myself shortly afterwards. I knew Roger sensed something was up, but he had the decency not to press me. In the warmth of the bunkhouse, with the sounds of the television audible from next door, what had happened in the engine room seemed distant and unreal—like a nightmare remembered on waking. I almost convinced myself that the entire episode might simply have been a vivid hallucination, brought on by my fears and my high. It was the only way I could rationalize what I'd encountered. But deep down, in my gut, I didn't buy that. I'd smoked weed my whole life and had never experienced anything even remotely like this. It was something that couldn't be rationalized or explained.

Just accepted.

After showering and changing, I went across the breezeway and told Roger I was going to meet some friends for a drink. Instead of heading south towards downtown Seattle, however, I crossed over the canal and continued north through Ballard to Greenwood. I didn't know the area that well, and even with the address I'd downloaded from Route Finder it took me half an hour to find the right street. I don't know what I expected. A house gone to seed, perhaps: peeling paint, unruly lawn, shutters flapping in the wind. Yet when I pulled into the driveway, I saw that the place had been meticulously maintained. The lawn was cut, the hedges trimmed, the sidewalks swept bare. It was as painstakingly tidy as a billboard advertisement for suburban living. I parked behind the truck in the driveway and got out, bringing the diary with me. Feeling strangely nervous, I went to knock on the front door.

It opened almost instantly.

"Can I help you?"

The man peering out at me was thin and stooped, like an ailing stork. He had limp black hair combed neatly to one side of his head. No stubble showed on his chin. His green golf shirt and khaki trousers were both clean and pressed. I was so startled by his well-kept appearance that I thought I had the wrong address.

"Mr Lowe? Mike Lowe?"

He nodded, eyes wary. Maybe he thought I was a reporter. I didn't know how to broach the subject delicately, so I just took a breath and came right out with it.

"I work for Roger Deakins out in Queen Anne's Hill. We're cleaning your boat down there. The Western Kittiwake.” I hesitated, looking at the diary in my hands. “I found this."

He accepted it stonily, as if it took great effort to raise his hand, clasp the notebook, and take it from my grasp. He stared at the front page like it contained some hidden riddle.

"Maybe you better come in,” he said eventually.

If possible, the house was even tidier on the inside. I saw no empty bottles of booze, no pill packets, no telltale signs of depression. All the furniture was immaculately clean and carefully arranged. A fresh sheen of wax coated the hardwood floors, and in the lounge the glass tabletop looked as shiny and spotless as a mirror. It reminded me of the snapshots in a merchandising catalogue: a stark and artificial space that wasn't really inhabited by anybody.

"Can I get you anything?"

"Tea would be great."

I waited while he puttered about in the kitchen. There was a framed photo of him and his family on the coffee table. I picked it up. They were outside—perhaps in the backyard. The sun caught them full on, flashing off white smiles and identically dark hair. A perfect family, oblivious to the tragedy that awaited them. I didn't hear him returning with the tea.

"Please, don't touch that."

He dropped two cups on the table and snatched the frame from my hands.

"I'm sorry. I didn't..."

"It's okay,” he murmured, already engrossed in replacing it exactly where it had been. “I just have a certain way I like things, is all.” When he finished, he noticed that some of the tea had slopped onto the tabletop. He went to get a dishcloth and mopped it up, then sat down across from me in a reclining chair. We sipped tea in silence for a few minutes. He kept the diary cradled in his lap, glancing at it every so often. He still hadn't opened it yet.

"I know about what happened,” I said eventually. “It must be tough.” I hesitated, realizing how trite that sounded. “Coping, I mean."

He bobbed his head, turtle-like. “It's a struggle. I get up every morning. I try to keep busy. I go to my meetings and I work on the house. The company is covering my unemployment insurance, but in a few weeks I might look into getting some work."

It sounded like a rehearsed answer, mingling the right amounts of stoicism and optimism. I knew the words were as artificial as his surroundings—the kind of thing you'd say to your shrink to give the impression of making progress. Sensing this, I didn't respond. I waited. His eyes were drawn once again to the diary, but this time they didn't flit away. He put down his teacup and gently peeled back the cover. A visible tremor ran through his frame—a sharp stab of recognition and remorse. Not daring to interrupt, I merely watched as he went through the diary page by page. As he did, the carefully maintained mask of his face seemed to dissolve, revealing the raw, stark grief hidden beneath. By the time he'd finished silent sobs wracked his body and tears trickled down his cheeks.

"I know what you must think,” he said.

"I'm not here—"

"I know what everybody thinks,” he interrupted, his face fierce with anguish. “But it wasn't my fault. The currents in the straight turned us sideways. Then the undertow caught hold of the hull and before I knew it we were going over. Just like that.” He took a shaky breath, running his hands over his face. “I scrambled out of the wheelhouse. I tried swimming under, to get at the cabin—I swear to God I tried—but in that water it was hopeless. There was nothing I could do."

A wave of weeping overcame him. I stood up and went to sit beside him, resting my hand on his shoulder. I couldn't tell whether I was hearing the whole truth, or a rationalized version of events he'd recreated in his mind. Only he would ever know. But I felt there was something between us, now. Enough so that I didn't feel awkward saying what I had to say.

"What if there was something you could do now?” I asked.

He looked up at me, his face naked with hope.

"Anything,” he managed to stutter. “I'd do anything."

I turned onto the concrete loading platform that overlooked our dock, dimming my lights so as not to alert Roger. The mist had returned. It sat heavily on the water, thick and opaque as marsh gas. We sat and stared at the wheelhouse of the Kittiwake, jutting through the vapour like a ruined watchtower. Mike shifted in his seat, cleared his throat. “Haven't seen her since that day."

"She's been here all along."

He looked sidelong at me, his eyes roaming my face. “I want this to be true. Tell me I'm right to trust you."

I shrugged, uncomfortable with that responsibility. “You know as much as me,” I said bluntly.

We got out of the car. The air was ripe with sea smells that had drifted in on the fog: silt and brine and rotting kelp. Mike seemed reluctant to take the lead, so I went first down the gangplank. The mist swallowed us hungrily. I couldn't make out anything besides the dock in front of me. We passed the barge and the other boats, our footsteps muted and muffled as we trudged deeper into the watery miasma. Then the shadow of the Kittiwake suddenly materialized on our right, as if it had crept up on us rather than vice versa.

I stopped. Mike put a hand to the hull, his face crumpling.

"Jesus. Oh, Jesus."

I thought he might break down again, but he drew a long, shuddering breath—puffing out his cheeks like a blowfish—and managed to get it together. Then, decisively, I grabbed hold of the gunnel and pulled myself aboard. He followed, staying close by me. I felt as if I was minding an overgrown child. I'd hoped—even expected—that he would show some initiative. But it was left to me to open the cabin door and shine my penlight within, as if I was giving him a tour of his own boat. The interior looked too clean and spartan after my manic cleaning session. All traces of his family had been wiped away, bleached and scrubbed and mopped out of existence.

"Company's got some buyers coming in tomorrow,” I said. “They wanted the boat spick and span before then."

He nodded, not really listening. In the darkness, his face looked pale and wan as a Halloween mask. I gestured towards the engine room and led him that way. When I opened the door, watery blackness glistened within. The level had risen by ten or twelve inches—it was at least knee-deep. I shone my light across the surface, which was black and still as oil.

"There's a leak down here,” I explained. “Should have told you to bring waders."

We lingered on the threshold, following the beam of my light as it swept the blackness. I was taken aback by the room's unexceptional appearance. I'd built it up in my head as this black pit, oozing phantasmagoria, yet just then it looked like an ordinary engine room—filled with oily bits of machinery, valves, and the assortment of tools I'd left behind.

"I don't really know what I'm meant to do."

I shrugged. “You don't have to do anything if you don't want to.” My words came out harsher than I'd intended—almost confrontational. Seeing the look he gave me, I added in apology, “I can come in with you if you'd like."

He hesitated, then shook his head.

"I'll be right here, then."

He took an uncertain step onto the first rung of the stepladder. His torso blocked the beam of my flashlight, blackening the interior. I tapped him on the shoulder, startling him. “Here, take this. It's waterproof."

He accepted the flashlight wordlessly. The beam lit our faces from below. I saw a disturbing resignation in his eyes—like a condemned man being led to the chair.

"Thank you,” he murmured.

Then he was descending, his boots ringing on the steel rungs. At the bottom I heard two splashes as he stepped into the water. He sloshed further into the engine room, his silhouette retreating from me. Near the far end he stopped, scanning the walls with the flashlight. I had the sudden fear that he would see nothing, feel nothing. I would look like a cruel idiot, playing him for the fool.

"Anything?” I asked hoarsely.

"No. Nothing..."

Yet as he stood there, I saw him jerk back, then go suddenly still. I sat in frozen silence, not daring to speak or even breathe for fear of interrupting. Over the watery silence I heard Mike talking in low, comforting tones. I strained to listen, but couldn't make out any words. Moments later, the room went completely dark. He'd turned off the flashlight.

"Is everything okay?” I called.

After a pause his voice came back to me, so softly I had to lean forward to hear. “Everything's fine. They want you to shut the door. They want you to go."

I hesitated. The atmosphere had suddenly become electric.

"What do you want?” I asked.

"Shut it."

I withdrew my head and shoulders, closing the hatch behind me. Dropping to my knees, I pressed my ear to the metal. It was cold—almost frosty—to the touch. I heard indistinct sounds, as of voices and childish laughter. This was what I'd been waiting for, hoping for, but now that it was happening I felt no relief or vindication—just a growing sense of dread. I thought back to my own experience, to the warm touches and cloying perfume and clinging hands. I remembered the vivid feelings of confusion and despair—not just for a husband and father, but for anybody. Even me. I'd been so set on bringing him here, on making it right, that I hadn't stopped to consider the alternatives. His wife and children were dead. What if all they'd left behind was an imprint, a raw and hungry, insatiable need? What if bringing a man that vulnerable here was the last thing I should have done?

I reached impulsively for the hatch. As my hand closed on the wheel-lock, a gut-wrenching shudder wracked the entire boat. I fell sideways, bashing my head on the wall. Dizzying patches of white appeared across my vision. Over the sudden ringing in my ears, I heard a muted yet unmistakable roar. Water. Water was filling the engine room.

"Mike!” I screamed. “Get the hell out of there!"

I threw myself on the wheel-lock. It turned, but the door wouldn't budge. It was as if a block of cement had been dropped on the other side—the water pressure from within had sealed it shut. It was only a matter of time before the room filled entirely, claiming a final victim. The realization was made worse by the knowledge that part of me had foreseen this. As I stood there, paralysed by uncertainty, an unearthly groan echoed throughout the hull. I heard three sharp, unmistakable pops: the sound of tie lines snapping. I still didn't realize what was happening until I felt the floor listing beneath me. Then I glanced back through the windows of the galley to see the lights of Seattle's horizon pinwheeling like a fairground ride.

We were going over.

I clutched the hatch with both hands, bracing myself. I managed to hold that pose as the world tipped over, but I wasn't prepared for the sudden impact as we hit water. I lost my grip, crumpling awkwardly onto my head. The ceiling had become the floor. Before I had time to recover, a torrent of water surged through the cabin door and windows. It hit me like a massive fist, slamming me against the hatch. I choked and gagged and flailed about, desperate to keep my head above the surface. My clothing. I had to get rid of my clothing. As the canal water frothed and boiled all around me, I managed to tear off my jacket and kick free of my boots. By that point it had reached my chest. I knew that within seconds the entire cabin would be filled. If I didn't get Mike out before then, we were both dead men.

"Fuck this!” I screamed.

Wedging both feet against the walls, I wrenched hard on the wheel lock and threw the full force of my weight into the hatch. It was a huge mistake that nearly cost me my life. By then the water level in the cabin was higher than in the engine room. The hatch flew open and a churning cascade rushed through the portal, dragging me with it into the blackness. I had time to snatch a single breath before being sucked under. Something hard smashed into my back. I caromed off, felt myself turning over, and then went suddenly still as the violent currents settled. In my panicked state, I didn't understand that the room had filled up, stopping the inflow. I only knew that I could move again. I flailed about underwater, completely disorientated in the frigid blackness. There was no up or down or left or right—just suffocating water. It surrounded and constrained me like a tomb. Raw terror burst in my chest, and I suddenly knew what it had been like for them in those final moments.

Then I saw the patch of light—a pale rectangle that seemed to shimmer and shift like a mirage. The hatch. It had to be the hatch. I started in that direction, swimming with desperate breaststrokes. My knees and elbows bashed against machinery that was invisible in the darkness, but I hardly noticed. I was so close. I could make it. I would live. I would breathe again.

That was when I felt the hands.

They clutched at my ankles, icy and imploring. I screamed in shock and began to choke. The darkness itself seemed to be holding me, restraining me, claiming me for its own. I reacted with savage violence; I kicked and clawed and struggled in a mindless frenzy. I could see the hatch just in front of me, with its promise of life. I got one hand over the steel rim, then another. With a final, vicious kick I managed to break free and pull myself across the threshold.

Driven only by screaming instincts, I continued through the galley, swimming and clawing my way along the floor. Dark patches appeared at the edges of my vision, and my lungs felt as if a hatchet was buried in them. I don't remember feeling anything else. I'd passed my breaking point and descended into desperate delirium. My movements had a frantic, dream-like quality to them, as if I'd already died and was merely acting out my last moments again and again. In what seemed like slow motion, I scrambled through the doorway into open water. Overhead, street lights beckoned from another world. I pulled myself clear of the hull and crawled upward, like a lost soul climbing Jacob's ladder.

I dragged myself out of the canal half a mile downstream from our dock. I was a sobbing, spluttering wreck. Blood dripped from a gash on my forehead and I vomited several times before catching my breath. Then I just lay there and let the violent, bone-wracking shudders run their course. I could breathe. That was all that mattered. I lay in the mud, drinking sweet lungfuls of air and sobbing like a child just loosed into the world. Everything—the ripe smell of the canal, the distant sounds of traffic on the Queen Anne's Bridge, the winter wind on my back—seemed strange and new again.

When my breathing finally steadied, I rolled myself over and looked back. Only the keel of the Kittiwake remained above water, breaching the surface like a sleek wet fin. I clasped my hands around both knees and drew them to my chest, then sat huddled like that as the boat slowly sank. I knew there was no use going for help. Mike was dead. Maybe, given the choice, he would have wanted it like this. That's how the press would write it up: as a desperate, guilt-ridden suicide. But he hadn't been given the choice. Not really. I'd made it for him—and I'd never know if his last moments were ones of peace or terror. Remembering the desperate, clutching hands, so strangely human, I decided I was better off not knowing.

It's hard to say how long I stayed there, numb with shock and on the edge of hypothermia, watching the keel of the Kittiwake sink lower and lower. Only when it had vanished altogether did I rouse myself. Struggling to my feet, I tottered up the bank and began the trek back to our barge. Along the way I had plenty of time to come up with a reasonable story: on my return from the bar I'd seen somebody boarding the Kittiwake, and when the boat suddenly capsized I'd jumped in to save them. In my condition, shattered as I was by guilt and remorse, there'd be no reason to doubt my word. I knew how Roger would react. He'd tell me that I'd done everything I could, and more than most people would have. He'd get me out of my clothes and settle me down with blankets and hot tea while he phoned the police. He would offer me comfort and sympathy—which was more than I'd offered Mike.

And probably more than I deserved.

Copyright © 2008 Tyler Keevil

THE BIG PERHAPS

Reading Andy Hedgecock's description (Interzone 213) of a visitor who, perusing his eclectic library of books on both scepticism and religion, remarked that he was “hedging his bets” got me thinking. Because the accusation could easily be levelled at me: an avowed atheist who nevertheless writes stories about the paranormal.

But hang on. Why do some people make the highly irrational assumption that because you write about something, you must believe in it? Did Walt Disney believe that mice wore dungarees and piloted paddle steamers?

I had direct experience of this when Tom Sutcliffe, in his review in the Independent, accused my TV series Afterlife of encouraging belief in the paranormal. Perhaps he would reject the works of Dickens and Shakespeare on the same grounds? Somehow I doubt it. Personally, I think it was a subconscious dig at “low art” (which the combination of “ghost story” and “ITV” must surely spawn).

True, in Afterlife, the conceit of the series dictated—surprise surprise—that an afterlife existed. On the other hand, in my stage play Answering Spirits, about the Fox sisters and the rise of Spiritualism in the USA, my angle was the exact opposite: that there's no such thing as spirits, that Spiritualism is entirely founded on a hoax, and is wholly a non-supernatural phenomenon. There's no rule, is there, that I have to be consistent? Both pieces are essentially examinations of Belief. Frankly, I've come to realise that a lot of my writing is, in one way or another. Maybe it's to do with the fact that my grandmother was a god-fearing Baptist and my father a science teacher with no time for such rubbish.

All of which started me pondering that matters of religion not only permeate Horror but imbue it with a great deal of its power.

Obviously there are the A-list books and films whose empathy for the Devil couldn't be writ larger: The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary's Baby and all their demonic offspring, which are so imbued with Catholic angst it's as if the Creed sat there on the writer's desk on top of the Thesaurus—though their authors don't necessarily share the beliefs they describe. Ira Levin was once quoted as saying: “I don't believe in Satan, but I'm not sending the money back."

There are other, much less obvious, examples of religious permeation in the genre. For instance the film The Descent has a title evocative partly because of its Christian subtext—we're going down, and we know what is waiting for us. Similarly, Fallen. Also consider 30 Days of Night. Would it have the same accursed ring to it if not the same number as Judas's pieces of silver? And who saw that version of Dracula not so long ago which revealed that Dracula was Judas? It was a neat way to explain his aversion to crucifixes, granted (though garlic, it has to be said, still remains a toughie).

Of course, Hammer alumni Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee always proposed that they weren't doing “Horror” films at all: they were acting in modern takes on medieval mystery plays, where the forces of Good and Evil did battle. I, for one, buy that. Interesting to note, though, in view of the censorship wrangles that Hammer constantly got into, that the original mystery plays—populist rather than “high art” to your medieval peasant—were banned for a hundred years. This was possibly because the Devil was invariably more charismatic than boring old God. Satan after all has motivation, attitude, drive, and a hell of a back-story. Or perhaps they were banned for depicting God at all.

Cut to today, and a teddy bear called Mohammed. But I digress.

Or maybe not. I think now more than ever it's the duty of Horror to reflect concerns about Faith and Science and the clash between the two. Most of us grapple with where we stand on a sliding scale between deludedly gullible and blinkeredly sceptical. Uniquely, horror and supernatural stories, by portraying beliefs as real, can enable characters to be confronted with these issues and be faced with deciding what they think and feel. Yesterday I watched Larry Fessenden's Wendigo, a marvellous little shocker in which a fearful child faces pagan forces and the nastiness of grown-ups. In films such as Night of the Demon, it's great to throw a sceptic into the situation and see him squirm. In fact it's always good to have a Doubting Thomas in a supernatural movie, because, if we were in the same situation, wouldn't we? Equally useful is a religious character who thinks they know all the answers, but doesn't. There's a reason both are archetypes in the genre. Often, the question of belief is barely under the surface.

Truth is, Christian tropes are buried deep in our DNA, even when we think we've rejected them or out-grown them. The Sunday school stories we've inherited over generations have Goliath-and-David shapes that are hard to shake off. They might even—for those of us who believe in Story, if not God—carry fundamental truths, about human nature at least. Humans wrote them, after all. In many authors, certainly, religion and Horror have always been intertwined.

For example, Richard Matheson's work, to me, is always, on some level, about Faith. Just recall the classic occult battle in his adaptation of The Devil Rides Out, ending with the memorable summation: “Thank God"—"Yes, it is He we should thank.” In A Stir of Echoes a supernatural gift bestowed upon an ordinary but tortured soul has an aspect of the Christ-like often embedded in a sub-genre seen throughout Stephen King and beyond. Unashamedly, in What Dreams May Come, Matheson offers a nothing less than a complete view of the hereafter based on a thorough reading of Spiritualist literature, and the film would have been fascinating if not for the disastrous casting of Robin Williams (not so much Everyman as Neveryman). In Duel the question “Who is in the truck?” clearly works on a metaphysical level. As, one might argue, does his Twilight Zone episode ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet', where the Fuselian creature William Shatner sees squatting on the wing represents the implicit fear in the question “What's up there?” And anyone who has seen The Incredible Shrinking Man will never forget the way in which this ostensibly “B” movie ends up with its miniscule protagonist facing infinity, and perhaps even God, at a subatomic level.

Perhaps most memorably of all, in his abiding masterpiece I Am Legend faith comes alive in the form of a vampire invasion led by the original “neighbour from hell” Ben Cortman (apparently based on Matheson's Poe movie collaborator Roger Corman). It voices the uneasy thought: “What if what we merely believe turns out to be true?” (Although in the recent Will Smith adaptation, the subversive ending to the novel is made offensively trite and conservative.)

Perhaps, in the end, as Hubert Selby says: “There are only two motivations for human beings—fear and faith."

Fundamentally religion, narrative and superstition will always be inter-related because they are all concerned with cause and effect. Stories are experiments in cause and effect. If a character does this, this will happen, depending on this, perhaps that. In superstition, cause and effect has gone wrong to the extent people think a rabbit foot will help them win a Grand Prix, astrology will dictate their wedding day, or twenty Hail Mary's will mean they'll be saved. (To me, a good deal less believable as a concept than a stake through the heart.)

But then the value of stories is metaphor. The trouble comes when people take them as factual truth. Factual truth to live their lives by. That road leads to Darwin being banned from schools and doctors in abortion clinics being murdered. That road leads to madness—not freedom, that's for sure.

Stories basically champion free speech and religions, at their core, don't. Which is why the subject is worth writing about. And, if you ask me, in Horror, even when we aren't, we are.

Copyright © 2008 Stephen Volk

Life was not so unkind to Howell as it seemed to the world at large—it offered few surprises, and predictable rewards. Where there were explicit directions, Howell found he could go anywhere, do anything, but whenever and wherever he got lost, he found Atwater.

The first time it happened, he believed that it was as real as everything else in his life up to that point had been. On his way to a business appointment in Burbank: he'd given himself plenty of time to get there, leaving the office in Mid-Wilshire an hour ahead of the departure time on the Triple A itinerary he'd printed out the night before. After living in LA for over a year, he still did this for any place he had never driven, and kept a binder and three map books.

Traffic shut him down within sight of his office. Parked on the 101, swimming in sweat, and he suddenly, absolutely, needed to pee. He couldn't just give up and get off; it had to get better soon, but it got worse, so clusterfucked by Hollywood Boulevard that he couldn't even get through the glacial drift of traffic to the exit. Watching as the time of his appointment came and went, and he wasn't even in the Valley, yet he was committed. The southbound traffic was almost as bad. Howell left a message to reschedule with the client in Burbank. The secretary treated him like some idiot who'd tried to ride a horse into town.

Wondering which of the empty coffee cups at his feet he'd like to try peeing in, wondering why the sensible Volvo people had never tackled this crying need of the long-haul motorist, Howell crawled through the pass and into the Valley.

The 101 burst out into Griffith Park, and a blazing Catherine Wheel avalanche of sulfurous afternoon sunlight speared his brain. Cascades of shaggy green hills and shadowed black canyons lurched up to the shoulder, the wilderness under glass of the park and Howell was looking when horns sounded behind him, and the road ahead was a vacant plain.

Howell whooped with joy and stomped on the gas. The Triple A directions had wilted into pasty slime from the heat and smog and sweat from his hands, pages stuck together. The damned thing was supposed to be foolproof, distances totaled out to the hundredth of a mile, but 42.62 crept by on his trip odometer, and no Burbank Avenue. No off-ramp at all, and then he saw from the baffling menu of interstate and city highway junctions in the southbound lanes, that he was on the wrong freeway, and headed east to Pasadena.

No one let him out of the left lane until he'd passed under the Golden State Freeway. With a berserker roar, he kamikazed the next off-ramp and slammed on the brakes, power-sliding up a hairpin chute between blank brick walls. He skidded to a stop just short of the sign. ATWATER, it said. No population or elevation, no explanation, no Kiwanis or Lion's Club chapters. Just ATWATER.

He idled at the intersection for a good long time. No other cars came. There were no other cars. Anywhere. In the middle of LA. No cars. No pedestrians, either, and Howell waited for something, for a director to scream “Cut!” and a crew to spill out from behind these painted murals of a ghost town to resurrect the scene he'd ruined.

On the three corners opposite the off-ramp, a 7-11, an AM/PM, and another 7-11, all abandoned, windows shattered, roofs askew and foundations cracked. All angles subtly off, and apartment buildings down the street had collapsed, crushing their ground floors or spilling their contents out into the street. All the entrances were swathed in CAUTION tape, and CONDEMNED notices were pasted on all remaining doors. BY ORDER OF FEMA—

The last real earthquake in Los Angeles was in 1993. Howell looked into this before taking the job and moving here. A decade later, and they never tried to rebuild? Unless it was a movie set ... or something else happened here...

Imagination did nothing good for Howell. He let it go and set the Volvo rolling down the main drag.

Atwater wasn't large; he could see the same brick wall cutting across the street only a few blocks from the off-ramp. The whole area was walled off from the rest of the city, a pitcher plant with only one mouth, into which he'd stumbled. The sounds of the city outside were almost completely muzzled—he heard only the hushed hum of distant traffic and something like electronic wind chimes, or a Don't Walk alarm for blind pedestrians, but here, nothing moved. Fine then, he'd turn around.

A man threw himself across the hood of his car. Threw himself, those were the right words, because Howell certainly didn't hit him.

"Please,” the man bleated, beating on the windshield, “please help—"

The man came around to the passenger side, and Howell hadn't locked it. He wore a navy blue suit and tie, shabby and shiny, the kind of thing an exceptionally cheap prison might parole its least promising inmates in, but he didn't look like a bum, and Howell supposed he wanted to help, so he let the man fumble it open and fall into the passenger seat. “You don't know how long I've been waiting,” the man said, “for someone to come—"

"Where the hell are we? Where's everybody?"

"No on-ramp,” the man wheezed, hauling the door shut and turning to look at Howell. “We have to go back up the off-ramp, but nobody comes in here, ever ... For God's sake, let's go!"

Something buzzed past Howell's ear. He whipped his head around so fast something tore in the back of his neck, but he let out a sharp yelp and shouted, “Did you see it? You let a—let it in—” He couldn't bring himself to say the word.

Howell looked at the man's face, at gaping pores all over his face and neck, tessellated hexagons like tiny waxen mouths. Black, buzzing bullets oozed out of them. His head was a honeycomb.

"It's not as bad as it looks,” the man offered, his humming hand shooting out to bar Howell in his seat. “Please just drive."

Howell shrieked. He was allergic to bee stings. He was allergic to the word ‘bee'. He yanked open the door and threw himself out, except the fucking seatbelt trapped him, hanging upside down in the street. His hand slapped at the button, or was it a latch. Bees swarmed and formed a beard on the man's face.

"You're making them mad,” the man said, his eyes wet, nose streaming snot and furious bees drowning in it. Tiny feather-touches of agitated air played over Howell's face, the microscopic violence of thousands of wings. A homicidal halo roared around his head.

The seatbelt snapped free and Howell rolled out of the Volvo, hit the street running on all fours, out of the intersection and into the nearest shelter, the underground garage of a three story townhouse.

He slid on his belly down the steep driveway and crawled under the gate, jammed open on a toppled Vespa scooter. The dark was his only cover here. He had no real hope of finding help, only of hiding until the lunatic either stole his car or abandoned it, but he was not getting back in there. He'd walk out onto the freeway and hail a Highway Patrolman, he'd get out, he'd go home and never come back.

Almost nauseous now with relief, Howell unzipped and pissed in the dark.

A sound, and then another, behind him. His bladder slammed shut; his balls crawled up and wrapped around his femoral artery, legs tingled and fell into a coma. Small sounds, but distinctive, and if not threatening, then in this place they portended a myriad of things, all awful.

It was the sound of a metal tool striking a metal tray, and the sound of a miniature saw biting into something hard, and the reek of burning bone. Howell turned and sought something to hide behind as he saw how far from alone he was.

A moth-battered ceiling fixture lit up a shining steel table in the center of the empty garage. Two gaunt figures in black smocks and leather aprons hovered over it. They wore cages over their heads like old-time insane asylum alienists, or their heads were cages, for they seemed to imprison nothing but shadows.

Between them on the table lay a nude female body, painfully white, viciously thin, a naked sprawl of cruel angles and lunar planes, decoratively inked with dotted lines that encompassed the whole form. Freshly sutured cuts ran down the arms and legs, and perhaps the worst of it was that Howell saw nowhere a drop of blood.

Deftly, one of the alienists sawed down the bridge of the dead woman's nose, while the other peeled the parted skin away from the skull. Howell didn't know how long he watched; their procedures were so methodical, he got sucked into infinite minutiae, only to take a sudden, stabbing breath when, with a magician's flare, the peeler laid bare the skull and held it up.

The skull was black glass, toxic onyx ice, squealing and smoking as it met the hot, close air. The alienist dropped it into an oil drum, changed into a fresh pair of heavy rubber gloves and opened the gilded doors of a medieval reliquary on a sideboard.

The other alienist continued his master ventral incision at the jaw, laying open the fuligin rib cage, which spewed ribbons of oily vapor across the table.

Working behind, the first alienist selected a skull of ancient yellow bone from the reliquary and deftly slipped it into the hollow face, arranging the features just so, then nipping the lips of the incision together with black thread as fast as a sweat shop matron.

Cowering behind a Camaro half-propped up on cinder-blocks in the mouth of the garage, Howell started to creep backwards to the gate. He'd face down the honeycombed man, or just run out onto the freeway, he'd get out of here—

When the woman on the table spoke.

"I felt that,” she whimpered, and Howell was gored by the wonder in her voice, as much as by the fact that the speaker was a filleted cadaver, with two headless surgeons elbow-deep in her. He trembled, but it was thousands of misfired reflexes warring with each other as he tried to frame a reaction to this—

An alienist set a new rib cage in place and stitched it up as the other prepared to join his incision with the cleft of her groin.

Howell rushed at the cutter, screaming, “Get off her!” with his fists pounding its broad back and his mad rush tipped him so that he almost fell into it when the towering form collapsed on itself with no more resistance than an airborne shopping bag. He blundered into the edge of the table and knocked the wind out of his lungs as the alienist with the needle calmly reached for something on the tray that looked like a nail gun.

On the table, the woman looked at him. Her eyes, impossibly vast black pupils, ringed by violet irises like bone-deep bruises, drank him in and stole something he needed to breathe. “Take me,” she said, “take me away."

Howell's hand found the knife and lashed out across the table at the other alienist. The blade slashed the unresisting fabric, the black form deflated and melted into the oil-stained shadows.

Howell dropped the knife and looked for something to cover her with, trying to say, “I'll get you—get you—out—"

"What's your name, here?” she asked.

He took off his jacket and draped it over her, arms out, awkwardly trying to size her up to lift. “Um, Howell, Roger, um, Howell. Listen, are you okay to move? I saw..."

She sat up on the table and leaned into him. The exquisitely fine stitching down the center of her face creaked when she smiled and put the knife to his throat. Her other hand hustled his crotch. “I'm cured."

He looked away, but she forced him to look with her knife. “Get hard,” she commanded, and tore herself open.

Her breasts, imperceptible but for her nipples, like bites from some enormous spider that lived in her bed, already swelling, seeking him out, accusing snail-eyes.

His stomach rolled and everything was hot, rushing water, drowning him. He wished he could melt and flow away through her fingers, but where he wanted it least, he swiftly became solid under the harsh ministrations of her bony hand.

Using the knife and his cock as levers, she got him up onto the table, peeled away his slacks and boxers. “Let me see you,” she husked in his ear, “show me what you really are."

He couldn't melt or run away, so he just took it. Froze solid as she lowered herself onto him, cold, tight and dry, spat on the head of it and impaled herself.

Inside, she felt like anything but flesh, ground-glass needles and gnashing teeth and mortuary marble, doors within doors opening in a cold black cathedral. He thought of the operation he'd interrupted, the looted fossils of a saint swapped out for her necrotic skeleton, and in the reliquary he saw a pale yellow pelvis, untransplanted—

Spastic reflex wrapped his arms around her, protruding ribs like notches for his fingers. Her torso shook as if she was full of panicked birds, and she hissed, to him or to herself, “Take your medicine."

Shuddering, she rose up and dropped herself hard against him, and spider webs of black ice shot through his hips and into his guts. In his head, he reviewed sums, columns of expenditure figures for the projected relocation scheme his company had sent him up here to investigate. Culling them fiercely in the quiet corners of his mind, he noted two adding errors and committed them to memory; as soon as he got back to his laptop, he'd correct them—

The knife never left his throat. It sawed back and forth as she smashed herself against him, eyes rolled back, breath choppy gusts of frigid mist that grew colder with every stroke, despite the unbearable friction.

"Take it, take it,” she growled in his ear, and in the cold and heat he felt he'd lost what he'd put into her, it was hers now, and she was fucking him to death with it. He could only hold on.

Her rhythm sped, stiffened, such a ferocious blur of motion that he regretted daring to open his eyes, and she screamed, “He's coming, faster, he's coming!"

The sensation spreading through him now pulled him further away from the world, fired his gut-sense that the agony of pleasure he felt was really her, taking him over. He hid from it, crying inside, please God, just let it be over—

And then it was, and his skin was slathered in cold motor oil, and she was gone. He did not look around or try to cover himself, huddled on the icy steel table in a puddle of oil and urine, shocked mute by the sudden stillness.

The ground shook.

Dust and grit sprinkled his cold, raw skin. He rolled off the table and hitched his piss-soaked pants up. He was alone in the dark. It was so quiet, he could hear the Volvo, still idling out on the street, and those faint, phantom chimes. But something else was coming, an itch in the soles of his feet, a tremor that shivered through his bowels, and he remembered what she'd said, just before she vanished.

He's coming—

A steady, subsonic rumble spread up through the floor, a silent sound of pure terrestrial protest. A whole patch of ceiling gave way, dumping plaster and shattered concrete and spark-spitting washing machines into the garage.

Howell crawled under the gate and scrambled up the driveway on all fours, uttering a weird, panicked hooting sound with each hard-fought breath. He could still hear his car, so close, he could hear the seat belt alert beeping endlessly, and the dull burble of the public radio talk show he'd tuned in on the stereo, but he could also hear voices on the street, and those chimes, growing louder, reverberating off the encircling walls of Atwater. And buzzing—

Howell hit the sidewalk and had to remind himself to get up and run to the Volvo. He saw no one around it, but the honeycomb man stood in the middle of the street, and he wasn't alone.

Another man, short, with a head like a claw-hammer, and snarls of piano wire running from his arms and legs and torso to a jumbled mound of marionettes in the street behind him, like the sole survivor of some sort of street-mime's massacre. A little girl stood beside them, sucking her thumb and holding a length of an impossibly long albino python, which wrapped around her so many times, showing neither head nor tail, that she might have been made out of snakes.

She pointed at Howell as he ran for his car. The honeycomb man shouted, “Wait! Take us with you!"

He said something else, but though Howell saw his mouth working, he could hear nothing but the sound of jets, a squadron of them, flying up out of the secret, hollow heart of the earth.

Behind Howell, the townhouse lurched forward and settled down into the underground garage. The apartment block behind it bulged and broke open, rooms bursting like bubbles full of abandoned human lives and flaming debris flying, and smoke and something coming through it, something that made the freaks on the street race for his car. Howell got in and slammed the door, locked it and threw the car in gear.

He screamed and threw the wheel to the right, jumping the curb and flattening a street sign. The honeycomb man spilled across the hood in a roiling cloud of bees. Howell stomped on the gas, batting the air vents shut.

The puppeteer waved at him, hurling screaming marionettes into the grill of the car. Their wooden claws gouged out his headlights and chrome and ripped off his antenna as he passed, looking, looking for the narrow niche in the wall that he'd come in through, but it was gone, the intersection with the three convenience stores was now a T-junction facing a blank brick wall.

The insanity, the injustice of it all, finally broke him. He kept going forward, but he saw nothing.

And then the ground shifted, and the car was going uphill, but he only went faster, and the wall fell away as the ground rose, as something unspeakably heavy gained on him, making a sinkhole of Atwater from which he could not hope to escape.

Howell saw the freeway. The cars were hurtling by and he was headed into their midst in the wrong direction, but he did not care. He saw only fire and black smoke in his rearview mirror, and he wrenched the wheel around as the Volvo sailed off the ragged edge of the road and over the wall, and he saw a flash of white in the mirror. He looked and saw her face, a snowflake in the collapsing furnace, and then he was over the wall, and the car's axle nearly snapped as the car hit the on-ramp with the wheels at a right angle, but it sailed down the dry ice-plant embankment and swerved, amid a chorus of horns, into the flow of traffic.

Howell got off at the next exit and cleaned himself up. Then he went to his appointment in Burbank.

It was some weeks before Howell could admit to himself that he wasn't going to report the incident. To tell it would make it real, declare that he believed in it, but no one would believe him. How much easier to just go on, to leave it behind, when it fit nothing else in his life but his dreams, which he never remembered anyway. For over a year, a bad dream was all it was, and all it would ever be.

Until he got lost again.

Driving up to Sacramento, an interview for a senior accounting position with the state comptroller's office, and he would have flown, if not for the terror of handing over his life to some unseen mumbler with a bar tab in eight states. If he had been meticulous in his planning before, he was now obsessive. He bought maps and plotted his route and itinerary, and he researched Atwater, and made damned sure that nothing brought him any closer to it as he passed the junction he'd stumbled into last time.

He'd been stunned to discover it was a real place, an odd, isolated knothole in the haphazard sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, encircled by freeways and largely undeveloped since the early Seventies, but an unremarkable, ordinary place that had suffered only a few broken windows in the last earthquake. What might have driven a more curious man mad only salved the fear he hadn't dared confront since it happened, because it confirmed that it was all a bad dream. He drove through the Valley, and passed Atwater unmolested.

He had the route folded in his lap and the GPS unit in his new Volvo told him he was in the San Joaquin Valley on the northbound 5, entering Chowchilla, but the GPS unit had no way of knowing about the truck wreck, bodies strewn across both lanes and up the scrub-brush shoulders, naked children everywhere, and all he could do was clutch the map to his breast and tell himself, you're not lost, not lost, don't look—

But they were only pigs, scattered by the impact with a truck loaded with tanks of flammable gas that came off the Chowchilla on-ramp too fast. Only a pair of highway patrol cars had arrived, the troopers hanging their heads at the waste of good bacon.

Detour signs and sawhorses with rusty orange blinking lights diverted the traffic up through Chowchilla onto the two-lane eastbound 140. Howell followed the signs through the tiny town and turned north on the 99 at the promise of eventually reaching Sacramento thereby. Remarkably, almost no other cars joined him on the detour, preferring to sit in gridlock while the dead pigs were mopped up, and he should have sneered at their stupidity, but instead, he couldn't stop wondering what they knew—

He was on the 99, he was sure of it, when it started to rain. Suddenly, he was driving through a car wash, and the GPS unit in the dash, in fact everything in the dash, blinked and went black.

He hit the windshield wipers, but they didn't work. He braked soberly to a stop, angling to the right shoulder and hitting his hazard lights, though no sign that they worked either. He was about to call Onstar and have them send a tow truck, and he had his map out on his lap, when he saw two men step into the tiny arena of his headlights, arm in arm and grappling, legs crazily digging for traction in the slick mud.

Howell had his phone in his hand when the two men smashed their heads together and staggered back into the dark. He was pushing the number he had programmed to speed-dial the friendly Onstar operator somewhere in Bombay or New Delhi, who would use satellite imagery and impeccable, pleasingly accented English to guide him out of the storm, and back to the highway, even though he was definitely not lost—

His eyes roved over the map, up the 5 to the 140 to the 99, and up the 99 past Merced, and a tiny town just off the highway, though no roads to or from it showed on the map. The town was called Atwater.

He looked out the window. Each fighter had his hands around the other's throat, and throttled his foe for all he was worth. Faces purple and streaming in the rain, they had wrung each other half to death when one suddenly kicked the other in the gut. The injured man folded, and his attacker pressed the advantage with ruthless abandon, smashing his head again and again into the pavement.

Howell sat there watching, even after the dashboard lights came back on, and the windshield wipers gave him a clearer view.

The victor lifted the vanquished up by his head, looking deeply, longingly, into the eyes of the man he'd beaten. Then his arms tensed and he squeezed the skull, crushing it as his mouth opened wider, jaw unhinged, skin stretched, to engulf the top of the broken head between his lips. Howell's hands fumbled for the gearshift, switched on the hi-beams. Oblivious to the light, the victor opened his mouth still wider, hoisting his twitching enemy off his feet and forcing the body, inch by inch, into his own.

Howell reversed and floored it, headed back the way he'd come. But the road was different. Corn crowded in on both sides. He saw peaked Victorian rooftops behind the waving stalks, but knew he'd find no help there. His brain crawled out of his skull and flew above the racing Volvo. If he hadn't been so meticulous in his bathroom stops this trip, he would have voided his bladder as he screamed through the town of Atwater.

Not a single board of a building looked familiar, but he knew it was the same town.

He passed an intersection that wasn't there before, a big black sign swinging above an old wire-hung traffic light said PENTACOST ROAD.

He passed a man dressed in his mother's skin, that still screamed and nagged in his ear; another who sweated fabulous tumors of molten gold, and fungal, crystalline growths like diamonds; an armless, legless nude woman in an eyeless rubber mask and ball-gag stuffed in her mouth, raced along side the car, borne aloft by black segmented tentacles growing from her gaping, snapping vagina.

The crumbling Victorian mansions crept closer to the road until they strangled it. In its death-throes, the road thrashed from left to right until a mansion blocked the road entirely, and Howell aimed for the narrow alley between the colossal house and its neighbor, but the car wedged itself into the space and refused to budge in either direction. Howell climbed over the seats and out the back.

The storm battered the land with an ever-growing din, but still he heard the somnolent music of those molten chimes, coming from everywhere and nowhere—and growing louder. He looked frantically all around, waving a flashlight in the rain-slashed dark, but still he ran full into the honeycombed man before he saw him.

Howell fell on the pavement, but rolled and aimed the flashlight at the man. His problem with the bees had gotten worse. They were bigger, the size of hummingbirds circling his head, dancing secrets to each other on his shoulders, the hexagonal combs like shotgun holes in his face and neck and down beneath his shirt.

"Hurry,” the honeycombed man said, and the bees echoed, “she's waiting for you."

Howell backed away from the man, from his car, from his own body. There had to be a way out of this, a way to escape, to wake up—

He turned and took a long stride to run away, but there was the man who'd beaten—and eaten—his doppelganger. “Get me out of here,” the man said, and fingers squirmed out of his mouth, clawed at his lips. The fighter bent over, wracked by spasms and surges of movement under his muddy white suit. He screamed, and Howell saw something thrashing in the seat of his pants, tearing away the fabric, a tail—no, a leg...

Howell backed away again, but he heard angry bees circling behind him. The man threw himself at Howell's feet, screaming so loud, so wide, Howell could see the man inside him screaming, too.

"Come on.” The honeycombed man took his arm and dragged him to the porch of the mansion in the road. Cobalt blue lanterns saturated the darkness in the parlor, vertebral shadows of legions of ferns, and among them, a bed, and on it, a woman's body—

But no, it wasn't her, and had he hoped it would be? This one was enormous, a monstrous puffball belly with drained, flaccid limbs trailing away from it like the knotted fingers of surgical gloves. Sizzling wings at his back drove him closer.

"Mr Howell,” she said, and he started, because underneath all that, it was her. “I know all about you, Howell. I even know your real name. What do you know?"

"I...” He looked around, at anything but her, and he heard creaking, crackling sounds, the ferns growing up through the floor so fast they glowed, feeding on the fever-heat, the light, pouring out of her. “I don't know anything."

"You got away, but you keep getting lost, you keep coming back."

"I got away because I don't belong here. This is all some kind of a—"

"Mistake?” Her breath hitched in her, like laughter, or something inside trying to escape. “You escaped because you have no imagination. You don't dream."

"I had a dream ... about you, before. You ... This ... This is a dream—"

"This is a dream.” The ground rumbled. The walls shook off pictures and knickknacks. A window looking out on the street shattered, the wind and rain pried away the storm shutters. Her belly shifted and stirred. “But it's more real than where you think you came from."

Her hand shot out and caught his. He pulled away so hard he staggered into the wall, his shoulder went right through the moldy plaster. “You ... did something to me. Why did you do that?"

Her face brightened. “You remember! I didn't want to give you the wrong idea, but there was no time. There's no time now either.” Her hand caressed the turgid globe of her belly.

"I don't understand what's going on here, but what are you?” He swallowed and choked as he realized he was most afraid that she was not real. “All of you? What happened to you?"

"You did.” She convulsed, pain drawing her into a ball around her pulsating womb.

He pointed and stammered, “No, that's not mine."

"You sound like you've done this before.” She shrieked and made ribbons of the sheets. Her heels dug into the mattress, kicking divots of flea-infested stuffing across the rumbling room.

Howell knew he should take her hand, but was terrified of coming any closer. Her belly contorted as if it caged a wild animal, then two animals battling, then each of them began to transform to catch the other at a disadvantage. Her skin stretched out into wild formations, stalks like roots and the eyes of overripe potatoes looking for anchorage or food to fuel its runaway metamorphosis—looking for him.

Howell backed into and right through the wall. He tripped over crumbling plaster and spilled into the atrium, narrowly dodging the heavy front door swinging in the whipping wind. The rain was no longer rain. Hot ash and bits of still-flaming debris swept by his face.

The hordes of Atwater, a hundred or more of them, crowded into the cul-de-sac before the mansion. On the horizon, a blood-red sun rose and swiftly grew, for it was not rising into the sky, but rolling up the road. The horde met this sight with bestial screams and wails of despair, but they remained rooted, distracting themselves with desperate last-minute orgies, battles and suicide attempts. Though they seemed incapable of coming, killing or dying, still they chased these forbidden states in the burning rain even as the red sun drew closer.

The chimes grew louder, a steamroller trampling a forest of tubular bells. Inside, the woman called out to him, but he was fixed to the spot.

As the sun swelled, it came clear to Howell. A towering, brazen idol, taller than the highest weather vane on any of the mansions it shouldered aside as it rolled down the street on iron-shod wheels.

A giant, saturnine head and torso, with great hands outstretched to lift its worshippers to its grinding mechanical jaws. The whole idol glowed dull red with the heat of the furnace raging inside it. All that it touched crumpled in white flames, but the hordes of freaks crowded closer, herded by cage-headed alienists with baling hooks and pikes.

The horde tortured itself, each tearing at the deformities of his or her neighbor as the heat between them came alive with light and fire. Packed closer and closer together as the idol trapped them in the cul-de-sac, they approached an ecstasy of panic, yet they meekly stepped or knelt, singly and in knots of writhing bodies, onto the spreading palms of the glowing idol.

Howell knew this was the thing from which he had averted his eyes, the last time he got lost in Atwater. When she said, “He's coming,” she meant this. Now, it was too late to escape, the horde danced on his trapped car. He could go through the mansion, dive out a window on the other side and run all the way home, if he had to, but he got no further than the parlor, where the woman's ordeal was, for better or worse, nearly over.

The woman who raped him told him the thing inside her was his. He could come no closer than the hole he'd made in the wall, but he could not run away from it. Her legs jerked and wrenched impossibly akimbo, laying bare her privates, and a glimpse of something fighting its way out of her.

No one had ever asked for what she took from him. No one had ever wanted anything from him but his facility as a calculator, and so the violence with which she had taken his seed had left him curiously stronger than he'd been, before. He'd never realized how much he feared human contact, and he saw in her slitted eyes, now, how much like him she was, how loathsome the act had been for her, but how desperately necessary.

That the act had produced some offspring, here in this place that was insanity itself, was the only sane thing Howell could find to cling to.

He went to her and took her hand. He tried to soothe her with words and touch, but she seemed beyond noticing. “If you're going to be the mother of my child,” he said, “I think you could at least tell me your name."

Her eyes rolled but focused on him, and in the midst of her panting seizure, she found breath to laugh at him for real. “Your child? Oh, Howell, you idiot."

A rush of scalding heat raised blisters on his face, and the outer wall melted away like a tortilla under a blowtorch. Outside, all he could see was a single red eye, glowering cruel and absolute with the fires of a collapsing sun behind it, a brain that blasted all it touched to atoms. It looked full on them, now, as, all at once, the woman gave birth.

Her hand clasped his and the mountain of her belly tore open like a water-balloon smashing into a wall.

Ferns curled and turned to silver tornadoes of ash. Swamps of sweat vaporized out of the sheets. The woman's hand went slack and deflated in his grip, split open like rotten fruit. Howell's own clothes smoldered and gave off puffs of steam and smoke, but he noticed none of it.

The thing that squatted in the ruined chrysalis of the woman at first looked like nothing more than her insides, bones, muscles, guts and all, stirred and resculpted into a crude effigy of a newborn child, but it redefined itself as he watched. Swaddled in blood and shreds of uterine lining, the thing uncoiled and opened its eyes. Swollen sacs of tissue burst and unfurled into membranous wings, and Howell understood.

"Thank you,” she said, her voice piping and unsteady in its new vessel, “for helping me escape. I'm sorry you won't."

The wings snapped and beat the air, shaking off slime and lifting the newborn body into the air in one swift motion. Howell ducked, then made a half-hearted attempt to catch her, but she eluded him and dove out the window, into the eye of the idol.

And then the whole house was flying sideways, and Howell had no choice but to go with it. The chiming, roaring explosion went on forever, the room rolling end over end and dancing wheels of fire all around him. And when it all stopped, he was too broken to move, but somehow, he was outside.

The brazen idol clawed at the sky, at a fleeting dart of light that was well away from its glowing grip, and the idol seemed to come unhinged inside, and all its parts simply disconnected from the others and the furnace, unleashed, spilled out waves of fire upon the hordes. Howell ran and ran and still the sound of the fire rolling, gaining, eating up the land, grew in his ears, but he kept running, in his mind calculating his speed and caloric consumption and estimated time of arrival if he just ran and ran home, if he ran to Mexico, if he just ran around the world and came back to this exact point—

Somewhere, long before he got home, he dropped in his tracks and fainted, mind and body completely spent.

And he woke up in a ditch beside the 99 just outside the town of Chowchilla, a sheriff's deputy in an orange poncho poking him in the ribs with a flashlight. “Thought you was one of them pigs,” said the deputy.

He held his life together pretty well, after that, all told, and most of the time, he didn't remember his dreams.

He worked from home, toting up accounts for several small, borderline illegal companies. He did not, could not, go outside. The fear that he would get lost again, that he might lose track of the route down the street to the corner store, kept him inside. In every corner of every place he did not know as intimately as well as his own body, a doorway to Atwater waited.

And yet he kept working, eating and sleeping, because, though he did not admit it even to himself while he was awake, he hoped for something.

He lurched on through life like this for months before the dreams started to push through into work, into the blank spaces on the screen and the black pauses between commercials on TV. Her face, her wings lifting her out of the fire and into the sky. He still lived, he began to see, only because he thought she would come back.

That there might be some sign, some message to affirm that she was not just a dream, he began to seek out, but nothing came forth to save him. He looked for other Atwaters and found one, in Minnesota—'a small, friendly community which welcomes people with open arms’ said the website of the town ‘named for Dr E.D. Atwater, of the land department of the St Paul and Pacific Railroad'—but nothing to distinguish it or marry it to the others, except its name. He did searches, found people, companies, named Atwater, but nothing that resonated ... until he found a listing in his old local phone book, and did a search on the computer.

Atwater Transpersonal Institute. The website gave a breezy outline of treatments, but Howell didn't read them. He looked only at the picture on the home page, of a row of couches with people lying on them, sleeping peacefully with spider webs of electrodes pasted to their skulls. He studied the woman on the nearest couch, the planed bones of her face, the black wings of hair flared out on the pastel pillow, and he got his car keys.

At the end of a quiet residential street, on the peak of a hill overlooking Presidio Park with its Spanish colonial fortress, the Atwater Institute looked like the first outpost of yet another colonization. A low, faux-adobe building huddled around a conical tower of tile and glass. It hid itself from the street behind white brick walls and eucalyptus trees, but the gates readily swung open when Howell pressed the button at the unmanned security checkpoint. He drove up the cobblestone path to the front doors, where a nurse waited. He wanted to turn around and go back home, but he forced himself to get out and walk up to her. “I think—I know a woman who is being treated here. I'd like to see her, please."

The nurse only stared, backed away and went inside, leaving the door hanging open. He followed, pausing helplessly as a valet slipped into his car and whisked it off to an underground garage.

Inside, the atrium was dimly lit by a soothing cobalt light. Banks of ferns in hanging pots softened the outlines of the room, and a soft, almost inaudible music played somewhere, an atonal carillon stirred by alien wind.

Howell wanted out, needed in. She's here, somewhere, it's all here, it wasn't in your mind, oh God, it was all real—

"I'll get Dr Atwater,” the nurse said, and fled the room. Howell looked at abstract pictures on the walls, at a watercolor of a man with a beehive for a head, at another of a man being strangled by marionettes with their own wires, which sprouted out of his flesh.

"Art therapy,” said a voice over his shoulder. “It's not pleasant to look at, but it makes them healthier."

"What else do they do?” Howell turned and looked at the Doctor's feet. He could not look at his face, but he heard the man's reaction.

"I ... My God, what're you doing here?” asked Dr Atwater.

"You treat people with sleep therapy here, right?"

"That's correct. Maybe you—"

"I have been having bad dreams for a number of years, Doctor. About this place."

"I can't say I'm surprised. Maybe if I could show you...” Dr Atwater beckoned him through a door into an even darker corridor. Howell followed, looking around him. The music was louder back here. Atwater said, “Binaural tones guide the treatment. Shamanic cultures know it and use them in rituals, in drumming and trance-inducing states to guide the shaman into the realm of the spirit. It's subtler than medication, and it doesn't blunt the subconscious input from the limbic system. It lets dreams become the patient's reality."

"For how long?"

"In my papers, I recommended three-day regimens over several months, but the modalities promised so much more for extreme cases, if we could only push deeper, longer. But you know all this."

Howell stopped avoiding the doctor's eyes. “Where is the woman? The one in the picture?"

Atwater opened a door, waved Howell closer. A body lay on the couch that filled the cell. Howell leapt at it, but froze.

The honeycombed man twitched and shivered on the couch. He wore mittens and restraints, but still his face was red and chafed, all facial hair plucked out from compulsive grooming.

"One of our most challenging cases. He suffers from a massive OCD complex, but in his therapy he externalizes his disorder, manifesting it in terms he can metaphorically abolish. He's been dreaming for a month on, a week off for two years, and he's getting better."

Blinking, seeing the bees like ravens on the patient's face, Howell muttered, “No, he's not.” Then, rounding on the Doctor, he demanded, “Where is she?"

He looked deep into Dr Atwater's eyes then, and though they were a cold blue, he saw the lambent red glow in them. His mouth made a bold pretense of smiling openness, but his brow was forked with wrathful wrinkles, and his rusty red beard formed a half-mask of flames. “I'm afraid I don't understand. Who are you looking for?"

"You know, don't you lie!” Howell flinched at his own voice, but he took hold of the Doctor's arms and pushed him back against the wall. “You were there! You tried to eat her up like all the others, but she got away from you!"

Atwater's eyes flashed, his jaw dropped. “So, you found a back door into the group. Well, that's a mystery solved, at any rate."

As if done with Howell, he made to turn away and go about his business, but Howell slammed him again into the wall. “Where is she?"

"Gone. Transferred to a private institution. Her parents might not sue. They're very wealthy, powerful people, and they were very upset when their neurotic, drug-addicted daughter came to us to be cured and emerged a full-blown autistic."

"Your dream therapy fucked up her brain?"

"No, Howell, you did. She got it from you.” Atwater opened another door onto darkness. “Here, I'll show you."

Howell stepped inside. A body lay on the couch, but there were many machines, a congregation of automated mourners beeping and wailing their grief and providing the only light, trees with IV dripping solutions and the atonal music of binaural chimes.

Atwater spoke into his ear in a low whisper. “He was our first extreme case. Semi-vegetative autistic from birth, ward of the state, we secured power of attorney before the first bricks of the Institute were laid. He was going to be my greatest triumph."

Howell approached the couch, feeling like he did in the mansion, as if he were about to ignite and combust from the heat of the idol, from the heat pouring out of the body on the couch.

"At first, he responded swimmingly, but the deeper we tried to drive into his subconscious, the more he retreated ... until one day, about three years ago, he just stopped waking up. I concluded that the psychic disintegration—for that's what it looked like, to me—was a result of his distorted self-concept, his lack of imagination. But I underestimated just how powerful his imagination really was, didn't I?"

Howell tried to remember where he went to school, who his parents were, anything more than three years old, and wondered why none of it had ever mattered before. Because he was a hermetically sealed, self-contained world unto himself, and nothing outside him had ever been anything but numbers, until she forced him to touch her, and escaped—

"At the time, we never reckoned on the possibility that our patients were manifesting in a shared environment, let alone that one could escape it. When Ms Heaton began to exhibit your symptoms, we thought it was a ploy. Ms Heaton was very cunning, manipulative, and had attempted suicide more times than her family bothered to keep track of. We never dreamed she could contact the other patients, let alone that she might find you. But you found her."

Howell leaned closer to the sleeper, eyes roving over the only truly familiar face he'd ever known. The geography of it, seen from any angle for the first time, totally engrossed him, so that he didn't notice when Atwater locked the door and took out a syringe.

"His name is Jeremy Ogilvie, but we use code names for our patients, to protect their privacy. The nurses coined his—he used to scream at the top of his lungs whenever he was touched, so they called him the Howler."

Atwater's shadow loomed across the white desert of sheet, but Howell only leaned closer to the sleeping face.

"For so long, I've thought of you, Mr Howell, as my only failure. It would appear that you are the only one I ever really cured."

Howell reached up and touched the mouth of the sleeping face, and smiled when its eyes opened.

Copyright © 2008 Cody Goodfellow

SKINJOBS & SPOOKS

Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror deserves much better company than grindhouse association with Quentin Tarantino's mediocre and wholly self-indulgent chase ‘n’ crash road-movie Death Proof. Although it's easy to dismiss as nothing more than trashy sci-fi horror, Rodriguez's film is hugely enjoyable. Unlike the egotistical Mr T, the maker of Planet Terror clearly takes his work a bit more seriously than he takes himself. Directorial conceit is far less obvious in this attempted throwback to a fondly remembered video boom that opened fresh markets for cheaply produced genre flicks offering zero artistic merit but oodles of bloodthirsty fun. Here, go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan, Charmed) becomes the instantly iconic one-legged heroine just by fixing a rifle to her thigh stump, making ready to shoot-up infected troops or rednecks puffed into puss-bag hideousness by exposure to a stolen airborne bio-weapon. Recklessly absurd, plot-wise and aesthetically, this energetic OTT use of explosive squibs, and skilful application of CGI, results in almost deliriously non-stop splatter once the main characters have been properly introduced and predictably assumed their rightful positions for the slaughterhouse survival game of revenge and escape.

Years before micro-skirted McGowan stumbled to victory, eternally nubile Milla Jovovich battled zombie hordes in futuristic Raccoon City and beyond. Since playing weird but endearing alien Leeloo in Luc Besson's entertaining space opera The Fifth Element, she's become the reigning queen of popular sci-fi action cinema. As martial arts assassin Alice, she presides over the notably successful subgenre franchise of Resident Evil, its immediate sequel Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and now Russell Mulcahy's post-apocalypse and Nevada desert-bound Resident Evil: Extinction, she wins the hearts, while purpose fully neglecting the minds, of fanboys by vigorously exterminating undead animals, maniacal humans, and mutant creatures alike. Betrayed by unscrupulous corporation bosses (who probably created her) roving slayer Alice is naturally distrustful of everyone she meets, and is not particularly discerning about her targets: if ugly, nasty, obviously corrupted (genetically and/or ethically), she kills. Expect episodic wall-to-wall and sky-to-earth mayhem as the hellish wasteland throws everything, from ambushing ghouls to skinless hounds and killer crows, at the nomadic survivors led by Claire (Ali Larter, Heroes) and Carlos (Oded Fehr). Of course, cross-matching Mad Max 2 with Underworld: Evolution does not bring us any genre innovation, but it presents unexpected miracles by the psionic heroine (as when ‘brain power’ defeats a spy satellite), and the fast-bred army of Alice clones provides one final twist that's likely to prompt a fourth adventure.

A minor gem of the Cabin Fever and Evil Dead variety, but one that skilfully avoids the need for lashings of blood and gore, Robert Wilson's Dead Mary boasts vastly superior, dramatically engaging character studies. The long weekend away for a party of close friends results in paranoia and violence when a mysterious force exposes petty jealousies and profound betrayals. This compelling story of—apparently—supernatural possession is subtly enhanced by lots of telling little details, ensuring that the formal production values are equal to the strong and intense performances of an outstanding ensemble cast led by Dominique Swain (Lolita remake, Plain Dirty, Toxic). If you enjoy tightly focused psychological thrillers, which reveal social breakdown in small isolated groups driven from instinctive suspicion to cold-blooded murder by inner demons and/or outside influences, this one's definitely for you. If you prefer zombie flicks dripping with the crimson stuff, Automation Transfusion fits the bill, and not in a pleasant way, either. Released on R1 DVD by Dimension Extreme ‘unrated and undead', Steven C. Miller's brutal gore-fest with teenage heroes fighting hordes of quick-moving infected cannibals becomes surprisingly effective, once flat-liner intros and unavoidable prelim dramas give way to ultra-violent scenes of animalistic savagery and graphic mutilation. Of course, it's all down to secret government experiments. The resulting virus gets beyond control and regional quarantine leaves townsfolk at the mercy of running, swimming, hunting mobs. Jittery camerawork hides a low-budget production's distinct lack of pro stunt work or perfectly choreographed action seemingly required nowadays for depicting widespread collapse into shotgun anarchy but, in compensation, gifts the madness with a rawness of tone and unsubtle energy that few modern apocalypse horrors can match. Although the amateurish cast fail to emote with believable screaming or convincing panic, the satisfyingly OTT luridness (a foetus ripped out and chewed), repetitive feastings on cornered suburbanites, agreeably witty moments (play-dead corpses on the school gym floor rouse suddenly with a furious hunger), and cliffhanger ending all seem likely to prompt slack ‘you-must-be-joking’ expressions from deadhead viewers, this movie ought to find favour with admirers of that edgy Dawn Of The Dead remake. A sequel, Automation Transfusion: Contingency, is underway for next year. How to prevent another plague of imitative schlock? “You gotta shoot ‘em in the head!"

Ironically, David Arquette's comedy-horror ‘homage’ The Tripper only goes to prove, yet again, that any filmmaker purposely attempting to create a cult movie, whether it's a profound or a silly one, is doomed to failure. Always. No matter that its producers have assembled a remarkable cast (including Lukas Haas, Balthazar Getty, Thomas Jane, Jaime King, Paul Reubens, Jason Mewes, and Courteney Cox), for their neo-hippies’ backwoods’ festival of party-dude music and free love; where the cheaply satirical carnival of junkie clichés, chainsaw homicide, nudist victims, and LSD hallucinations, are rudely interrupted by a Gipper-masked Reaganite psycho, gleefully hacking up counterculture wannabes, without caring whether they're espousing anti-Republican propaganda, or not. It's never funny or scary or very clever. It's plainly derivative, not crazily inventive. It's like many other Hollywood celebrity's oversubscribed vanity projects. Apparently too snobby to craft a genuine or pure horror movie, here's a debutant director failing to develop even a laudable tribute to exploitation cinema. “Hilarious,” claims the publicity blurb. Oh, give it a rest, please...

'Extreme edition’ has become a common marketing ploy for horror movies on DVD, but Saw IV, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (who also made parts II and III), obeys the now familiar law of diminishing returns for grimly exploitative sequels. Jigsaw's usual psycho signature gimmicks embracing moral dilemmas running just like clockwork, and typically fatal torture systems—designer apparatus that would impress Heath Robinson's evil twin—are present and merrily non-PC again. But now there's tiredness and lack of genuine imagination here, especially with regard to the ingenuity of the cruel-to-be-kind ‘life lessons', using sadistic devices engineered to maim or kill. We even get the clichéd situation of a hanging man, bound and helpless, standing atop a block of melting ice. Mechanistic flurries of fast-forward editing, swathes of borrowed plot twists guiding a batch of unsympathetic characters towards obvious/ignominious fates, and a half-hearted attempt to paint a redemptive streak onto notorious serial killer Jigsaw's case history, frame the main action. Yet, no matter how far single-minded violent bloodletting is pushed in movies, it rarely gets under the viewer's skin as proficiently as the full-blown head-trip resulting from script wrangling by superb actors, if teamed with a proven director frequently capable of genius.

William Friedkin's Bug turns a stage-play by Tracy Letts, about a bemusing mismatched couple, into a veritable tour de force of claustrophobic strangeness, inching down the razor's edge between increasingly disturbed livewire psychodrama and hysterical farce. Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon star as Agnes and Peter. Hardly a step up from lonesome trailer trash and antisocial conspiracy-theorist nutcase, they determinedly feed on, or positively reinforce, each other's romantic fantasies, paranoid delusions, and longing for significant moments in failed, wasted lives. As imaginary ‘bugs’ settle deeper into their dual consciousness, breeding likes flies on horseshit, their relationship escalates from whimsy and desire to insanity and obsession. Languid passion turns into feverish mania. Although it's only slightly reminiscent of the director's blatantly fantastical episode Nightcrawlers, for 1980s’ Twilight Zone, this is a similarly uncompromisingly intimate portrait of a seemingly unavoidable descent into self-destructive madness, building on the initial premise of a downbeat soap opera to embrace savage humour and theatrical horrors lurking in the background of moribund American life.

Based on a true story? The ‘say you love Satan’ killer inspired Dave Campfield's inept Dark Chamber (aka: Under Surveillance). This one concerns a cult of devil worshippers spying on the residents of an apartment house, where muddled intrigues abound, a noisily brooding score overwhelms every important dramatic scene, and the supposedly amateur b&w videorecordings (from hidden pinhole cameras) are confusingly mixed with primary colour footage, so wide angles and fisheye-lens views are presented as interchangeable with close-ups and other standard constructive filmmaking techniques. Is this a fully intentional blurring of fictional reality and psychological fantasy, or evidence that a paltry $30k budget was insufficient for ‘blocking’ scenes effectively, or even for adequate rehearsal time (several clumsy performances have the killing stench of beginner's misfortune)? Many errors by a probably overworked first-time writer, director, producer and actor might be easily forgiven, but editorial incompetence is not one of them.

"Are you telling me ... the devil is in my daughter?” Yes, of course. Where else would you expect to find Satan nowadays? Based on a true story, Ethan Wiley's supernatural soap opera Blackwater Valley Exorcism has demonically exploited Isabelle (Kristin Erickson) testing her mind-reading act on friends and family, practicing ritualistic self-harm, violently attacking her mother, becoming a lewd tease for any predatory males in authority, including the local sheriff (Jeffrey Combs), and a bishop (James Russo), and then doing her utmost to expose the numerous secrets, misdeeds and hypocrisies surrounding her. Is she aiming for queen snitch of the year award? With silly dialogue ("Get that priest in here, ASAP!") by debutant screenwriter Ellary Eddy, this hilariously bad piece of generic filmmaking reiterates every fashionably unclean cliché known to man, woman, or beast, and scores a direct 666 hit each time. Truly, this is a ridiculously sinful melodrama that's required viewing only for those poor souls compelled by a higher power.

Luis de la Madrid's The Nun (aka: La Monja) reminds us that female preachers also get involved with just as much evil in the twisted world of cinema. Years after attending the boarding school run by nasty Sister Ursula, troublesome students become victims of a vengeful spirit emerging via spooky CGI from household waters. One of the dead women has a grown-up daughter who visits Barcelona with friends to investigate these violent deaths, linked to an unsolved mystery at the Catholic school. Although scripted by talented Jaume Balagueró (director of The Nameless, Fragile, Darkness) it's difficult to take a conventional plotline such as this seriously, following a generation of Killer Nun shockers. Del Toro and Yuzna get name-checked, I Know What You Did ... and Blair Witch are referenced, and events proceed in a timely yet unsurprising manner, with the Spanish travelogue and cultural peculiars only stocked in minimum quantities, but all that adds up to is a merely adequate wet-phantasmal timewaster.

Catacombs is a chase thriller in which sheltered and troubled Victoria (Hawaiian born Shannyn Sossamon, Wristcutters: A Love Story) joins her rebellious sister Carolyn (singer Pink in her first dramatic role) in France, where the girls attend an illegal party in the limestone labyrinth of mass graves in abandoned mine workings under Paris (as featured prominently in versions of Phantom Of The Opera, of course). Set-up from the start for a scary initiation, Victoria is hunted by a goat-masked killer, and discovers her sister's body, but then finds herself lost and alone in supposedly haunted tunnels, after the chaotic stampede of a police raid. Unsurprisingly, the horrifying prank staged by Carolyn backfires, leading to Victoria's panicky search for an exit from the nightmarish maze, in fear for her life. Boilerplate plotting and barely middling direction by newcomers Tomm Coker and David Elliot benefit greatly from outstanding cinematography by Maxime Alexandre—whose fine work on Switchblade Romance (aka: Haute tension), Hills Have Eyes re-make and P2 seems likely to keep him in demand. Excellent camerawork doesn't conceal the film's utter lack of effective suspense, however, and the repetitive use of total darkness—in which our token heroine just whimpers pathetically—eventually scuppers what little appeal the movie could have to fright fans. Judging by this unfortunately tension-free and wholly conservative effort, both filmmakers could probably learn a great deal from a close study of Argento's more violent and morbid works.

Identical sisters Agata and Catalina (both portrayed by Iliana Fox) share an eerie psychic linkage in KM 31 (aka: Kilómetro 31), directed by Rigoberto Castañeda (maker of Spanish stuck-in-a-lift horror Blackout). Mexican highway accidents centred on a roadside marker variously appal when stricken Agata is left comatose and paraplegic, and intrigue after distraught Catalina is drawn back to the haunted black-spot, followed closely by both women's boyfriends, and a somewhat obsessed local cop, to investigate the primal scene of repetitious ghostly appearances. Although the storyline is inspired by real events, and reminiscent of many a TV mystery movie plot, several clever twists and low-key CGI visuals lead to a deliciously spooky climax that's powerful, grotesque and tragic. There's much to admire in this modestly stylish production, which brilliantly captures a refreshing, esoteric take on many familiar supernatural and ghoulish affects, overcoming the minor burden of its clarifying flashback (with allusions to Clouzot's Diaboliques; Kubrick's Shining), concerning the shared childhood trauma connecting the twin girls with a unique bond transcending consciousness and death, and ultimately KM 31 wins viewers’ appreciation with a bravura finale—staged partly in a city sewer, partly in an old river—that'll never be forgotten easily like so many disposable-DVD spine-chillers of today.

Now released in a two-disc special edition, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is arguably the greatest supernatural horror film ever made, vastly superior to Stephen King's own mediocre TV miniseries adaptation, directed by Mick Garris. Jack Nicholson's career-defining stint as winter caretaker at the imposing Over-look hotel is one of the genre's finest performances. Right from the start, Jack Torrance seems a bit odd. Susceptible to psychological pressures of frustration and isolation, haunted by an assortment of weirdly menacing ghosts, Jack cracks up spectacularly, becoming the archetypal crazed axe-murderer, stomping through a snowbound garden maze while chasing his terrified wife and son. Sadly, this DVD is not the famed 142-minute ‘uncut’ version. For that, you still need the American R1 NTSC format release.

Apart from his digitally shrunken role as Gimli in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, John Rhys-Davies is well known for portraying cultured British gentlemanly types, albeit some times of the arrogantly bombastic variety, but in Chris Graham's invariably nasty shocker The Ferryman, he's a swarthy mad-dog sailboat lunatic, handy with a big knife. As the mysterious Greek, he rudely interrupts the romantic adventure of three couples on charter yacht Dionysus, cruising from New Zealand to Fiji with gregarious skipper big Dave (Tamer Hassan). A severed hand in a shark, and perfect weather that suddenly turns murky before the discovery of an abandoned boat, fore-shadow sexual violence and bloody murders. But it's not a straightforward slasher flick, as a body-swapping menace takes control of the yacht, with mind switching facilitated by some mystic-dagger stabbings—that result in a bizarre masturbatory scene amongst other things, with animal ferocity and evil viciousness in abundance. The plot's closing twist is very twisted indeed, but foreseeable if you pay attention to flashback de tails, character motivations and methods of dispatch for the much-delayed slaughter.

William Butler's Furnace is a prison ghost story. It stars Michael Paré (Philadelphia Experiment, Streets Of Fire), as the detective investigating suspicious deaths in maximum-security lockup. The ever-busy Tom Sizemore (Dream catcher, Black Hawk Down, The Relic, Heat) sleepwalks through his role as the corrupt guard, and the likes of Danny Trejo and Jeffrey ‘Ja Rule’ Atkins are typecast as inmates. Yes, there's a vengeful spirit on the loose, after a closed wing of the prison is reopened, but the reasons for murders, and the spooky finale's revelations of a ‘dreadful’ unsolved crime, fail to amount to much suspense or genuine horror. Renny Harlin's superior US debut Prison handled a similar cross-genre mystery twenty years ago, with sharper intrigues and memorable shocks.

Created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, reborn from a mix of bayou muck and chemical fires, substantially revised by the great Alan Moore (to award-winning prominence) in the 1980s, filmed by Wes Craven (novelised by Peter David, movie sequel by Jim Wynorski), then spawned for home screens in cult live-action and short-lived animated TV series, the peculiar history of hero-monster Swamp Thing is an outstanding case of innate thematic mutability, and witty re-imaginings for various markets, that's strongly in keeping with the evident comicbook nature (excuse the pun) of such a protean character. The first season runs to just 22 x 25-minute episodes of family-audience escapades in Louisiana, with Dick Durock reprising his titular role from the movies. Transformed from Dr Alec Holland into a big greenie that, despite a gristly voice and compost heap appearance, is not the least bit mean except when he's facing archenemy Dr Arcane (Mark Lindsay Chapman), a power-crazed yuppie conducting shady experiments on who knows what from hell knows where, Swamp Thing tackles various neat little morality plays, but the brisk dramas clearly fall victim to a narrative flippancy in so many woolly plotted fables, typically lacking the amusing quirkiness of a similar quietly judgemental benevolence, as later expressed rather more competently in TV shows like Eerie, Indiana. In the use of studio-bound wood-lands, many camouflage scenes are uncannily effective, as solitary Swampy readily blends into the background of trees and bushes.

Apart from righting wrongs or punishing the wicked, the largely peaceful Swamp Thing's mission here is to regain his supposedly ‘lost’ humanity (actually, that indefinable essence has remained intact within the creature—in a shrewd imitation of Frankenstein's monster, and the Incredible Hulk); but, as for the effectiveness of green-policy activism, well, it's not as if Swampy's an expert consultant or a top advisor to any environmental protection agency, or whatever. Granted, saving many lives, after the fact of violence or fatal accidents, by using magical healing powers to revive the dead, elevates this grotesque manifestation of a costumed superhero to the status of near god-like omnipotence. Yet even such a worthy figure is usually only able to correct avoidable mistakes, reverse horrible tragedies, and easily anticipate but rarely prevent occurrences of harm or damage (Swampy prefers to lurk silently in thin greenery and just spy on everybody), so human fallibility remains an obvious part of this principled character's essential charm. Swamp Thing's friendship with young Jim (Jesse Zeigler) is the most consistently disappointing aspect of the show, tending to reduce the format to simply another kiddie adventure series (tamed by its teatime TV schedule constraints?). However, its occasionally violent scenes, weirdly offbeat puzzlers, and revitalisation of tired 1970s’ evil stalker/ crooked science/monster-of-the-week routines, predates much better genre diversity of The XFiles, and Swamp Thing is greatly improved when poor Jim gets shipped away for South American slavery (!), and Kari Wuhrer (Sliders, Eight Legged Freaks) arrives mid-season as mysterious psychic beauty Abigail.

Set in Tennessee's hallelujah country but shot in Bulgaria, Tibor Takács’ Mega Snake follows the director's previous monster movie Ice Spiders (big skittering eight-leg freaks menace a ski resort), and is yet another knowingly cheesy Sci-Fi Channel ‘original’ film. Eagerly progressing up the food chain from poultry and dogs, to go at herds, farmers and family picnics, a fast-growing man-eating giant snake of Cherokee legends very soon takes on oil-pipeline proportions, leaving nothing and no one safe. Largely critic-proof and highly resistant to common sensical derision, this backwoods Anaconda offers wonderfully brainless fun moments, replete with slithery CGI (digital-dry visuals are unconvincing though nonetheless often creepy), modest horrors of a 30-foot snakeskin, smelly half-digested corpses, reckless yea-haw ATeam stunt action, and headless bodies on funfair rides. When guns and flame-throwers fail, a final solution involves killing the semi-mythical beastie from within. Luckless local Les (Michael Shanks, Stargate SG1) overcomes his fears to become a stoical hero who braves a risky and icky ordeal. And yes, of course, he saves the swallowed-whole girl too!

Also filmed in Bulgaria, Nacho Cerdà's ghost chiller The Abandoned is set in Russia, and tells of how middle-aged American, Marie Jones (British TV actress Anastasia Hille, who portrayed Carole Lombard in RKO 281), returns to the farm-stead of her adoptive parents, finds a proverbial old dark house bursting with sinister atmosphere, and is saved from drowning by Nicolai (Czech-born Karel Roden, 15 Minutes, Blade II, Rasputin in Hellboy) who claims to be her lost twin brother. Haunted by their doppelgängers, the frightened siblings find local time in disarray, with rooms and contents mysteriously shifting back four decades. Nicolai drops through a hole in the floor, and then frantic Marie's basic survival instincts kick in, but she's unable to escape the unnerving spectre of ultimate doom. Seething with despair, threatening intensity and inevitable tragedy, this is a deeply poignant drama about heart-breaking loss, and smothering parental yearning for missing children. Featuring disturbing use of special effects—reminiscent of climactic scenes from Neil Jordan's High Spirits and Peter Jackson's Frighteners but decisively serious in tone, lacking any comedic intent), here's a truly great supernatural mystery thriller with a powerfully resonant conclusion, that's resolutely downbeat yet tinged with sufficient hope so it won't leave the sort of nasty emotional stain likely to discourage repeat viewings.

Based on the Stephen King novella, Frank Dragon's The Mist [R1 DVD reviewed] benefits from a notable main cast, and has tolerably blatant CGI for various monster attacks, but the insipidly unoriginal ‘doomsday’ scenario of inter-dimensional alien invasion remains entirely predictable (right down to its twisted ending of supposedly guilt and grief-laden personal hell), only developing with tiredly excruciating slowness. Thomas Jane heads the group of ‘sane’ survivors trapped in a supermarket enveloped by sinister fog. The shut-in shoppers are menaced in turn by huge tentacles, flying bugs, giant spiders and immense Lovecraftian creatures stomping around somewhat lethargically. Marcia Gay Harden (Miller's Crossing, Space Cowboys) acts the crazy side of human error as an irredeemable religious nutcase leading her ‘congregation’ of simple-minded god-fearing souls. As a haughty lawyer, Andre Braugher is among the first batch of hapless casualties, Frances Sternhagen gives us her best feisty old biddy act, William Sadler is excellent as the belligerent coward, and Laurie Holden (Silent Hill) is the token heroine. Of course, we have visited this corner of Stephen's uncanny kingdom of dodgy SF-horrors before (in The Stand, Langoliers, Storm Of The Century, etc), where helpless groups or whole communities are inexplicably under siege from deadly evil powers clearly beyond the ken of sympathetic mortals. Ice ages of indecision pass routinely by while the hero's followers lurch closer to enacting basic safety measures and obvious precautionary steps. Why is plot advancement really dawdling for two hours here? Apart from the protracted aggro caused by Cthulhu's cousins there's less than 30 minutes of actual story, that's barely worth stretching to a moderately entertaining 45 minutes of genre telly.

Unfortunately, over-produced sci-fi twaddle has become Hollywood's forte. TV anthology series Masters Of Horror boasts a hugely impressive line-up of directorial talent, including Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, Tobe Hooper, Don Coscarelli and Joe Dante, among top ranked auteurs. DVD packs of 50-minute stories are perhaps too generously appointed, with mere 13-episode seasons released in two parts, to accommodate copious, or all-too-frequently OTT and formulaic, disc extras. Tales range from hardcore gore-fests and deliriously atmospheric satire, to brooding campfire yarns and surreal weirdness. Season one's highlights? John Carpenter's superb chiller Cigarette Burns gets the series off to a fine start, examining the undiluted power of bizarre cult cinema, as collector and rare-print finder discover the appalling secrets of a legendary picture, ‘La Fin du Monde'. Angela Bettis and Erin Brown (alias, Misty Mundae), are primed for a lesbian romance in Lucky McKee's quirky black comedy Sick Girl, when the side effects of a mysteriously symbiotic bug produce unusual yet unfortunately tragic consequences. Larry Cohen's entertaining thriller Pick Me Up stars Fairuza Balk, Laurene Landon and improv genius Michael Moriarty in a turf war between highway-roaming serial killers. Imprint by Takashi Miike (Ichi The Killer) is set in 19th century Japan where the plight of a peasant abortionist segues to gruelling tortured-geisha sequences, reportedly considered too extreme for regular US channels. John Landis’ witty folktale, Deer Woman, mixes road-kill crimes and Indian shape-shifter legends, with in-joke references to American Werewolf In London. Season two opens with lesser accomplishments, the contributions from Argento and Landis being mediocre, but Carpenter's archly provocative ProLife tackles anti-abortion issues with deliberate savagery, and presents campy demon-baby delivery effects upping the gratuitous content. Right To Die, by newcomer Rod Schmidt (Wrong Turn), does not compare to Carpenter's masterful balance of serious theme with schlock theatrics. Stuart Gordon's revision of Poe's The Black Cat lets Jeffrey Combs off the leash as the genre-defining poet, while Joe Dante turns in The Screwfly Solution, based on the short story by James Tiptree Jr, making this one of the very best episodes yet.

The weakest link here is undoubtedly series creator Mick Garris. His flawed scripts result in some of the least compelling horror dramas offered. Adapting a Clive Barker story for John McNaughton to direct, Haeckel's Tale proved a major disappointment in the first season. Garris directed Valerie On The Stairs and Chocolate, which are both instantly forgettable. Written by David J. Schow and directed by Tom Holland, We All Scream For Ice Cream is remarkably silly. Peter Medak's campy feast of cannibals The Washingtonians, based on a story by Bentley Little, serves a banquet on the wrong side of ridiculous. For Tobe Hooper's The Damned Thing, Richard Christian Matheson has adapted Ambrose Bierce, resulting in a modern classic of seemingly-viral apocalypse, Texas style, which sees a melancholy sheriff (Sean Patrick Flanery) confronting towns folk suddenly overtaken by homicidal/suicidal madness following a slow-burning dramatic aftermath to shocking opening scenes. Norio Tsuruta (maker of Premonition) turns a ghost story by Kôji Suzuki into ocean-going murder mystery Dream Cruise, in which a Japanese businessman confronts his adulterous trophy wife Yuri (Yoshino Kamura, Isola) and her lover, American lawyer Jack (Daniel Gillies, Captivity, SpiderMan 2), but nothing's what it seems aboard the pleasure boat as guilty secrets are revealed and there's plenty of J-horror spectral effects, in and out of the deep water, with typically stunning use of creaky sound throughout. Season closer The V Word, directed by Ernest Dickerson (Demon Knight), has bored teenage boys attacked by a vampire (Michael Ironside), when they break into a funeral parlour. Yet another uninspired script by Garris means the episode never gets up to speed, as thriller or revenge slasher, has no place very interesting to go, and nothing new to say anyhow. “Whatever happened to the piss and vinegar of youth, eh?” Jodelle Ferland (Tideland, Silent Hill, The Messengers) is largely wasted in a supporting role as the youngest victim. With a one-in-three average score for duds, this series maintains an entertainment standard few similarly anthological horror shows can equal.

Copyright © 2008 Tony Lee

You toss me another can of pre-mixed gin and tonic. I can't stand the stuff but you got it free off Jimmy Twice. Where he nicked it from is anybody's guess and I'm too monged to even try. All that bothers me is why you don't have to pay him anything for it. Well, I say ‘anything'. I've got visions of you bent over the water butt in the back yard, being fucked so hard that everything on your face is clenched. Commas of spittle flying out of a rictus. I'm sitting here, half twatted in a living room that is an insult to the name, getting a semi on over my best mate banging another man, over the thought of you banging another man. I'm that kind of sick. I'm that sort of stupid.

"How long?” she asks.

"Bit longer,” I reply.

But not too much longer, hey? Not, say, over three hours. Because now it's nine seventeen p.m.

I can live with that. For now. Just about. I like the look of you there on the sofa. I like the way your throat moves like a snake taking down a mouse every time you swallow some more of the G&T. Some people have that aggressive cartilage thing. I like the way your fringe is too long and threatens your eyes. I like the impudent jut of your tits under that biscuit-coloured Jigsaw jumper and the way the top of your jeans moves against that buff little belly of yours. Bare feet and lip gloss. A little ball of silver in your tongue; the occasional soft clack of it against your teeth. There's something turning on the stereo but it's too low to identify. Light from the candles catches on the vinyl and throws infinity signs to the far wall.

I'd give anything to be suffering from some kind of virus. Something to distract me from what's coming. Does anybody say they feel ‘poorly’ any more? I haven't heard that for years. We used to call something good ‘bad’ when I was a kid. Things haven't changed that much; I heard a boy on a bus with his face in a PSP call a Didier Drogba goal ‘well sick'. I used to read comics about boys who built go-karts out of bath tubs, American soldiers who died screaming ‘Aaaaargh!’ while the Japanese preferred ‘Aieeeeee!'. Five tongues wagging from a Bash Street mouth over a mound of sausage and mash. Sloo. Ooyah. Does anyone say, has anyone ever said that? Is everything good really Nang? Book? Sick? There's a boom for vintage objects on ebay. I had a look. You can pay forty quid for an Eagle-Eye Action Man with rubber grip fingers. There's stuff listed that I used to own and can no longer find. I think my mum had a clear out when I was at college. All of it in the bin. The MicroVision handheld games console. The parachute for my Action Man. The Rubik's Cube and the Slinky. All of it was shit. By which I mean, shit.

"Are you frightened?” She was. She couldn't stop swallowing, drink or no. She must have realised how dense a question it was, because she didn't wait for me to answer. “Are you pissed yet?"

"I'm on my way,” I reply. I feel like getting up to have a look in the freezer, see if you've got some vodka, something hard to ladle down me, but I'm afraid that standing up will spill me over. My legs feel about as steady as tubes of ash. And it's not the booze that's doing it. It's not the booze. You've become so still that the truly still parts of the house seem to contain more movement in them. I'm distracted by the patterns in the poor wallpaper; the way its edges don't quite match up. The music jags around the room like something trying to escape. The door seems to bow inward. Threat bloats. The less time there is, the more it drags. This song has been playing for ever.

Someone comes in with a face and a pair of riotous trousers. There's nothing else to focus on. Words are swapped, but I'm not saying any of them. There's the outline of something dangerous in his back pocket but it doesn't worry me because a knife is not how it's meant to go. The swagger of the song. The impudent bass and the harlequin fl ashes of guitar. The heart beat. The sweat and the need. The lisp and the cruelty. The swoon.

She said, “It's time to go."

I turn away. I remember. An autumn afternoon, sun low, burnt orange like dregs of Fanta evaporating to syrup. Flavours of childhood on my tongue. Get your coat on. Help me with the zip. Wellington boots. The way your socks never stay where they should. Old Spice on his face. Black comb sticking out of his back pocket. Back in time for tea. See you in a bit. Mum waving from the living-room window. I've got numbers in my mind. I count twenty-seven front doors. I count three red cars. I count seven aerials. I like maths. I'm good at it. He works me now, as we walk to the woods, to the derelict Burtonwood airbase.

"What's a half times a half times a half, then?"

"An eighth."

He looks at me. “How can that be?” he asks. “How, if you multiply something, can it become less than what you start with?"

I don't understand the question. I say, “When we find the hollow tree, will the fairy be there?"

"Maybe,” he says. He lights a fag. More smoke comes out of him than went in.

"Will she turn me into an octopus?"

"No. Don't worry."

"But I want to be an octopus."

The color in everything has been touched by the sunset. The bubbles in the iced-over puddles. His stubbly chin. The thick clouds of steam coming off the cooling towers at Fiddlers’ Ferry. I'm sure I can taste that colour. The cold dries my tongue. Boys in bikes with fishing rods head for the brook. We climb the stile into Bewsey woods. Dad and Mum come here to fill black bin bags with rotting leaves for their garden. They bicker in the bushes while I hunt for German soldiers hiding in the trees. Without Mum, Dad just smokes and stares, searching the branches for wood pigeon. In the summer, cross-country runners from the school come steaming along this path. Three miles, the course is. I can't run that far. I can't run half that. You get caned if you don't make it, Gilesy told me. You get caned so hard that your bum looks like a tiger for the rest of your life.

I count twenty-seven mushrooms. I count three magpies. I count seven acorns.

"When you were little,” I ask, “was everything in black and white?"

Dad laughs. Shakes his head. I'm eight years old. It's Nineteen Seventy Seven. It's only seven years since The Beatles split up. It's only thirty-two years since the end of the war. In thirty-two years it will be Two Thousand and Seven. I will be thirty-eight. Dad will be seventy-three. Mum will be sixty-six. The future seems such a long way away. The past seems so near. Ten years ago I wasn't here. In ten years time I will be eighteen. Old enough to do what I like. I'll go to the woods with out wellies on for a start. Tiled areas appear through the mud, where buildings on the airbase once stood. Broken glass in different colours. Americans were here. They chewed gum and chased Warrington girls. Thousands of aircraft droned in and out every day for years.

I count twenty-seven rhododendron leaves. I count three swans. I count seven buttons on Dad's cardigan.

Numbers. Numbers affect me in the same way that music affects Dad. Sometimes Dad tells me he can't get a song out of his head. It might be a song he loves, but after three or four hours, he can't stand it. He's ready to drill a hole through his skull. Listening to something else won't get rid of it. It's as if this particular song—'Speed of Life’ by David Bowie is the latest—has snagged on an invisible nail in his head. The melody that hooked you becomes a dirge, a stain that can't be rubbed clean.

Mum and Dad aren't working. Something's not right. They have no friends. I sometimes hear Dad in the kitchen long before anybody else has risen, crying, groaning with panic and frustration. You are my sun and air, he says to me. I am the spit of him. The child is father to the man.

I can't get the numbers out of my head.

I count twenty-seven cigarette ends. I count three used condoms.

I count seven drained bottles of cider.

Here, in this wood, the orange and green pebbles of glass in the ground, my hand lost inside Dad's, I feel as if I could live for ever.

The song follows us from the living room to the car. I'm unaware of doors being opened and closed, the smack of cold night air, the needling lights; but some details do stick: your perfume, the nap of the fabric on the back seat, the insectile glow of the dashboard.

I'm not introduced to the new character, Face/Trousers, but somewhere out of the proving dough of his face come words. Manchester words. Cold and angular. A winter voice. Each time I hear that accent I think, I can't help myself,

Oh Manchester, so much to answer for...

"Any signs? Any shadows? Any phantoms? Any smoke and stir? Any flukes?"

No names, in this car. Names is for tombstones, baby. Except Jimmy Twice. In this story, Jimmy Twice is the leading man, because nobody else is taking a credit. I should be grateful. You brought him along. This is all for me. My safety.

You say, “Nothing. Time is running out."

"Give him another drink, then,” Face/Trousers says. “Let's up the fucking ante."

I'm not arguing when they offer me more of Jimmy Twice's knocked off ethanol. I stare at the labels on the bottles. The classier the stuff sounds, the rougher it is. Emperor Vodka. Blue Chip cachucha. Debonair Rum. All of it distilled in shitty kettles on humanity's edge. Disused quarries and canals choked by plastic. War-zone estates where the only step up is that provided by the kerb. I've sucked in so many litres of air from these places, an incremental absorption of black asbestos, B&H, aerosol paint and hydrofluorocarbons, that my lungs feel like leather shoes hanging in my chest. I've seen so many fights, witnessed shootings and cripplings. Murders. Men pulverised, battered, slit. Blood in the gutters like abattoir sluices.

"Are you ready?"

No. No. No. “No."

"Well them's some tough tits, then, intit? Readify yourself, feller. Something's going to come at you from somewhere. We need to be alert. Unless you're pulling us pizzles, y'shitehawk."

Out in the open. What I feared, what I knew, solidified, confirmed. I reduce, I wither. It's only the muddled air of living rooms I can tolerate. Carbon dioxide. Plug-in air fresheners. Nicotine's ghost.

When I was a child—

Was I ever a child? I only have the photographs to prove it. I was a lonely boy, or rather I was an unsociable boy. Embarrassed. Shy to the point where I fantasised about invisibility. Or was it just that I was lacking the skill, the nerve to go up to people and engage? Is that true of me? Or is it a construct I've fashioned? I suppose it must be true, as that's what I'm like now. I lost my virginity at the age of nineteen, and then, by accident. A party at a big house out Grappenhall way, too much Thunderbird and Bull's Blood. Six of us sharing a bed. I'm lying next to Shelley, a girl I really like. I have to lie on my side, away from her, or risk making a tent of the blankets. Sometime at night's darkest, when all the giggling and the blowjobs have stopped, I feel Shelley's fingers feeling for the waistband of my boxers. She slips them inside and starts gently raking her nails along the underside of my dick. I feel her move over me, ease the gusset of her knickers to one side and suddenly it's like smothering, she's hot, wet, her breasts squirming all over my face and I can't breathe and something's building and I cry out and the lights go on and everyone's staring at me as I empty myself into some one who isn't Shelley.

You kind of go off sex after an experience like that.

We land. Face/Trousers opens the door and you get out. The song follows you, though now it's playing nowhere other than in the vacant disco of my mind. The menace of chords. The crippling key changes. I couldn't stop thinking of that girl. The faint moustache and the BO, the build up of sebum on the crevices of her body where she could not, or neglected to visit with, soap. I masturbated about her for months. I never poke to her again. I couldn't talk to any girl after that. I wanted companionship but it stuck its wet nose up before too long. It always did. The sex dog. The physical question. My penis will not rise; my body is not made for this. I turn inwards.

I'm that kind of stupid. I'm that sort of sick.

Heartbeat drum. Spasm infill. The surge. The flight. The shiver of strings. The lisp and the frustration and the fury.

"You aren't fucking human,” Face/Trousers says. “You don't deserve to be fucking protected. If it wasn't for the money ... you fucking freak."

Brief whistling in a side street, five notes, repeated once. You reach out and touch me.

You reach out and touch him. Night tilts, granular, lessening, as if waiting for a signal to retreat. I remember.

Mum's mum, my Nana, died in Nineteen Eighty One. She was sixty-three. She moved out of the house on Meeting Lane in Penketh to stay in our back room once her husband, Richard, known as Gaga to me, died of a sudden heart attack. Massive, they said, as if it was something bigger than him, which I suppose it was, in a way. I didn't see her get out of bed in all the years she stayed with us. Dad played records loud. Eleanor Rigby. They didn't get on. She kept tins of Turkish Delight and Nuttall's Mintoes under the bed. She poured hot tea into a saucer and drank it out of that. She was pretty as a young woman. Porcelain features. The fear of death smashed them. She took pills every day. Fistfuls. There was nothing wrong with her, but for this fear. A phobia that sent her into the psychiatric wards at Winwick for a spell. She'd let me at the tin of sweets as long as I sat with her until her pills took the edge off the horror in her life. She lived her last twenty years fearing Death's arrival, unaware that stress was greasing its wheels. She died of fright. She was found kneeling over her bed, as if praying to something to keep it at bay. She did not abide calendars or clocks in her house. She never asked anybody the time.

But it doesn't put it off, this recalling of the past. Possibly because Time won't have some time out. Possibly because the past is dead. It might never have happened. In the same way, the future doesn't exist. Until it happens. And by then it's already history. So I cannot die, even though the numbers have burned in my head since the moment I began to keep memories.

Twenty-seventh of March, Two Thousand and Seven.

I read once, not too long ago, an article by a journalist about death, about the how and the when of it, information that was all imprinted on our DNA. Scientists had worked out how to read this code and this journalist, unable not to rubberneck, had asked to know his own end. Heart attack, they'd told him. Aged seventy-one. Death is in us from the moment chemicals massage the heart awake in the womb. I've unpicked that delicate double helix for myself. I've seen the death warrant. That date fizzed in my thoughts like the packets of energy that hop scotch my synapses. When you're eight, thirty-eight is an unknowable age. When you're thirty-eight, you realise how swift the passage of time really is. You're here for a wink. A whimper.

They sit there looking at me, looking at their watches, asking each other what time they have.

None, I want to say. None of us have got any fucking time.

I tiptoed through life. I never dyed my hair or had a tattoo, I never demonstrated or got arrested. I never travelled. I never lived. I am a stillborn. Dad said ‘Enough of that’ when I waved my scarf at a Liverpool match. Dad said, “Look, that's an offence” when he saw the woodwork teacher from school, Mr Fair weather, toss a spent match out of his car window. “I'd book him for that, if I was still on the Force. Anti-social behaviour. Lock ‘em up. Throw away the key.” I never tried drugs. I never tried a same-sex relationship. I never had a vindaloo.

Midnight.

Face/Trousers leaves, shaking his head, disappointed he didn't have to defend me with his butterfly blade. You twat. You stroker. You fucking waste of space. You go too, holding my hand for the briefest of moments. I survived. I was wrong. I'm no seer. No prophet.

But then. Because, not despite. I didn't, instead of did. I remember and there's nothing but numbers, nothing but the threat of this day.

Midnight. I didn't survive. I was right. But it wasn't cancer that killed me. Or a twisted vessel in the brain. Or myocardial infarction. It was time. It's beyond measuring, the thinness of existence's leading edge. It's so thin as to not be there. The present is dead, even as you live it. Now is gone. Forever.

Like me.

Copyright © 2008 Conrad Williams

The Unblemished (Virgin Books paperback, 347pp, (British Pounds) 7.99) debuted in 2006 as a hardback from US indie publisher Earthling and went on to win the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel, ahead of a field that included Stephen King's Lisey's Story.

The novel opens, more or less, with photographer Bo and a chance encounter with a strange man at a pub, who offers him a metaphysical map, which Bo accepts never thinking that there could be anything to it, and at first this seems to be the case, with no physical evidence of any change. But in the days ahead, there's an outbreak of grave desecration all over London, with corpses being eaten by the vandals, and Bo gets hints that these could be connected with the unnatural bargain he has made. Meanwhile Sarah Hickman and her teenage daughter Claire have fled London to avoid the attentions of ruthless criminal Malcolm Manser. Claire is mentally disturbed and has a strange growth festering in her armpit, but Sarah wishes to avoid hospitals. Manser is a sociopath who gets off on having sex with women whose limbs have been freshly amputated, and he intends for Claire to be his next victim. Claire is also of importance to Gyorsi Salavaria, an infamous serial killer and cannibal who went into seclusion many years ago, but has been acting as Manser's mentor.

All of this is by way of laying the groundwork for what follows. Sarah tries to start anew in the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold, only circumstances force her and Claire back to London with Salavaria and Manser in pursuit. But the London to which they return is not the same as the city they left. A race of flesh eating monsters have infiltrated the city, in completion of a promise that was made to them centuries before, and with each day they have grown in numbers and power, so that the social order has totally collapsed, with a fog of confusion over everything and no-one actually able to put their finger on precisely what has gone so badly wrong. Human beings barricade themselves inside their dwellings or stalk the dangerous streets with weapons in hand and one eye always looking behind. Bo and Claire are of importance to the creatures’ plans, and Salavaria believes himself to be one of their number, a half breed prince destined to lead the race into a new era. The scene is set for a fight against ancient evil, with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance.

The publisher's blurb for this book describes it as ‘an epic drama of flesh-eating monsters and hunted survivors that rivals 28 Days Later', and there's much of truth to that description if you allow for the fact that Williams’ monsters are not zombies. Within his chosen medium, that of the written word, Williams is every bit as much the innovator as Danny Boyle, assimilating ideas and imagery from other media to make over or his own ends. His others, with their hidden stingers and habit of lardering their victims, planting eggs inside them, bring to mind such monsters as Eugene Tooms from The Xfiles and the creatures of Aliens. But there are hints too of an older tradition, the little people of Machen and, in the back story that provides the pretext for their attack on London, the tale of Hamelin and its people reneging on their bargain with the Piper. Williams takes all these diverse elements along with many others, to produce a bleak and phantasmagorical vision of society overwhelmed by the flesh eaters that is as familiar as the last zombie movie out of the starting gate but also uniquely his own. And while we may regard some of the plot features, such as Bo's involvement with the map and the link to the Black Death/Great Fire of London, as far fetched, something about them of contrivance and convenience, they serve well as props that enable Williams to craft scenes of outré terror and macabre visions of the infernal on London's streets.

Human evil has a role to play in the proceedings, with Malcolm Manser as its apostle. In Manser Williams has created a truly memorable psychopath; an early scene in which he pursues his predilection for amputees is among the most unsettling the book has to offer, with graphic description and a chilling matter of factness. It could be argued that the others feast on human flesh because it is in their nature to do so, but for Manser the atrocities he commits are more considered and therefore morally culpable acts. The writer's daring is seen in the way he simply uses this character as a foil for Salavaria and to drive the action along by his pursuit of Sarah, whereas a lesser talent would not have been able to resist the temptation to place such a monster at the heart of the story, to make it about him. Similarly with Salavaria himself, who shares many of Manser's traits, but ultimately is shown to be as indifferent to his protégé as Manser is to those he kills, more so. Through the use of this half breed, a creature who has spent so long among humans that he has assumed some of their attributes, Williams cleverly gives us an intro into the mindset of those others, who might else remain simply ciphers. Salavaria's monstrous appetites, his hopes and expectations, the moments of fear and doubt that he experiences, provide the reader with a bridge to an evil that might otherwise have remained totally inhuman and beyond our understanding, simply a personification of cannibal lust.

Bo and Sarah are the antithesis of Manser and Salavaria. He, just like Salavaria, has hopes and expectations, to do with his career and girlfriend, and it's the desire for something out of the ordinary to enter his life that allows this evil to happen to the city he loves. And he spends the rest of the book at first in denial and then desperately scrabbling round trying to make things right. Sarah is the most sympathetic of the characters, the archetypal mother figure growing in stature as the book progresses, a person who is forced to become hard and quickly if she and those she cares about are to survive. Her utter devotion to Claire shines through, and she has to make compromises with her own nature if she is to effectively protect her daughter, her essential passivity replaced with a take charge attitude that casts the weaker men into the shade. There are echoes in her character of another Sarah and protective mother, the Sarah Connor of Terminator 2, though Williams never goes so far as to put automatic weapons in her hands.

The finely crafted prose and strong sense of place that helped define Williams’ previous novels are also in evidence here. Southwold, the quintessential seaside town in the off season, is brought to vivid life, the empty hotels and shops, the deserted cliff tops and beach at night, with the suggestion of evil rolling in on the high tide. London, or rather the distorted reflection of the city that this book contains, is brought to life on the page, so that all the sights and sounds and smells of the city come cascading in on the reader's senses. Every locale is given the stamp of authenticity by the details Williams piles on, so that we feel as if we know these places too, have lived there, and this familiarity adds an extra frisson to his portrait of a world collapsing into chaos. There's a cinematic feel to the chain of events, with so many memorable incidents, such as the three comic cut out underlings who challenge Salavaria, the flight from flesh eaters across the rooftops, edge of the seat scenes in which Sarah confronts her enemies, all of these driving the narrative forward to the inevitable final confrontation, vividly acted out inside some otherworldly cathedral. From first word to last Williams holds the attention, his prose achieving a kind of lyricism, both beguiling and repellent as it captures scenes of utter depravity and horror, throwing them back into the mind's eye, like battery acid splashed on the imagination, so that phrases like ‘not for the squeamish’ carry extra weight.

In The Unblemished Conrad Williams has produced his longest and finest work to date, a book that reprises and expands upon themes he has addressed before, which pays homage to the tropes of its genre while taking them off in new and exciting directions. Kudos to him, and also to Virgin for making this novel available to a larger audience.

SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Sense of place is something that always comes over very strongly in your work for me, with settings that recur, and London is the most obvious example, but also you seem inclined to favour seaside towns in the off season as a setting, with Morecambe in Head Injuries and Southwold in the new novel. What is about these places that appeals to you as an appropriate setting for horror stories?

Southwold will crop up again in another novel I've wanted to write for some time. I suppose it's about extremes. London's monsters are all up front. Emotions are scrawled on every face. You have to shout to be heard. It's a red in tooth and claw city. More cambe is more of a town that slowly gets under your skin. Shadows and rain, the tired beat of the surf. The tat and the consistent sensation of being somehow eroded. It's a town hunched away on the coast as if it's turned its back on the world. Having spent six months of winter there, it will always be like that to me, no matter how pretty they make the Midland hotel or how jolly the statue of Eric. There are ghosts everywhere you look.

You obviously have a great affection for London, but at the same time it ended up flattened by an earthquake in London Revenant and overrun by a race of cannibalistic monsters in The Unblemished. One might surmise you have issues here, so what's your problem with the Big Smoke?

It's at you 24 hours a day, that city. It's like having someone tapping you on the shoulder, mithering you all the time. You feel as though you're never allowed to relax. Everyone knows someone who has been abused in some way, attacked. I was pickpocketed, burgled. I had an agent who was murdered. It's not a place to be if you feel alone. And yet sometimes it can floor you with its beauty and charm. It's a Jekyll and Hyde city. I've been away for a few years now and I do miss it a lot, but I think I made the right decision to escape.

One character in The Unblemished says something to the effect that urban collapse, at least as regards London, could reach a critical degree because everything has gotten so weird the encroaching horrors are just filed under business as usual, unchallenged and uncommented upon. Do you think reality has begun to outstrip fiction in the weird stakes, and if so can you give any examples from personal experience?

That's another little side effect of living in London, and perhaps any big city. You become inured to events. Which is not to say that something like 7/7 doesn't broadside you. When it happened, there was shock, but nobody was surprised. Despite the unpleasant things that happened to me in London, I was never mugged, but it was always at the back of your mind. The longer I stayed, the more likely it would happen. Perhaps these epic acts of terrorism are turning our thoughts to the minimal. Perhaps an era of subtle, intimate horror fiction is on its way. The weirdest thing that happened to me came on the day Labour returned to power. I refer to it in London Revenant. I'd just bought a flat in Stamford Hill and was on a late bus home after an office party. But I fell asleep and ended up being jolted awake at the terminus in Edgware at around 4am. I had to wait for half an hour for a bus back. I got off at Seven Sisters Road and walked past a small park where three or four men were openly having sex with prostitutes. One of the men had a dog with him and had clearly stopped off for a quickie while he was taking it for a walk. It was such a depressing sight. I wanted to use it in London Revenant, but when I came to write it, it didn't seem believable. In the end, I used it to bolster Iain Wild's theory about having to see the beauty in depravity in order to make life something better than what it is.

Secret races are another common theme in your novels, with the tube dwelling tribe in London Revenant and the cannibalistic monsters of The Unblemished. What's the appeal of these others for you?

It's about trying to find what scares me. It's kind of an extrapolation of the saying about being eight feet away from a rat wherever you are in London. That feeling of something happening under your feet. The idea of lives lived beyond your perception.

Your work is oft en brutal and shocking, yet you're also an exquisite prose stylist, with a language that is oft en lyrical. I wonder if you ever feel there is any opposition in your work between what's being described and how it's being described? Do you ever feel the need to censor or restrain yourself when dealing with scenes of violence?

Not at all. I think that horror fiction, perhaps more than any other, lends itself to the lyrical. There is beauty in anatomy and a grandeur in this business of dread and death. I don't self censor, but I think you have to know when to rein it in and when to go full chisel.

In past interviews I've seen you describe your preference for short stories, but you seem to be happier with a larger canvas nowadays, with each novel longer than the last. How do you feel you've developed as a writer in this regard?

I love short stories. I love the quick fix they offer, the sense of achievement. But I always wanted to be a novelist. If you want to build a career, and that's all I've ever wanted, you need to be concentrating on novels. Which is not to say I've turned my back on short fiction, but I just can't devote as much time to it any more. Writing novels is a completely different discipline. You have more time to develop character and plot, but you also have to keep an eye on pace and balance. You also have more strands you need to pull together. I'm still learning—I think every writer is—but I hope I'm improving with each novel.

While working on The Unblemished you described it as ‘my attempt at writing one of those big 1970s horror novels. It's got monsters in it.’ Do you still stand by that description and if so do you feel that you've succeeded in what you set out to achieve?

I wouldn't put it in quite so reductive a way. But I still think it owes much to the structure and tone of those earlier novels, while also serving up a hearty dose of post-millennial angst. I'm pleased with the good reviews and the award it received. I just hope that the general public take to it too.

The Virgin release of The Unblemished is somewhat different from the novel that won the International Horror Guild Award. Can you tell us a little about how that came about and what the main changes are?

Essentially, it's the same book. The story arc is no different, but there have been alterations, yes. One of the characters has been subsumed by another to aid the plot's logic. A laggy section depicting life in the 1600s has been binned. The location of the climax has shifted and changed. A couple of mistakes corrected. Generally, it's been tightened, sleekened ... improved, hopefully. I'm grateful to Adam Nevill, my editor at Virgin, who sent me 29 pages of notes about the book. He warned me he was very hands-on. No kidding. I still have his fingerprints around my throat ... But virtually every comment he made was bang on the money.

Lastly, you've signed for Solaris books and there's a 2009 novel release, Decay Inevitable. Could you tell us a bit about that and also why your byline is now going to feature the middle initial, Conrad A. Williams?

Decay Inevitable is a novel about what goes on in the soft, blurry borderland between life and death. It's about two men, one—Sean Redman—who leaves the police force after a cataclysmic error, but can't shake the job out of his system and another—Will Lacey—who loses his wife during childbirth and witnesses something incredible. There's a female killing machine called Cheke and a host of other unsavoury characters milling around between worlds. I had great fun writing it and hope that comes across. The Conrad A. Williams was forced upon me, really. Publishers like their writers to go into little boxes. Solaris didn't want to use the Gala Blau pseudonym I offered them (they wanted to tap into the massive readership that Conrad Williams has ... the fools) and it would have muddied the Virgin waters to use my name, so a compromise was reached. I win, both ways, because I think the editorial teams in both camps are absolute gems and it's a privilege to be working with them.

SOME FACTS ABOUT CONRAD WILLIAMS

Conrad was born in Warrington in 1969 and currently lives in Manchester with his wife, the writer Rhonda Carrier, their sons Ethan, Ripley and Zachary, and Reddie, a Maine coon cat. * Conrad teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. * He has the distinction of being the only author to have two stories in a single issue of our predecessor The Third Alternative. ‘The Machine’ appeared in issue 31 in 2002, along with ‘The Routine', published under the pseudonym Gala Blau. * Conrad has ghost written the biography of a celebrated dominatrix. * Trophies on his mantelpiece include a British Fantasy Society Award, the Littlewood Arc Prize and the International Horror Guild Award. * His middle name is Alexander and he has a website at www.conradwilliams.net

A CONRAD WILLIAMS BIBLIOGRAPHY

Novels:

Head Injuries (1998)

London Revenant (2004)

The Unblemished (2006)

Novellas:

Nearly People (2001)

Game (2004)

The Scalding Rooms (2007)

Rain (2007)

Short Story Collection:

Use Once, Then Destroy (2004)

LOVE ON THE ROCKS: ANDREW HUMPHREY IN REVIEW

It's been five years since his debut collection Open the Box and now Andrew Humphrey is back (not that he'd ever been away) with two new books. Other Voices (Elastic Press paperback, 221pp, (British Pounds) 5.99) contains thirteen stories that, in the words of the publisher, encompass ‘the genres of urban horror, science fiction, crime and slipstream', most of them set in a Norfolk landscape that Humphrey has made his own.

Back cover blurb aside, science fiction is not really a genre I think of Humphrey in connection with. Rather he uses the trappings of SF on occasion, but only as backdrop to his trade mark stories of alienation and estrangement. Lead story ‘Grief Inc’ is a good example. The setting is a Norwich of the near future, one in which society has reached such a point of collapse that comparisons to downtown Beirut are not far off the mark. Carter, the story's protagonist, makes a living by using his ability to take away the grief of others, but the irony of his situation is that he cannot deal with his own dissatisfaction and know the relief his customers feel, must make do with a cynical philosophy that allows no room for caring. It's only by confronting his own shortcomings and taking a risk on somebody else that he is able to break the pattern in this gripping and beautifully realised dystopian tale.

The science fictional elements are more overt in ‘Mimic', a Dickian story, in some ways reminiscent of The Prisoner TV series. Men at a secret underground installation guard aliens who can take any shape, including human form, giving rise to the suspicion that one of them has been replaced by a duplicate, but how can they know? It's a familiar genre trope, but Humphrey plays a new riff on an old theme by conflating concepts of memory and identity with an ever more pressing sense of paranoia induced by the motives of the faceless bureaucrats who control these men's lives. The same interplay between the personal and larger events can be seen in ‘Tilt', which opens with a series of inexplicable explosions rocking the world, possibly heralding the Rapture and End of Days. For Humphrey's characters though this drama played out on a global scale is just background noise for their business as usual marital discord, the wife using the opportunity to settle a few old scores and the husband's response largely one of diffidence, giving the story a bleak subtext along the lines of the more things change the more they stay the same. It seems that not even the end of the world will allow us to break out of the old routines, only empower us to indulge them with even less restraint than before.

'Think of a Number’ is the most overtly horrific of what's on offer. A young man training as a killer for hire goes back to murder all those who abused him as a child, when his father farmed him out to a paedophile ring. This is a grim and unflinching story, one that neither looks away from nor sensationalises the terrible events it describes, and whatever pleasure there is for the reader comes from the satisfaction of seeing the evildoers get their deserved comeuppance and a sliver of insight into the mind of the killer. There's a different father and son pairing in ‘Dogfight', with the two attempting to bond after the death of their wife/mother, but for the boy any olive branch extended by the man is tainted with the memory of past betrayals. They find common ground in the old wartime stories of the boy's great grandfather and time slip visions of a dogfight in the empty skies over Norfolk. The story has echoes of Graham Joyce's ‘Tiger Moth', but Humphrey gives it a uniquely compelling resonance with the way he depicts hostility within the family unit and the hint of hard won trust coming to the fore at the end, even though it may cost both man and boy their lives.

'Strawberry Hill’ is perhaps my favourite story and one of the most moving in the collection. The protagonist is forced to deal with an incident from his past, something he had thought long forgotten but has returned with a vengeance. It's a beautifully written and chilling story that raises questions about personal culpability, the role of the voyeur and the sins of childhood, and does so in a way that drags the reader into its world, asking us all to hold a mirror up to our own faces. The past similarly comes back to haunt the present in ‘Old Wounds'. The protagonist's son gets involved with an older woman, one who sounds suspiciously like the big love of his life, only she was supposed to have died years back in an S&M tryst gone wrong. It's an artful story, one in which revelation follows revelation, with many subtle touches of emotion along the way and a surprising but entirely appropriate note of ambiguity at the end.

'Last Kiss’ is the final story in the collection and also the longest. John uncharacteristically performs a good deed, saving a young man on the brink of committing suicide, only for it to come back and haunt him when the young man invades his life, exposing his flaws and infidelities to his trusting wife and absent mistress. It's a measured piece, each step in the disintegration carefully charted and slotting neatly into the whole, with the various interlocking relationships compellingly detailed, John with wife Becky, with mistress Helen, with best friend Charlie, and a bright light shone on all the weak points. In John we get a typical Humphrey protagonist, the cheating husband and lover who thinks only of himself, but all the same can't quite cope when others do unto him as he has done to them. It's a powerful end to a collection that will linger long in the memory.

Similar themes of trust betrayed and love gone sour are played out on a larger canvas in the novel Alison (TTA Press paperback, 174pp, (British Pounds) 9.99), but first I have to declare an interest. TTA also publish Black Static and so, while the reviewer will vigorously protest his impartiality, the reader may feel a need to flavour his comments with a pinch of salt and assume that he won't mention the five typos the book contains or the very obvious plot glitch on page 200 etc. The novel opens with a scene of domestic bliss, Chris and Alison at home together and doing the ordinary things that lovers do, and then quickly hits us with another, shocking scene, Alison's funeral and graveside recriminations as her family vent their anger at her suicide by blaming Chris. From then on it divides into two strands, one moving forward in time and the other reprising the relationship between Chris and Alison. Both strands are written in the first person and with Chris as the viewpoint character, but one is in the present tense and the other in the past, a simple but effective ploy that enables the reader to keep track as events segue and bleed into each other.

In one strand we get Chris’ first encounter with Alison, who is the flatmate of his then girlfriend Emma, and we see their relationship blossom into romance, his attempts to lure her away from a boyfriend who makes her unhappy and a controlling family. In the other strand we learn the secret's of Alison's life, the things which she never revealed to Chris and the complicity in her deceit of his best friends, nightclub singer Emma and drug dealer Spike. Both strands play off of and inform each other, while presiding over both like some evil genius, a spider at the centre of its web, is the monstrous Charlotte, Alison's abomination of a mother. The tag line for this book is ‘everyone has their dark side.’ Chris uncovers Alison's guilty secret, but it's the catalyst for getting in touch with his own dark side.

This is a fast paced story, one that I read in two sessions, punctuated by a break for pizza (spicy chicken, if you're interested). Part of the speed is down to the short chapters, but it's also owing to Humphrey's terse, driven prose, with an almost machine gun delivery at times and cutting dialogue. He is superb at showing how love can develop, the ups and downs of a relationship, the ties that bind people, the things that can drive them apart, and pitching it all in terms the average reader will be able to relate to, events that carry the stamp of authenticity in personal experience. Gentle Chris is the ideal foil for damaged Alison, so that you sense things were always doomed between these two, and ultimately it is Chris’ innocence that is lost, while the other characters, manipulative Charlotte and amoral Spike, bullying Miles and needy Emma, are all just as fully rounded and well realised on the page. Humphrey never allows us a moment's doubt as to the reality of these people or the ways in which they interact with each other. His piecemeal disclosure of the plot is an object lesson in how to hold a reader's attention, lacing the narrative with a heady dose of violence and off the wall sex. It's only in the latter regard, with the pivotal event that shaped Alison's fatal ‘fl aw', that I have a smidgen of doubt as to credibility, but it's a tiny voice whispering ‘Well, maybe’ rather than shouting ‘No!', and not something I want to make a big deal about, or feel will in any way detract from the enjoyment of this entertaining and insightful study of dark psychology.

Let's hope we don't have to wait another five years for something new from Andrew Humphrey's pen.

THE FACTS, AND NOTHING BUT THE FACTS

Mostly it's about fiction here at Case Notes, but every so oft en we like to cast a critical eye over some non-fiction titles whose subject matter may be of interest to our readers.

Case in point, Servants of the Supernatural (William Heine Mann hardback, 290pp, (British Pounds) 20) by Antonio Melechi. With the subtitle ‘The Night Side of the Victorian Mind’ and a cover photograph of a table rising into the air much to the consternation of those seated around it, this book is ostensibly concerned with documenting the late Victorian obsession with the paranormal, witnessed in the popularity of mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home and the Fox sisters, and in the rise of spiritualism. Much, if not most of the text however, concerns itself with the pseudo-science of mesmerism, which enjoyed widespread popularity in the nineteenth century and provoked fierce debate in the press of the day and among the scientific community, with arguments being put forward on both sides. Melechi is excellent at detailing this fervour and the swings and roundabouts that mesmerism enjoyed, with claims being made for its virtue as a cure all, giving us marvellous thumbnail sketches of characters on both sides of the divide and illustrating his arguments with a wealth of contemporary documents.

With yet more grandiose claims being made for somnambulists—that they had far sight, could commune with spirits etc—and the theory of mesmeric fluid linking all entities in the universe, mesmerism laid the philosophical foundations for the great age of spiritualism that was to follow. Again Melechi is impressive in delineating how this movement found its way to British shores, identifying its champions and debunkers, and sketching the main protagonists, such as Home himself, all of this segueing into a more rational and sceptical approach, with the establishment of groups like the Society for Psychical Research to investigate paranormal claims and the inclusion of stage magicians and skilled illusionists to make plain what science alone cannot disprove, a tradition that continues to the present day in the figure of James Randi.

Servants is a fascinating document, made more so by the fact that the events it describes are all a matter of history and that, while so obviously engaged with the material, writer Melechi is able to maintain his objectivity. There is, as Melechi states, a predisposition on the part of many to believe, in that if the claims being made are grounded in fact then the afterlife is proved, and so we all have a vested interest of sorts and a concomitant need to guard against that, to consider proof rather than cling to hope. And the book finds echoes in the present day, when interest in the paranormal is once again on the agenda for many, while cults and movements such as Scientology flourish by promising so much.

In many ways The Haunted (Palgrave Macmillan hardback, 288pp, (British Pounds) 19.99) by Owen Davies makes an ideal companion to Servants, with some nice correspondences between the two books. As an example, in Haunted we learn that the writer Catherine Crowe was of the opinion that ghosts would be naked, while in Servants we hear that in 1854 she walked the streets of Edinburgh naked, having been told to do so by the spirits (a spell in an asylum followed), prompting the observation that many of today's celebrities are perhaps more spiritually inclined than we may have previously thought. Davies has a wider scope than Melechi though, in both time and subject matter, his book embracing the same period but covering far more territory. He eschews the question of reality as regards spectral phenomena, instead presenting ‘A Social History of Ghosts', looking at how they interact with society and what certain beliefs reveal about those who hold them, providing cultural and geographical context.

The Haunted has three sections conveniently labelled ‘Experience', ‘Explanation’ and ‘Representation’ with an afterword in which he discusses ‘The Future of Ghosts'. In the first section Davies looks at traditional aspects of the English ghost and how they compare to ghosts in other countries, the types of places with which ghosts are associated and finally asking what kind of people seek them out. The second section addresses matters of belief and goes on to enumerate various ideas as to what may lie behind ghost stories, including influences in childhood, dreams and nightmares, hallucinations and mental illness. For the third section he gets down to brass tacks with the various methods of imitating ghosts and the motives of the people who do so, whether they be simple hoaxers or those with a more criminal intent, moving on to the role of ghosts in entertainment, courtesy of travelling fairs with their various optical illusions, stage plays and, inevitably, cinema. Yet more food for thought is provided in the afterword, with the revelation that statistics show, while it has remained fairly stable in other countries, belief in ghosts has grown in the United Kingdom.

Like Melechi, Davies packs his book with a wealth of detail and constantly refers to contemporary documents, but the wider scope makes for a more interesting read, with the reader able to follow various strands down through the years. For instance, we learn that the stereotypical white sheet ghost was derived from the practice of burying the dead in funeral shrouds rather than coffins. It provided an easy means of merriment to pranksters, though not without risk, as during times of ghost scares, such as the famous Cock Lane ghost affair of 1762, it was not a good idea for people to go out at night dressed in white as they were likely to get shot at by jittery ghost hunters (and I have no idea why shooting at a ghost should be effective). The white sheet ghost finally lost its scariness with the advent of silent films, when the likes of Laurel and Hardy turned this previously fearsome spectre into a figure of fun. Similarly if, like me, you've ever been amazed at the preposterous lengths some Gothic novelists go to in an attempt to give a rational explanation for the ghostly manifestations on their pages, then the various accounts of efforts undertaken to drive people from their properties or scare them to death with fake ghostly phenomena will probably come as an eye opener. Perhaps the most intriguing sections are those that deal with the ghost as entertainment, detailing how they were portrayed on stage and in early film, the roots of the spectral tourism industry, various effects used to create them for sideshows and the work of stage magicians in both exposing and exploiting such trickery.

Davies has written an eminently accessible book, the depth and breadth of which my comments have only touched on. He has assembled a miscellany of diverse and fascinating material that will be of interest to both the scholar of the supernatural, the general reader and the writer in search of a few ideas to exploit for pleasure and profit. I have only one complaint, that an index would have been very welcome, but as I received an ARC this oversight may have been rectified in the actual book.

An Illustrated History of the Haunted World (New Holland hardback, 160pp, (British Pounds) 19.99) deals with the same sort of material as the previous two titles, but without the academic depth and rigour. It is unashamedly a coffee table book, packed with lavish illustrations, but with the text on the light side. Written by Jason Karl, a television presenter and founder of The Ghost Research Foundation, it has a journalese feel to it, with crisp, attention grabbing prose, an expectation of bullet points and buzz words, all designed to whet but not satisfy the appetite.

I found it uneven, with themed chapters that were very much hit and miss. Those that were a hit included the first one, entitled ‘A History of Hauntings’ and taking an informative look at various famous cases, such as Amityville, Borley Rectory and the Salem Witch Trials, offering nothing new to any one with more than a passing knowledge of these matters, but certainly demonstrating the possibilities to the less well informed. Similarly excellent were the chapters on ‘Prominent Figures of the Paranormal’ and ‘The History of Spirit Photography'. I found the latter especially engaging, with some eye catching photographs and potted histories of each item, including speculation as to their authenticity. On the other hand the chapter ‘Beholding the Spirits’ did little more than list various spiritual celebrations from around the world, such as Beltane and Halloween, with pretty pictures, while the chapter on ‘The History of Spirit Communication’ was just as shallow, simply naming and describing such things as dowsing and hydromancy, with no serious attempt to explain or investigate any of them. And that, I guess, encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of a book like this. On the one hand it does suggest many avenues of investigation, but on the other it simply doesn't have the scope to pursue any of them to a more satisfying conclusion, can only ever be a taster.

It's a maxim of mine that you can never have enough reference books, but perhaps that's no longer true in the age of the internet when, in theory at least, whatever information you need is only a google search away. Nonetheless the appeal of the book lingers, of holding a big, fat volume in your hands and being able to dip in at your leisure, to find stray nuggets of information and follow them wherever they lead, in the same way that you do internet links, and yet somehow, ineffably different.

I'm not sure how to go about reviewing a reference book though. Surely nobody expects me to read the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained (Chambers, 760pp, (British Pounds) 35) from cover to cover, and then chase down all of the articles to determine veracity etc? Not a review as such then, but more of a mention. It is a chunky volume and a well made book, a thing of beauty in its own right, with easy on the eye text and plenty of illustrations. There are over 1,250 alphabetically arranged entries, covering a wealth of subjects, plus 24 essay style panels, dealing in somewhat more depth with such things as Mythology, Cryptozoology, Spiritualism, Cults, Secret Societies and Hoaxes, to name just a few.

The Chambers Dictionary doesn't seem to be intended as comprehensive on any particular topic, as I'm sure the editors would be the first to admit, but it is ideal as a gateway book, that invaluable first port of call for any investigation of the paranormal, supernatural and related matters. There's also, as with many reference books, a sense of the serendipitous about it, a combination of the very things you expect to find and some that maybe you don't, the volume casting a wider net than the scope if unexpected pieces of information, as for instance in the entries for ‘H.P. Lovecraft’ and ‘The Necronomicon'. I found an entry for ‘Ghostwatch', but no mention of ‘Stephen Volk', alas, or entry for either ‘Black Static’ or ‘White Noise'. Oh well, guess you can't have everything, but maybe they'll catch us next time around, and in the meantime this handsome and eminently useful volume is already retailing at over a tenner off at Amazon.

Stephen King doesn't rate an article in the Chambers Dictionary either but no matter, as Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg have gifted him a book all his own, The Science of Stephen King (John Wiley & Sons, Inc paperback, 264pp, (British Pounds) 11.99). To my mind there is something of the contrived about this title. While he oft en pitches his ideas in a technological patter for the sake of verisimilitude, science has never struck me as that big a deal as regards King's oeuvre, with the very ‘impossibility’ of much that he writes being part of the frisson his work induces in the reader. These authors seem to realise that and say as much when, for instance, discussing the implausibility of what happens in the story ‘Trucks', only to carry on regardless and use this fictional example as a springboard for a discussion about robotics and the development of artificial intelligence.

Nonetheless, the ‘terrifying truth behind the horror master's fiction’ is a compelling hook and the book Gresh and Weinberg have produced is an agreeably entertaining and informative document, one which will enhance appreciation of both King and state of the art science. There are nine themed chapters, each dealing with one aspect of technology—time travel, dimensions, pandemics, psychic powers etc—and tying them in to King's work. In an informal, chatty style the authors discuss how this theme was used previously in fiction, giving examples and providing a historical context, and they then go on to address what King brought to the subject and how original his contribution was. After that we get into a sciencelight but absolutely fascinating discussion of the facts behind it, so that there's a potted history of quantum mechanics as part of the parallel worlds thread, a history of plagues in the past and assessment of their likelihood for future, the various equations regarding the existence of life on other planets, and so on. It's a fun read, with the authors keeping the explanations simple enough for a technonoodle like me to follow but detailed enough to demonstrate that they (and presumably King also) know their stuff . Basically, it's the teaspoon of sugar approach to science, though that might not be an entirely appropriate metaphor in the circumstances, and if you or a horror lover in your life want to learn a bit more about matters scientific then this book will do the job painlessly and well.

SCIENCE AND STEPHEN KING

Psychic abilities—Carrie, Firestarter, The Dead Zone * Aliens—Dreamcatcher, The Tommyknockers * Pandemics—The Stand * Other dimensions—The Dark Tower sequence, Insomnia * Time travel—The Langoliers * Parallel worlds—From a Buick 8, The Talisman, The Dark Tower sequence * Longevity and genetic research—The Golden Years

THE THINGS THEY SAY

All quotes taken from The Haunted by Owen Davies: ‘The English are naturally fanciful, and very oft en disposed by that Gloominess and Melancholy of Temper, which is so frequent in our Nation, to many wild Notions and Visions, to which others are not so liable.’ Joseph Addison on the English penchant for ghosts * ‘...a purposeless creature ... appears nobody knows why; he has no message to deliver, no secret crime to reveal, no appointment to keep, no treasure to disclose, no commissions to be executed, and, as an almost invariable rule, he does not speak, even if you speak to him.’ Folklorist Andrew Lang bemoaning ‘modern’ ghosts * ‘It may be laid down as a general maxim, that any one who thinks he has seen a ghost, may take the vision as a symptom that his bodily health is deranged ... To see a ghost, is, ipso facto, to be a subject for the physician.’ A somewhat pedantic approach from Charles Ollier * ‘No: nor did I ever see a murder. Yet I believe there is such a thing; yea, and that in one place or another, murder is committed every day. Therefore I cannot as a reasonable man deny the fact; although I never saw it, and perhaps never may. The testimony of unexceptionable witnesses fully convinces me both of one and the other.’ John Wesley, on being asked if he had ever seen a ghost * ‘The only supernatural agents which can in any manner be allowed to us moderns, are ghosts; but of these I would advise an author to be extremely sparing. These are indeed, like arsenic, and other dangerous drugs in physic, to be used with utmost caution; nor would I advise the introduction of them at all in those works, or by those authors, to which, or to whom, a horselaugh in the reader would be any great prejudice or mortification.’ Literary advice from Henry Fielding

FAMOUS HOAXES

The Cock Lane Ghost—between 1762 and 1764 a house in Smith fields, London was alleged to be haunted by a poltergeist nick named ‘Scratching Fanny'. It was revealed as an attempt by the tenants to discredit a man to whom they owed money by having the spirit accuse him of murder. * The Piltdown Man—fossil remains discovered in Sussex in 1912 and purported to be the ‘missing link', but in 1953 exposed as the jaw bone of an orangutan and the skull of a modern man. * The Cottingley Fairies—photographs of fairies taken by two young girls in 1917 and investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. Finally revealed as fakes in 1981. * Alternative 3—mockumentary broadcast in 1977, claiming to expose a secret plan to establish a colony on Mars. * The Santilli Film—supposed film of an alien autopsy that surfaced in 1993, but was later proved to be a hoax. The story was made into a film starring Ant and Dec.

MOST HAUNTED

Some famous haunted houses: The Stanley Hotel—138 room hotel in Colorado, the inspiration for the Overlook in King's novel The Shining. * Borley Rectory—called ‘the most haunted house in England', spectral manifestations began in the late 1920s when it was occupied by the Rev Guy E. Smith. The rectory burned to the ground in 1939. * Heol Fanog—house in the Welsh countryside and home of the Rich family, the spectral activities there recorded in Mark Chadbourn's 1996 book Testimony. The name means ‘road to the peaks'. * Hampton Court—palace given to Henry VIII by Cardinal Wolsey and said to be haunted by more than thirty ghosts, including that of Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife, a White Lady and an odd shape dubbed ‘Mr Blobby'. * The Stickney House—designed by spiritualist George Stickney, the interior of this Illinois mansion has no right angles, as Stickney believed spirits could get trapped in corners. It is now occupied by the Bull Valley Police Department

Blaze by Richard Bachman (Hodder paperback, 352pp, (British Pounds) 6.99)

Richard Bachman is Stephen King, just in case there's anyone left who doesn't know that. Oh, and Joe Hill is his son, though we're still not sure if either of them was on the grassy knoll.

The eponymous hero of this novel, Clayton Blaisdell Jr, is a giant of a man, but not quite all there, as the saying is. The most successful years of Blaze's adult life were those when con artist George Rackley took him under his wing and used Blaze in his criminal schemes. But George is dead now, nothing more than a voice in Blaze's head, guiding him past the traps that lay in wait as Blaze attempts to bring off the pair's dream of a big payday by kid napping a millionaire's baby. Of course the simple-minded Blaze never really stands a chance, and the hard nosed FBI agent in charge of the case doesn't intend to give him one.

In his introduction to the book King explains that it is a trunk novel, written many years before and thought lost, only now seeing the light of day. He also, doing the reviewer's work for him, identifies it as a homage to Of Mice and Men with Blaze as the Lennie Small character and Rackley as his mentor George Milton, though there the resemblance ends as Rackley, at least posthumously, is not as benevolent, and Blaze learning to operate independently and resist what the voice of Rackley tells him to do is one of the main plot arcs.

Along the way King fills in much of Blaze's back story, the act of parental brutality that unhinged his mind, the abuse from teachers and others that led him to where he is now, and the rare moments of kindness and joy, such as an excursion to Boston and an idyllic summer on a farm, but none of it fated to last, that give Blaze the hope of happiness and then cruelly snatch it away. Only with George does he find some self-worth, the little man never looking down on him, always treating him with respect and showing him how to make his way in the world. The idyllic quality of these last memories suggests that the voice Blaze hears is not that of George at all, but his own evil genius.

The prose here is nothing special, but it powers the story along its character driven route, with King in an uncharacteristically unsentimental mood. He has sympathy for Blaze, shows us in minute detail how he got to be the person he is, but offers no attempt to pardon or condone the crimes that he commits. If the book has a message, it's simply that if individuals are denied kindness and those chances most of us take for granted, then nothing good will come of it. Blaze is, regardless of his actions, a good man, one without a scrap of meanness in him, which cannot be said of his pursuers, however in the right they may feel themselves to be, and underlying it all is the old saw about but for the grace of God there go I. This is not King at his best (well, if that were the case it probably wouldn't be published under the Bachman byline), but it is King in a reflective mood, telling a story with a heart and telling it well.

THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR BY DEAN KOONTZ (Harper Collins hardback, 357pp, (British Pounds) 17.99) It's a tale of two couples. In the blue corner we have Amy Redwing, who devotes her life to finding good homes for abused dogs, and her significant other, the architect Brian McCarthy, and in the red corner are their polar opposites, ruthless crime baron Harrow and his consort, the deranged Moongirl. The links between the two pairings stretch back into the past, and as far as the latter couple are concerned there's unfinished business needs taking care of, the kind for which an out of the way spot where nobody can hear you scream is ideal, and they have just the right bait to require Amy and Brian's attendance. But there's a wild card in the deck. Brian has started to have psychic fl ashes and all the evidence indicates they're somehow connected to Nickie, a beautiful golden retriever Amy has just rescued from a drunken owner, a dog with strange abilities and who may be able to turn the tide in their favour.

This is pretty much typical Koontz, with an intriguing story and a ferociously paced narrative, short chapters and terse language driving it relentlessly forward, but there's also a leaning towards sentimentality, seen most obviously in all the stuff involving dogs, so you can almost picture the author going dewy eyed as he tapped at the keyboard. The supernatural elements seem very much like a plot convenience, one that the book would have worked just as well without, and the final twist is a particular bone of contention, with no real purpose other than to let Nickie play dogus ex machina and provide the requisite happy endings all round.

Dogs aside, the meat of the story lies with those two couples, and if the Devil doesn't have all the best tunes he can certainly pitch the most intriguing characters. Amy is a good person and Brian is a good person and that's pretty much all that needs to be said. The tension between Harrow and Moongirl though is palpable, so that every time the action shifts to them the reader has no idea of what might happen. Harrow, regard less of his inclinations to bloody murder, is the more in control of the pair, but having constantly to guard against showing a moment's weakness, fascinated by his partner in the way that a moth is drawn to the flame. Moongirl is a chilling creation, fond of tormenting Hope, her handicapped daughter, getting her kicks out of burning property with the owners still inside, unable to have sex without the lights off: Koontz gives her enough kinks for a whole mental ward, but they are just window dressing, quirks of character with no real attempt to get at the psychology behind them. On the latter score, more is done with Billy Pilgrim, Harrow's lieutenant, who always names himself after Vonnegut characters and justifies his actions with a philosophy of cynicism and blackly comedic take on the human condition.

On balance the good here outweighs the bad and so, recommended I guess, but not if you're a cat person.

BONE MACHINES BY JOHN DODDS (Bright Spark paperback, 284pp, (British Pounds) 7.99) To get the bad stuff out of the way first, this is the worst case of proofreading I have ever seen, so bad that I e-mailed the author to enquire if I'd been sent an uncorrected proof copy by mistake. There's repeated confusion over names, the most annoying instance a scene in which police are discussing the case, with the killer's name first substituted for that of the detective in charge and then for the forensics expert. Elsewhere words are added or missed from sentences, or simply misspelled, so that we get phrases like ‘to choke of the detective's air supply’ and ‘involuntarily as his scrambled for purchase'. Typos unfortunately seem to be a given of the publishing industry, even at TTA where we do our best to eliminate them, but the level of carelessness here is appalling and the cumulative effect of all these tiny errors is to continually pitch the reader out of the narrative. John Dodds tells me that the problem is to be addressed in any further print run, but all the same caveat lector.

From a plot point of view, it's the tale of a mad artist, a horror/crime pedigree that stretches back via John Connolly and Jose Carlos Somoza to innocent days of yore when Vincent Price went doolally in a wax museum. Dodds’ Chapman brothers’ wannabe is abducting young women from the streets of Glasgow, and for journalist Ray Bissett things get personal when his daughter Caroline goes missing. Ray has a past with Kendrick, the detective in charge of the case, and so manages to get himself seconded to the investigation, and the race is on in deadly earnest to find Caroline before she becomes a component in somebody's masterpiece.

Allowing for the lack of originality, Dodds makes a good fist of portraying the mad artist and making him seem believable, albeit the story's main twist became obvious long before the actual reveal. The plot holds the interest with some credible developments and convincing depiction of police procedure, if you can accept the idea of Ray being allowed the kind of access he gets here, and it did seem to hinge on a flimsy pretext, a red herring of a plot strand having to do with an MP with sticky fingers. Neither Ray nor Kendrick seemed particularly likable characters, though this in its way helped to make them more credible, with the feisty Caroline and sexy scientist Isla much more engaging. The weak spot is the prose which, even allowing for the typos, is littered with phrases that just don't seem to have been thought out or cause the reader to do a double take, such as having somebody stare acquisitively where inquisitively would have made more sense in context or describing the back of a head as ‘almost as impassive as the front'. The writing here gets the job done, certainly, but it's not very elegant. On the front cover blurb, Michael Moorcock gives Dodds his seal of approval ('one of the most promising new writers I have read') and I've had cause to praise his work on other occasions, but if his talent is to realise its potential he needs to work a lot harder than appears to be the case here, to show a novel the same attention he would a shorter work, and he needs an editor who'll care enough to make him do that.

DARK WARS BY HIDEYUKI KIKUCHI (Del Rey paperback, 272pp, $9.95)

J-Horror is flavour of the month in La La Land, with Hollywood studios queuing up to find suit able Japanese properties and make them over for western audiences, usually sacrificing the very elements that made those films so effective in the first place. Anyway, it's nice to see that the traffic isn't all one way, as witness this novel from the creator of Vampire Hunter D, which comes with the subtitle The Tale of the Meiji Dracula (Meiji refers to the period 1868-1912 when Japan underwent an intensive programme of modernisation).

The pretext for Dracula's visit to Japan in 1880 is contrived in the extreme. A samurai warrior was transported back in time and space to feudal Transylvania, where he fought alongside Dracula against the Turks. Dracula is visiting to inform his family of the man's fate. Yes, well...

Early on at least there is little attempt by Kikuchi to make the material his own. The Count's arrival in Japan, by night and aboard a deserted ship, has Made in Whitby stamped all over it. Similarly he has a Renfieldesque cat's paw to work his will on and hides out in a supposedly haunted mansion. The forces arrayed against him include a Van Helsing clone, who has the necessary knowledge of vampires, and two young ladies, one of whom gets turned by Dracula and the other who valiantly resists. Only the names and setting have been changed.

Of course, the setting is central. Over the years critics have made much of a socio-economic interpretation of Dracula, the bloodsucker representing the inroads of foreign competition into British markets, and there's something of that here, with the Count's arrival at a time of change in Japanese society, when the country was opening itself up to foreign influences, and his superiority in combat seeming to epitomise this Europeanization. One of the most memorable scenes in the novel is a ball held by a prominent politician, at which Japanese women are seen to dress in the latest Parisian couture and dance Viennese waltzes, with those who cling to the traditions of their country regarded as hopelessly gauche and backward looking. And yet it is these very traditions, embodied in the figure of the young swords man Daigo, who adheres to outmoded ideas of personal honour, that provide the will and discipline to resist the vampire, where European prowess cannot.

The picture of a society undergoing monumental changes is at the heart of this book, as one way of life is replaced by another, and also the suspicion that the baby may have been thrown out with the bathwater. Kikuchi's appeal is not in the way he depicts the fight against Dracula, even when the story moves, as it inevitably must, from the merely derivative to more novel fare, giving us sword fights and martial arts spectacles that are entirely alien to Stoker's seminal text (though not to more modern exemplars, such as Blade). Rather it lies in the significance he invests that struggle with and the way he portrays a culture in turmoil, the clash of ideas and competing philosophies. Whether he does enough to raise the story above its obvious antecedents is debatable, as at the end I still had the feeling that I had read something rather slight, a prototype for a significant book rather than the thing itself, with the story rushing headlong to its conclusion when a slower, more reflective pace might have better served.

HALF THE BLOOD OF BROOKLYN BY CHARLIE HUSTON (Orbit/Del Rey paperback, 256/225pp, (British Pounds) 6.99/$13.95)

This is the third Joe Pitt book, and for those not in the know the backdrop to the series is a vampire society in New York that exists beneath the human radar, with various gangs competing for limited resources. As the book opens Joe is head of security for the Society, whose boss Terry is looking to strengthen their position by making alliances with vampire clans in Brooklyn. Joe is sent as muscle on a diplomatic mission to the Freaks, who operate a ghastly circus as a cover for their activities, but of course things inevitably go wrong with the intervention of another clan, Jewish vampires who want to send a clear message that everybody else needs to stay away from their territory, and the only option for Joe to put them right is through the use of deadly force. There's plenty of other stuff going on too. Matters reach crisis point with Joe's girlfriend Eve, who is dying of AIDS, forcing on him the difficult decision to turn her or not, while surprising changes take place in the hierarchy of the mystically inclined Enclave and ‘the girl’ is back with a plan to discover a cure for the vampire virus. By the book's end, Joe's status has altered radically and there are signs that a war may be brewing between Society and the powerful Coalition.

Huston is adept at juggling all these various plot strands, on the one hand providing a stand-alone story for the casual reader who decides to drop in and on the other moving along the general story arc and whetting the appetite for more. His writing is fast paced, with a nice touch in one liners courtesy of Joe, whose tongue is as sharp as ever, and plays nice counterpoint to his underlying compassion, albeit he can be ruthless as all get out with those he considers deserving and is getting increasingly weary of being used by those who claim to be his friends. The action scenes are plentiful and exciting, a particular strength of Huston's, but he doesn't neglect the quieter moments either, with Joe at his most empathic in those rare times of calm between the storms. We get more insight into the motivation of series characters like Terry and feminist vampire Lydia, with the subtext that, blood drinking aside, they are just like real folks, with all the concerns and politicking that implies. There are also some memorable new characters, such as the freak show crew, who introduce their own brand of gore into the proceedings, though my suspicion is they're not onboard for the duration. The only reservation I had was to do with the Jewish vampires, who at times seemed like caricature Jews, with their idiosyncratic way of talking and mannerisms, as if they knew nothing of the modern world, had become parodies of who they are supposed to be. It's a small point though, and doesn't negate the enjoyment of the whole.

THE MAN ON THE CEILING BY STEVE RASNIC TEM & MELANIE TEM (Wizards of the Coast paperback, 384pp, (British Pounds) 9.99)

Where to begin in telling you how good this book is? Perhaps with a history lesson. The Man on the Ceiling began life in 2000 as a chap book published by American Fantasy Press. It won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award and the World Fantasy Award, the only work ever to scoop all three of the majors. Harlan Ellison described it as ‘exquisitely compelling', Dan Simmons said it was ‘incredibly frightening, ineffably sweet and absolutely unforgettable', while Peter Straub chipped in with ‘grabs the genre by the scruff of the neck and lift s it right off the ground', and you can bet I'm not going to argue with any of those guys, especially Harlan.

So what's it about? To quote from the book, ‘This piece is about writing and horror and fear and about love'. I'm taking that from the ARC and I'm not bothering to ring Wizards of the Coast to check the line made it into the actual book, because it's a fair summation regardless. Another phrase used, almost a refrain in fact, is ‘everything we tell you is true’ and yes, there is something of the memoir about this book, life filtered through the eye of the imagination.

Okay, but what's it about? It's about Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem, two writers inviting us into their lives. It's about the art of fiction and it's about all the fears that we try to contain and defuse through horror. It's about a man and a woman, their love for each other. It's about bringing up a family of five adopted children, the ties that bind and the heartrending moments when they are broken. It's about being honest, even when it hurts. It's about death and tragedy and all the other things that terrify us, only here shown for what they are rather than processed, packaged and presented as a monster who'll conveniently go back to wherever it came from when the light is turned on or the story reaches THE END.

Some sections are written by Melanie and some sections are written by Steve, and sometimes we don't know who is speaking out of the page, either one or some fusion of both. They reveal things about themselves and about each other. They weave truth and story together to produce something that is less yet also more than both, which is perhaps what writing is, ultimately, all about. And they tell us about that man on the ceiling, who is demon and guardian angel both, who is real even though they made him up only five minutes ago, who is the ghost in each and every machine, who is the genius loci of the place in which they live given a face and a form. And it's all wrapped up in the most exquisite language, with every single sentence, every single word, carefully chosen in a celebration of the writer's art and paean of praise come funeral dirge for life itself.

While I love horror fiction I sometimes feel that the genre is too accepting of its limitations, that we have the most terrifying and wonderful and exciting stories to tell, and yet the ways in which we tell them are constrained, formulaic, hidebound even. Well Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem have ignored all the expectations foisted on genre fiction by critics and consumers alike to produce something that is pure art and the first absolutely necessary genre book of 2008.

LIGHT READING BY ALIYA WHITELEY (Macmillan New Writing hardback, 304pp, (British Pounds) 14.99)

Pru and Lena are RAF wives, consigned to the usual round of coffee mornings and gossip while their husbands are away at war, but the suicide of one of their fellow inmates when she discovers that her husband is having an affair with Lena's changes all that. Lena learns her friend's secret hobby; Pru collects suicide notes. The pride of her collection is that of former child star Crystal Tynee, the single word ‘Fripl'. On a whim the two women decide to investigate and see if they can uncover the meaning of this cryptic final communication. The trail leads them to Allcombe, where menacing teenagers prowl the streets and Crystal's mother lives alone and in fear. While everything may be fine and dandy in the woodshed, there's evidence of sinister goings on at the local old people's home, and Pru and Lena just may have bit off more than they can possibly chew.

Whiteley knows her onions. She gives the reader an intriguing mystery to cut his or her teeth on, remorselessly piling the details on top of each other, adding a slice or two of sex for flavour and a soupcon of violence to create tension, and then she pulls an ending out of left field that is as unexpected as it is right, and if you want to approach the book on that level, then chances are you won't be disappointed. Regardless, Light Reading is not a mystery story any more than Thelma and Louise was a road movie, and never mind how much vehicular mayhem filled up the screen. If you need a crime genre tag to slip on its toe, then a fitter comparison would be the black comedies of Carl Hiaasen, transposed from sunny Florida to the environs of a rundown English seaside town in the off season (and Pru with her suicide note collection is just the sort of oddball who would appeal to Hiaasen, though she'd need to lose weight, have breast implants and do serious time down at the tanning salon).

The title is ironic. Whiteley's prose is elegant certainly and insinuates itself into the reader's consciousness with a deceptive ease and lightness of touch, but her subject matter is grim, giving rise to a pitch black comedy that keeps the reader continually on edge. The deprecating tone of voice throughout—the acerbic humour with which Pru responds to the dullness of her life, the casually mocking eye that Lena casts over herself and others—is beguiling, even when it describes things we would rather not know about, such as unhappiness, old age and death. The things that are said, the crisp observations and witty rejoinders, are a constant source of delight, but oft en we laugh as an alternative to crying, humour as the antidote to despair at all the missed opportunities and small tragedies that fill the page and these people's lives.

Character is central. Specifically, the friendship between Pru and Lena is what drives the book, an attraction of opposites. Pru is rather frumpy, overweight and not really concerned with other people's feelings, pushing them away so that she can nurse the secrets of her past in solitary. Lena is the more outgoing, sexually frustrated and looking for love in all the wrong places, wanting to open up her life but unsure how. They really have nothing in common except mutual disdain for the other wives and throughout the book they dance round each other, seeking a moment of shared honesty but scared of the consequences. The real impetus of the book is not in finding out what happened to Crystal Tynee, but discovering what will happen with Pru and Lena. The rest is window dressing. Fripl, in fact. Recommended.

MEAT BY JOSEPH D'LACEY (Bloody Books paperback, 320pp, (British Pounds) 7.99)

The town of Abyrne sits at the heart of a waste land, its people beset by poverty and hunger. Local legends tell that the town was created by God, who also provided the Chosen as cattle for his people to feed on. Abyrne is ruled by an uneasy alliance of the meat baron Rory Magnus and the Par sons of The Welfare. Family man Richard Shanti works at the Magnus Meat Products factory, stunning the Chosen be fore they are processed for consumption, a job at which he is consummately skilled, but Rick has always felt uneasy about what he does and is secretly a vegetarian. He finds himself at the centre of events when tension between the meat baron and The Welfare is brought to boiling point by John Collins, a renegade preacher who teaches that the Chosen are human just like the townsfolk, and that it is wrong to feed on them, there is a better way.

Despite its provocative title and the cover image of a bloody hook, suggestive of so many straight to DVD slash for cash outings, Meat is every bit as much rooted in the science fiction genre as it is horror, at least as regards the story's backdrop. D'Lacey makes no attempt to explain the existence of Abyrne, an ambiguity that strengthens his story, but he does an excellent job of delineating this enclosed eco-system, showing how some thing so patently ridiculous might be made to work. The delicate balance of economic and social forces, the contrasts of poverty and lavish wealth, the various hierarchies, the severely curtailed lives of the Chosen are convincingly portrayed, and underlying it all is the religion that gives Abyrne's leaders their authority, with its sacred texts, the Gut Psalter and Book of Giving. And, as if to show that the hook on the cover wasn't entirely misplaced, there are scenes of horror aplenty, as meat is processed and the victims, Chosen and townsfolk alike, the eaters and the eaten, are dehumanised by the brutal system they live under, with torture inflicted at the whim of tyrannical Rory Magnus and his henchmen.

If D'Lacey impresses with the care and attention to detail he invests in the story's backdrop he is equally adept in dealing with his characters. Rick Shanti is especially convincing as a man who questions his role in life, a good man trying to do the right thing for himself and his family, even though it isn't always easy, a man who carries a terrible burden of guilt. Similarly, John Collins (I suspect the initials are significant) proves an inspirational preacher and compelling exemplar of a better way of life, D'Lacey pulling off the difficult trick of making him seem holy but without any attendant sanctimony. The other characters are every bit as well realised, from Rick's wife, who feels that he is remiss in his duties to the family, through Parson Mary who starts by toeing the party line but exercises her conscience to find a better way to serve her God. The only fl y in the ointment is Rory Magnus, who is a bit too much the stereotypical bad guy, painted as black as can be and with no redeeming features whatever, becoming almost a comic cut out monster, like Sade's cannibal giant Minski. In a way his one-dimensionality is necessary and drives the plot, but it also informs any assessment of the arguments in favour of Abyrne's status quo. It's a minor point though and doesn't detract from D'Lacey's achievement here, with the final scenes of collapse as the various factions in the town engage in open warfare bringing the curtain down in a memorable and thoroughly satisfying manner. The book didn't, however, turn me into a vegetarian.

HORROR PANEGYRIC BY KEITH SEWARD (Savoy Books hardback, 125pp, (British Pounds) 9.99) In the flyer that came with it Horror Panegyric is described as a ‘penetrating analysis of the Lord Horror sequence of novels', which are also published by Savoy Books. This begs the question if, as popular wisdom decrees, we are to approach self-published books with a degree of caution, then how much more so in dealing with analysis of said books presented by its publisher?

Savoy was set up by Lord Horror author David Britton expressly to publish his own work, a move described by Seward as ‘taking control of the means of production’ though self-publishing is oft en viewed less charitably. Savoy's activities resulted in a prison sentence for Britton, while Lord Horror has the dubious distinction of being the last book banned in Britain, turning Savoy into a cause celebre, with various literary heavyweights (Michael Moorcock, Colin Wilson) pitching into the fray to defend the publisher, all of which has largely rendered the self-publishing aspect academic and muddied the waters as regards any attempt to assess the merit of these books.

Seward's analysis is informed by personal reminiscence (how I discovered David Britton and Lord Horror) and oft en of the ‘trust me, I've read masterpieces before’ type, which is the foundation most reviewer recommendations rest on, albeit usually with a track record that enables the consumer to decide if the reviewer is reliable. He takes some startling intuitive leaps, as when responding to Horror's first literary outing, which took the form of sleeve notes on the back of an album cover, with the declaration, ‘Clearly a writer of power was lurking in the back ground of the music.’ And if he has anything critical to say or reservations about his literary hero then you won't find them in Horror Panegyric. Bottom line, while couched in academic language this is mostly fan boy eulogising, with the climax a resounding call to arms, urging consumers to snap up the books like the proverbial hot cakes. Of course, this is not to say that he isn't correct in his assessment, and I can hardly argue with Seward's opinion of books I haven't read. He does provide an interesting, albeit brief, history of the books and Britton's fight against repression and, to be fair, when he gets down to brass tacks Seward does make a very good case for the satirical and literary merit of the novels.

The bulk of the book, nearly two thirds of its pages, contains passages from the Horror trilogy of novels. That from Lord Horror itself appealed to me the most, a scabrous and entertaining narrative that I would have liked to see more of. The sections from Motherfuckers, or the Auschwitz of Oz and Bathed in the Blood of Millions didn't have the same sense of narrative cohesion, though effectively juxtaposing images of atrocity and innocence, and with the prose at times seeming to fizz out of control. I could certainly see why Seward compared them to Naked Lunch and talks in terms of Britton trying to outdo Burroughs (whose middle name, coincidentally, was Seward), though any judgement beyond that must wait on another day.

Horror Panegyric is a beautiful book, with some of the highest standards of production I've seen and a striking cover image from John Coulthart. Cut it how you will though, it is a publication from Savoy Books containing little other than adulation for other titles from this publisher. You are being asked to pay (British Pounds) 10 for what is essentially a publicity handout from the publisher, and if you're tempted by the Horror franchise it might be more savvy to put that cash towards some of the other books and comics Savoy produce.

In between Case Notes columns Pete posts yet more book reviews to the website: ttapress.com

Copyright © 2008 Peter Tennant

He's a nice guy and everything. Well, he's OK. But you can't help but look at his track record and wonder. One published novel, I don't know how many hidden away in the bottom drawer. And the one that did make it didn't really make it, if you know what I mean. Yes, it was published, but it didn't set the world alight and it's been out of print for donkey's years. No one on the course has read it or even seen a copy—except me. How can we take instruction from someone who doesn't seem to know how to do it him self?

Am I being harsh? After all, he's a published novelist. He didn't self-publish either; a proper publisher bought it and put it out because they thought it was good enough (or because they thought they could make money out of it, but having read it, I kind of doubt it). That's precisely what all of us on the course dream of, to have a novel published. It's weird how books are meant to be under threat from all other forms of entertainment and kids don't read any more and bookshops and publishers find it increasingly hard to make ends meet, yet everyone, from A-list actors to stand-up comedians to top poets to the woman down the street, everyone wants to write a bloody novel. And Dave, our course instructor, has done it and me and the other girls and our two token boys, who are really honorary girls since Vince is gay and Justin's so sweet it's like he's a girl, are all thinking big deal, so what, where's his second?

So, yeah, maybe I'm a bit hard on the guy. But you know what they say. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. And that's a bugger of a sentence to punctuate. Not at all convinced I've got it right; Dave would know how to do it. One thing he does know about is punctuation. Use a semi-colon correctly and suddenly Dave's your best friend, until you confuse it's and its, or there and their. Whatever. Still, the argument goes, if he were any good, he wouldn't need to teach. Right? Wrong. Look at Martin Amiss. The moment the 50-some thing enfant terrible of British letters announced his professor ship at Manchester, hundreds of washed-up novelists in universities up and down the country received an ego boost the equivalent of Mariella Frostrup suddenly saying, in her gravelly voice, “What we really need are more novels by X.” They felt validated. They were able to take that resignation letter out of the print queue. They even started thinking about getting stuck into another novel—or resurrecting the last failed attempt.

Dave's got all of that going on, I reckon. Anyway, I'm waiting outside his office for a quick meeting, not really a tutorial, I haven't got time for that, but, amazingly for me, I'm five minutes early, so I don't knock. Suddenly his door opens and one of the three people he shares his office with comes out and Dave sees me and gets up and suggests, since it's so busy in there, that we go to the canteen, which I'm cool with. So we head downstairs and he's moaning about not having his own office. Something to talk about, I guess. I nod and make appropriate noises, but I'm wondering if he knows I've read his book. How could he? I've not told him. I've been careful not to let it slip. I haven't even told any of the others I've got a copy, let alone lent it out. Salt, it was called, about a guy whose wife dies from eating too much salt. That may be an over-simplification, but that's basically it. He does go on about it, does labour a point, but when you factor in the research that's been done, a lot of it since he wrote his novel, about the dangers of consuming too much salt, it kind of makes it OK, I guess.

Dave gets a duck-breast wrap with hoisin sauce or something equally Daveish, while I get a plate of chips. I'm sprinkling them with salt when Dave says, “Go easy. It'll kill you,” and that gives me a jolt, but when I look up, he's got this weird half-smile on his face. I think it's Dave's attempt at a full smile, but he doesn't really do smiling. There's too much seriousness and tragedy in that big balding head. Stretching a smile across it must seem a bit like sticking a smiley badge on the door to the mortuary.

"I was thinking,” I say to him, “you know you told us all to write a horror story for Halloween?"

He nods.

"I'm struggling with it. I'm trying to experiment with point of view and perspective, like you said, and frankly the further I get into it, the less I feel I know about how it's all done, and I really need a tutorial, but I can't get away for long enough during working hours because of my job. Anyway, you once offered to make yourself available out of hours and I'm wondering if I can make an appointment, and probably not here, either, cos it's a right bastard to get to. Oh, excuse my French,” I add because I just looked up and he had this, like, bizarre look on his face and I'm thinking do I really want to book to see this guy out of hours? But I tell myself he's been checked and double-checked or else they wouldn't let him work here and I really must stop being so paranoid.

"No problem at all,” he says and I'm like, “Cool, thanks."

So, a few days later, I'm walking down his street in a leafy part of town. Leafy, perhaps, but not particularly well lit. The houses are all big semi-detached jobs with drives and front gardens and loads of brilliant hiding places for muggers and rapists, and I know what you're thinking. Why did he suggest we have the tutorial at his house, and more to the point, why did I agree? Look at the alternatives. Coffee shop? There's only Starbucks and obviously I'm not going there. We could hardly meet in a pub, because (a) it's a Friday night and we wouldn't get a seat and we'd be shouting at each other to make ourselves heard, and (b) it could easily, and weirdly, start to feel like a date, and from Dave's point of view especially, that has to be avoided. From mine too, of course, but I'm not the one who'd face awkward questions at work on Monday morning. Although, from what I've heard, it's not like Dave's colleagues—or perhaps I should say former colleagues—have been models of propriety where relations with students are concerned. But still. As far as I understand it, Dave's got family. That's what his biographical note says, anyway. Dave lives in Manchester with his family and teaches creative writing at blah blah blah. This is his first novel. It's a bit like saying “This is my first wife."

The appointment was set for six o'clock. It's the best time of day, at this time of year, for having a nose in people's windows. Too early to close the curtains but dark enough to have the lights on, so all these comfortable reception rooms with their framed pictures and their well-stocked bookshelves, their dining tables and upright pianos, they're like little stage sets each one, shining under the lights. Most are empty, but now and again you see some one drift in and wander out again. Maybe they glance out into the darkness and see me, my ghostly white face hovering at the end of their drive like something painted by Edvard Munch.

Dave's house is near the end of the street. It's the one with the group of mannequins in the bedroom window. I'll admit they gave me a fright as I looked up. Nice one, Dave. One dummy in a window, OK, but three, and two of them children? Each to his own, Dave. I squeeze past the knackered old car in the drive and ring the bell.

Dave opens the door and we get through the pleasantries and small talk and I can hear myself overcompensating for my shyness and generally being a bit of an idiot, and Dave's trying to make me feel at ease, but he's not a terribly relaxed person himself and so he's not that good at it. We shuffle down his hall to the kitchen at the end and he says he was having a beer and would I like something and I say I'll just have a glass of water if he's got one. If he's got one? Like his taps might not be working. He pours me a glass from the fridge and we sit down at his kitchen table at a slight diagonal, as if that might be less weird than facing each other directly, but of course it's weirder, because when would you ever sit diagonally across from someone if there are just two of you?

"It's quiet round here,” I go, meaning the area generally, but I can see he thinks I mean his house.

"They're upstairs,” he says.

I look away because I can't meet his eyes and on the shelf alongside is this weird-looking lizardy thing.

"What's that?” I ask before I can stop myself.

"It's a mummified lizard,” he says. “My sister brought it back from Egypt years ago. I like it."

"You're into mummies, aren't you?” I go. “I guess it's the salt."

Too late, I've said it. I want that nice wooden kitchen floor to open up and let me fall into the cellar that is no doubt underneath. He's looking puzzled.

"They use salt, don't they, as a drying agent?” I say.

"And why...” he begins.

I'm cross at myself, but I'm also starting to feel a bit cross with him, too. Why should it have to be a secret that I've read his novel? It was published. Why wouldn't his students—or one of his students, at least—be interested enough to get a copy and read the damn thing?

"You read us that short-short story by Christopher Burns,” I said. “'The Mummification of Princess Anne'. As an example, you said at the time, of a short-short that was actually worth writing, unlike all those Dave Eggers stories in the Guardian Week end. Remember?'

"Of course, I'm just pleased you do."

"It was great,” I say, overcompensating again. “I'd love to reread it. What was it in again?"

"It was in an anthology called New Stories 1."

"New Stories 1. I like that. It's confident. It's like saying, ‘This is my first wife.’”

He looks at me, but I can't meet his eyes. I just want to die.

"I'll go and get it,” he says. “You're welcome to borrow it. You strike me as someone who looks after books."

He leaves the kitchen and while I listen to his footsteps going upstairs I find myself looking around, checking the table, the work surfaces, the island. I spot a pepper mill, but there's no sign of a salt cellar. I hear a muffled voice upstairs, but only one. I drain my glass and then he's back, with the book, which he puts on the table.

"Where's the nearest loo?” I ask. “Weak bladder."

"Downstairs. Just go out of the kitchen and turn right. The stairs are in front of you."

I find the loo in the cellar. The seat is up. Hmm. I'm thinking this was a pretty terrible idea, coming to Dave's house, and I'm wondering how much worse it can get. Maybe there's another way out of the house from the cellar and I could escape and quit the course and give up writing and never have to see Dave ever again. Half with this in mind, although not seriously of course, and mainly because I'm a nosey cow, I check out the rest of the cellar. There's enough room down there for a student flatshare. I push open one door—it's already open really, I just have to open it a little bit wider—and see a couple of huge bags slumped against the wall. I see my hand reaching out to pull open the top of one of them to check out what's inside and I'm slightly weirded out to see that it's full of salt. Not table salt and you wouldn't want to cook with it, but salt all the same. Like the kind of salt they used to put on icy roads when you were a kid. Why's he got two great big bags of salt in his cellar? And why are his wife and kids so implausibly quiet? And then I hear his voice floating down the stairs from the hall.

"Are you all right down there?"

No, I'm thinking. Not really.

Copyright © 2008 Nicholas Royle

You've Got Your Troubles, I Got Mine

The grass is always greener. As an expatriate living in Japan, I oft en drift off into daydreams about the UK, the shops, the pubs, London's cultural buzz, unlimited fish and chips etc. Then I call up friends and they tell me the place is a dump and I'm better off where I am.

Am I really? Am I one of the lucky few, or is the ‘dark side’ of Japan that I write about darker than that British Jekyll & Hyde streak?

Take our new leader Mr Golden Brown. At the end of 2007, an ICM poll conducted for Newsnight found that nearly six in ten adults think that Brown and his government were tainted by ‘sleaze and scandal', and only 43 percent think he's cut out to be Prime Minister. Think old laughing boy is bad? Try a country with over sixty years of single-party rule, a party kept in power by public apathy. Despite the occasional show trial and subsequent resignation in the newspapers, corruption is institutionalized here. It's enshrined in concepts dating back to the feudal age such as amakudari (giving top private sector jobs to ex-bureaucrats), and seshuu giin (nepotism).

In September 2007 Prime Minister Abe suddenly resigned office after a worse-than-usual string of scandals and gaffes. He was probably the most unpopular PM in living history, but one result of his tenure was the addition of two neologisms to the Japanese language. One is KY, kuuki ga yomenai, which means literally ‘unable to read the air', and is now used to describe some one with no idea of what other people think or expect of them. His name is also used as a verb, as in Abe suru or ‘doing an Abe', which means to cop out of something when the going gets tough. “I heard that New England coach has done an Abe ... I told you he couldn't handle the job.” In his own defence, Abe said that his sudden jump wasn't due to incompetence, but poor health. The trouble-prone ex-PM stated in a press conference in January 2008 that he suffers from ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that meant he was visiting the bathroom up to thirty times a day.

You see? We had a Prime Minister who really was full of shit!

So some things will never change. The TV here will always be crap, high school students will always graduate from nine years of English education unable to verbally string a sentence together, and politicians will always be corrupt. Note the current election fever in the USA: there's a genuine feeling that some thing momentous is going to happen. In Japan, however, politics is not about personalities, it's not even about policies, it's about maintaining the status quo at all costs. The middle-aged male elite in grey suits are running things because they know best, and the ordinary Hiroshi Sato in the street should be content to work for the boss and go back to his loving wife, kids, rice and miso soup every night.

When Thatcher was in power there was a visible, coherent pro test movement. A lot of people in the UK are lamenting the end of that spirit of protest, saying the only things modern Brits are concerned with are the latest reality TV, what Victoria Beckham's wearing, and Britney's latest nervous breakdown. Well, how about another of 2007's top Japanese neologisms, baka doru—a contraction of baka idoru (idiot idol). This refers to TV celebrities whose claim to fame is their outrageous answers on quiz shows, revelling in a basic lack of common sense and general knowledge. Male or female, you don't have to be ignorant to be a TV star—but it certainly helps.

Living in Japan I am now, to all purposes, part of an ethnic minority, and I'm proud. When I lived in the UK I felt like an outsider because of my views; now, because of the colour of my skin, I am an outsider who stands out in the crowd like the Elephant Man on America's Next Top Model. The term gaijin was used in the feudal period and hasn't fundamentally changed; it still means ‘outsider’ and means that it is virtually impossible to be accepted legally as part of mainstream Japanese society.

The latest controversy in the small world of the gaijin is the changes in immigration laws. From November 2007, all visitors to Japan are being photographed and fingerprinted before entry, with the exception of diplomats and Zainichi Koreans who have lived here for generations. The law also includes people who've lived here for years and are coming back off holiday or business on a re-entry visa. This is the revival of a law that, of course, follows the lead of the USA in the same anti-terrorism practice, and also the UK has started insisting on fingerprints for visa applications from certain countries. Yes, this is a sad but inevitable trend which represents the dark side of globalization, but what has really incensed the gaijin community here is that it shows that the talk of Japan becoming increasingly internationalized stinks like two-weeks-old sushi.

The population is currently in a state of decline with birth rates falling from year to year, and the future damage to the economy could be considerable. To deal with the problem, the government, industry, university research programs and the mass media are putting their hopes in ... robots. Yes, mechanical servants, such as Honda's Asimo. Masakatsu Fujie, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tokyo's Waseda University, recently told an audience of foreign journalists that service robots would be able to “help reduce government spending on health care, take over many dreary service jobs and prop up Japan's societal vitality.” Household robots to care you finally lose your marbles, even robots to lift you onto the toilet seat. Perhaps ex-PM Abe is going to get one that wipes his arse for him.

Many critics are saying that this is blatant nonsense. The Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau itself has announced that by 2050 Japan's population will have shrunk by about thirty million, and it would need ten million new immigrants to survive as a nation. The politicians, of course, don't want to know. On January 25th the Justice Minister, Kunio Hatayama, announced that the current registration system for non-Japanese will be revised, a move that some critics say will give the state increased control over its foreign residents. Sixty-odd years after the end of the Pacific War, the Japanese authorities still regard non-Japanese with fear, suspicion and contempt.

So are things really getting worse in the UK and Japan, or is this just miserable-old-git syndrome? I suspect the answer lies with certain groups of people. George Orwell once wrote that if there is hope, it lies with the proles. Yes, the real heroes are those who work day by day to care for their families, those living with the disadvantaged and the handicapped, those who genuinely contribute to society. In the 21st Century, however, that might not be enough. The future may well belong not to the Abes or the Golden Browns, or even the Clintons or Obamas, but to those whose names are unknown to the media. Those working out on the fringes of science, art, literature, medicine, music, media, spirituality, those who may well be old or young gits but are doing something about it.

Copyright © 2008 John Paul Catton

Van Helsing bid him draft this account, and John Seward understood the request's efficacy—'Tis meet that I put it down, as Jonathan Harker noted more than a decade ago. His physician's scrawl was not a device that fostered accuracy and sanity, however. It let him tell lies. If he penned a fact and found it untenable, he might scratch it from the foolscap sheets, changing it to an indecipherable blot.

That was his will and testament. Gone were the days when symptom and diagnosis could twirl ‘round his thoughts in a predictable dance of cause and effect. Such rigidity of thought distressed, and exegesis was a vital tool for any metaphysician, apprentice or master; he had studied the unnatural through encounters with the Un-Dead, and Time's verdicts and attendant devolution were his enemies.

He had lost his wife and now feared for his life. He did not know if he was the man he always believed himself to be or just a phantom playing at life...

Geraldine was fair: her skin luminescent as pale orchid petals; her long tresses a golden net ripe with beguiling scents; her gaze as green as spring meadows. They first met upon his return from the Continent with Jonathan Harker, his wife Mina, and Arthur Holm wood. Their courtship was quick, the wedding a quiet affair. They were happy.

Examined in hindsight, his devotion probably was a reaction to the horrific events of the preceding seasons, the confrontation with Dracula. The immediacy of the courtship possibly owed itself to his unspoken desire for peace and happiness. He gave his wife every thing she asked, without hesitation; her requests weighed less than a butterfly's kiss. Yet, that same unselfishness proved her down fall. While he was grateful the Great Recorder granted him a second chance at love, his wedded bliss all too quickly disappeared.

Coincident on the century's turn, Geraldine expressed an interest in travel abroad, and he decided they should visit the Orient, a tour of the Empire's far-flung jewels. Hong Kong, Macao and Shanghai were crowded and boisterous as London in July, ripe with exotic scents of tamarind and myrrh, the effusive tones of scarlet, indigo and nut. Near the end of their stay in Shanghai, Geraldine contracted cholera.

The onset escaped his notice during the return passage via steamer to Delhi. How did he mistake cholera for seasickness? Her skin dried and lost its elasticity. Despite her thirst, drinking was difficult, and her complexion was ashen and waxen. He believed she thought her self with child. He certainly did; their love making was frequent during the holiday.

Geraldine kept her deteriorating condition secret, perhaps believing a New Woman should not seem so delicate before her husband and lover, that Seward's opinion of her would alter should he learn she had soiled herself. She grew lethargic, fell into a coma from severe dehydration, and died before a handful of days passed. The steamer captain placed Seward under quarantine, and he was unable to attend her burial at sea.

Jonathan, Mina and young Quincey visited him at Purfleet upon his return. He kept himself aloof; work at the asylum, too long pushed aside, required attention and he preferred to believe he was inconsolable. Geraldine had been ... his Lucy.

Yes. Lucy. He could admit that now. His beloved Geraldine had washed clean his memories of that sweet but unholy Thing they destroyed. How else could he explain finding himself thinking once more about that dear, damned lady? Envy, perhaps. Arthur owned Lucy's heart in life and un-death, and still won the favour of another woman, the current Lady Godalming. The happiness Seward wanted—that he felt he deserved—amounted to nothing more than misery and lost opportunity. Where was his last kiss?

He found himself wandering at night, oblivious to the autumn chill, unwilling to return to an empty home. Chloral doses brought dream less sleep, but he woke later and later in the afternoon, unable to participate in the asylum's daily routines. Rather than admit the bitterness he felt, he wrote to Professor Van Helsing in Amsterdam.

His paradise was lost, but Van Helsing's own past losses might make him a kindred spirit. Milton wrote: They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet, Quaff immortality and joy.

Van Helsing did not reply to his inquiries, however, and Seward's excursions took him farther from home until one night he passed the darkened façade of Jack Straw's Castle. Unnamed desire had led him to Hampstead Heath and Lucy's resting place.

He directed his steps to Highgate Cemetery, where the full moon washed clean the gloomy ranks of gravestones, each memorial as anti septic as the asylum surgery. He found a barrow and spades near Lucy's tomb, where some forgetful worker apparently left them. His hands shook as he grasped a spade's rough-hewn oak handle, and splinters pricked his palms. He welcomed the minor injury; the pain was substantial com pared to the illusion of peace blanketing the surrounding corruption. The lock upon the tomb succumbed to three well-placed strikes. Ivy, grey beneath the ivory moonlight, held the door closed for a moment longer, but that barrier too surrendered to his intent, vines ripping with unexpressed agony.

The tomb was dark and silent. Thick webs billowed in the breeze entering through the open door, perhaps the first fresh air inside this sepulcher in nearly a dozen years. It was as familiar as his lodgings.

Time, once more revealing its presence. Socrates wrote good men eat and drink that they may live. Seward would eat and drink sorrow, and so defeat the hold grief had on his thoughts. It did not matter Lucy was a surrogate for Geraldine; alive, Geraldine was Lucy's. He could not imagine her decomposing corpse was any worse than Geraldine's remains, given over to the hungry sea. He would open the coffin, lift whatever remained of her decapitated head, kiss her lips, and bid both his loves farewell.

The solder sealing the coffin was broken. The lid tumbled aside at his touch. The white silk lining had rotted, exposing patches of plain batting and wood, but the tatters appeared pristine under the pale moonlight coming through the doorway.

The coffin was empty.

A footfall sounded behind him. He turned. Something large blocked the entrance—and then a heavy object struck his head, completing the blackness that had descended upon his life.

"You mean him to break into the tomb, Van Helsing,” Holmwood had said, pacing between two stone angels perched atop nearby graves, pausing every few moments to glare at his companion. “Why go to such lengths? I have the damned key right here. Why not unlock the door and let that circumstance entice Seward? Better, why don't we just grab the fellow?"

The longer Van Helsing associated with Holmwood the more he noted the other man's quick temper. Their dealings involved only the issue at hand, and Holmwood routinely voiced frustration at the pace of the experiments. When Van Helsing originally divulged his interest and queried whether he might exhume Lucy, Holmwood hesitated; an anticipated reaction, considering she was his lost love. However, the initial tests were producing favourable results, allowing Holmwood to play lord and patron without a blow to his conscience.

"Do you really want John as an unwilling recruit?” Van Helsing asked. “Or let him take action and believe he brings him self to our fold?"

Holmwood relented and, predictably, Seward used the spade Van Helsing had one of Holmwood's men bring for just such use. The men collected Seward as soon as he entered the tomb to discover its occupant missing. They were not overly rough with him: a rumpled coat, trousers patchily covered in grave dust, and small contusions on his left temple were the only signs that all was not well. He remained unconscious throughout the lengthy carriage ride back to the estate, propped in the corner to Van Helsing's right while Holmwood commanded the plush front bench, pulling noisome smoke from a meerschaum pipe and muttering unintelligible responses to Van Helsing's conversational forays.

A light rain fell as they neared their destination, bringing a smile to Van Helsing's worn countenance. The hour before dawn was a time he enjoyed. The countryside outside London was fallow; the promise of life prepared to supplant the night and its silent reaches. His compatriot Vambery would arrive at some point on the morrow, and they would sow and reap, meeting the needs Holmwood set as well as their own scientific pursuits.

The men deposited Seward on a settee in the study. Holmwood stoked the coals in the fireplace before slumping behind the large oak desk set before the eastward-facing windows—the lord, seated on his throne. Van Helsing filled a tumbler with Scotch and brought it to Seward.

The young doctor was barely conscious, and coughed several times trying to swallow the fiery amber liquid. His blue-eyed gaze brightened when he recognized them, and he gulped the remaining fingers of liquor. Droplets ran past his mouth and down his stubbly chin to stain his unbuttoned white shirt.

"Professor Van Helsing? I thought you in Amsterdam!” He vigorously shook the other's hand. “I am so glad to see you! I've had the strangest experience—"

"Yes, yes, we know all about it, Jack,” Holmwood said, nodding his head.

"I don't understand,” Seward said. “How did I arrive at your home, Arthur?” He looked from Holmwood to Van Helsing, and then at his surroundings, taking in the expanses of dark panelling, the ranks of the long-faced Holmwood family peering out from fl at oil portraits and dull threadbare tapestries. Scattered amid this genteel British décor were signs of Holm wood's current interests: an Egyptian sarcophagus with the lid propped open to reveal the bandage-wrapped occupant; a leather-bound Bible open to Exodus and the passage about Pass over, sitting on a stand fashioned from an ornate brass crucifix and placed under the portrait of Arthur's father; a brace of ebony jackal statues, crouched on the floor to either side of the desk.

Holmwood said, “Van Helsing believes our project will derive some benefit from your assistance."

"I received your telegrams,” Van Helsing said. “Your current ... obsession was amenable to my inquiries. At my request Arthur tracked your movements. I determined you would arrive at High gate Cemetery last night and discover the absence of our Lady Lucy."

"You have me at a disadvantage,” Seward said. “What project? Why did you not approach me directly? Why this delay, this subterfuge?” He scowled, rubbing his temple where a knot, left by the blows from Holmwood's henchmen, was turning purple. He stood and refilled his tumbler at the bar, quaffing it in a gulp. “More important: what happened to Lucy?"

"There was no subterfuge,” Van Helsing replied, attempting to delay the moment of revelation. “This is a delicate issue, not entered into lightly."

Van Helsing lead the way to the main cellar door, explaining all would become clear and postponing any immediate discussion of Lucy. Holmwood excused himself, citing a waking household as reason to attend his lady wife. “She feigns interest,” he said, “but she is satisfied if I keep her company."

Van Helsing briefly smiled at this subterfuge. For all Holmwood's complaints about involving Seward, he could not hide his discomfort at the use of the estate or how desperately he wanted to move the experiments to another locale.

Van Helsing unlocked and moved through a small door set beneath the main staircase. A half-dozen unlit lanterns sat on a recessed shelf in the cramped space within. The glass was so stained by soot each offered less illumination than the match Van Helsing used lighting it. He had Seward hold it, then closed and locked the door behind them before proceeding down a granite staircase. The steps were wide, but slick and worn, the arched ceiling low. When the two reached the bottom, Van Helsing unlocked an iron gate with another key. New mortar marked the places where bars meet walls and floor. They moved down a long passage until reaching a second gate, which Van Helsing again opened and closed before descending a final set of stairs. Their footfalls echoed as they entered a narrow, deep chamber. More lanterns crowned the walls, bracketing alcoves where ranks of wine bottles reclined on wooden shelves. The air smelled of disuse and vinegar. Webs draped the shelves in patterns as erratic as the thoughts of a madman. Large granite blocks, fresh from quarrying, and a banded iron door, sealed the final alcove. Van Helsing unlatched a square grille set in the door at shoulder height.

The alcove revealed was larger than the others, expanded. Granite blocks lined its walls as well. “Holmwood built this to my specifications—which I discovered through arduous trial and error,” Van Helsing said, withholding how a mixture of silver and garlic laced the mortar and coated the iron.

A naked prisoner stood within the cell.

She slowly turned her face away from the light, her unkempt dark hair falling across her pale face. Chains tightly bound her hands, feet and midsection back against one wall. A trestle table ran along the opposite wall, stacked with an array of tubes and retorts, a butcher block and carving knives, and two sets of plates and cutlery. Several rickety three-legged stools crowded the floor underneath. Dozens of hooks strung with meat hung from the ceiling. A potbelly stove brooded in the back corner.

"The restraints are pure silver,” Van Helsing said. “I wrap them in oilcloth because the metal generates a severe allergic reaction. Even protected, it still saps her strength and curtails her other abilities, and the flesh in proximity exhibits a discernible rash. Without the cloth sheath, the damage would be considerably worse."

He indicated the prisoner's rib cage, where the flesh around the chains was raw and covered with seeping, pebbled eruptions. An area the size of his hand lay open, the skin peeled back and pinned against the prisoner's torso to expose the excised flesh. Severed muscle bands glistened with shades of red beside ribs as stark and sudden as an African hunter's ivory bounty.

Van Helsing grasped Seward by an arm, briefly squeezing it with all his strength—which he knew exceeded what the other man would expect from a septuagenarian such as himself. “Understand that I am proud,” he said. “Proud like a father, as is right when creation is made.” Seward's arm twitched as Van Helsing released it—a nervous habit the younger man assumed shortly after the start of his chloral addiction, and which Van Helsing hoped was only a sign of nerves and not a recurrence of the prior shortcoming.

"Professor, this woman is alive,” Seward said, gulping at the close air. “Vivisection is an understandable necessity in the advancement of human knowledge—"

"Nothing compares with a new fact in science. The aim of science is the advance of human knowledge at any sacrifice.” Van Helsing shut the grille and unlocked the door, motioning Seward to follow him towards the stove. He placed a skillet on top, pulled down two thin steaks from the hooks, and put them in the pan. “Get us two stools and set out plates and cutlery, John, and we will break our fast together."

"I must insist, Van Helsing. What are you doing?” Seward pointed at the prisoner, accidentally edging nearer to her.

"Take care you keep out of her reach, my son,” Van Helsing said, removing three brown eggs from the shelf above the table and cracking them in the pan for scrambling. “Her strength is amazing, but her current straits should not foster an assumption that she is defenceless. Her injuries and the lack of earth in which to ground and focus her spirit are the only things that keep her controllable."

The prisoner lowered her head and scowled at the two men—as much as was possible with her eyes removed. She stretched her head forward, slowly, languorously, then snapped her mouth shut like a bear trap.

"I removed all her teeth,” Van Helsing said, “not just the fangs. The fingernails grow back, faster than one might expect, so I must remove them at regular intervals. They are as hard as forged steel. I believe the eyes and teeth would grow back, given enough time."

Seward stepped back, stumbled, found a stool beneath the table. Van Helsing let him stay there until the eggs and steaks were finished, and then doled out equal portions.

"The idea was an acorn planted by mistress Lucy and the brides of Dracula,” he said while Seward wolfed down the food on his plate. “Just as the seed of that great tree will grow, given the right soil and climate and God's will, so did this know ledge send tendrils to root in my brain upon my return to Amsterdam—until I connected the disparities between the deaths of those four women and the death of the Count."

He stood, began to pace. “When we destroyed Dracula, his body disintegrated. Lucy was an image of perfection freed from her enslavement, and so it was the same with the three brides, despite their lengthy tenure as Un-Dead. What was the difference? Were they still beauty personified while their creator was nothing more than dust?"

Van Helsing detailed how he considered sunlight as a probable cause. They had exposed Dracula to the purifying rays of a chill November sunset. He returned to the castle in the spring, following his last visit to England after young Quincey's seventh birthday celebration and while Jonathan Harker compiled for publication the records of their struggle with the dark Count.

"The castle sat vacant, walls succumbing to the encroaching forest, fresh moss taking hold and breaking blocks down to rubble. It was unremarkable without its lord and master, and I feared it would disappear from view if I turned away. The true death of Dracula let Time continue there, where supernatural forces formerly kept its forces distant and inconsequential. More than ever, my theory required testing, and I braved oblivion to enter and reopen the tombs of the dead brides."

All three appeared the same as they had the day he staked them and removed their heads. Brought into the sunlight, however, they quickly devolved and came to nothing. Which raised the question: how long would they lay there in their graves, alabaster goddesses that could rival Greek statuary? They were truly dead now, so what was the power that preserved?

"I considered approaching Holmwood on the matter of examining Lucy, but he had since pledged himself to the current Lady Holmwood,” he said. “It would seem improper to open old wounds at such a joyous moment. Instead, I shuttled between Buda-Pesth and Amsterdam, and then back again, discussing theories with Arminius Vambery—who is a more solid and trust worthy colleague than Simon-Peter—and he proved invaluable translating old texts in his capacity as a professor of Oriental languages at the University in Pesth. We tested practical applications in the Transylvanian wilds as I traced the far-flung court of that ancient Voivode Dracula. His expansive court—a noble, especially a King-Vampire, but truly any of the select breed, measures his worth against those he considers beneath him."

"What did you discover, Professor?"

Seward had turned an analytical eye towards the prisoner. If the cell were larger, Van Helsing believed the young doctor would stand and pace as he balanced the salient points of the preceding tale against the current scene. All was progressing as Van Helsing had hoped; he could tell Seward had forgotten Lucy, at least temporarily, and he hoped the shock he surely would experience next did not overmatch the benefits of the current investigations. “It is akin to a re-discovery,” he answered, hinting. “Arminius and I traced several recipes and arcane formulae back through the Bible and other archaic texts."

"Recipes?"

Van Helsing smiled, tilted his head to one side, as if savouring his reply. He straightened, gripped the lapels of his jacket, thumbs tucked behind the worn and wrinkled fabric. “'And they shall eat the flesh in that night,'” he re cited, “'roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire; his head with his legs, and with the purtenance thereof. And ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; and that which remaineth of it until the morning ye shall burn with fire. And thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the Lord's Passover.’”

Van Helsing expected Seward's confusion at this passage from Exodus. He indicated their plates, empty save grease and juice from the meat. “John ... we are eating them."

Between the time of Van Helsing's revelation and the arrival of Vambery, Seward wrote his account. He did not continue past the events at Lucy's tomb; the morning's developments were too fresh and his position too tenuous to jot down his thoughts. Listening to Van Helsing and Arthur, and later to Vambery, he did not know what to say. What response could he make? “Eureka! The Angel of Death will pass by if I prepare in a prescribed manner!” All he learned from this talk about a preservative power siphoned from vampire flesh and Van Helsing's citation of an Old Testament passage was he now questioned the man's sanity.

His mouth tasted of garlic and pepper.

When Van Helsing led him out from the cellar, he laid an arm across his shoulders for support, but, also, so Seward would not question him further.

Holmwood exhibited an unseemly bonhomie more suited for matters of the heart than this madness. They sat in the study while he catalogued his plans to remodel Seward's asylum. Apparently, Vambery brought a shipment of Un-Dead with him, closing the facility he and Van Helsing had maintained in Amsterdam. Purfleet was their choice as the new home for their operation.

"I'm to house these things,” Seward said, circling the study. “What of my patients, my staff?"

"Initially,” Arthur said, examining his macabre collection, “the men I recruited here in England will replace your staff. If all proceeds as we planned, we can hold our first gala before winter. I've approached several lords of the realm and they ... expressed interest in lengthier terms with their titles."

Seward noted Holmwood said nothing about the patients, and he kept his silence even after Vambery arrived in a coach at the head of a convoy of six wagons and Holmwood passed out handfuls of gold sovereigns for the carters to continue on to Purfleet. A seventh wagon entered the courtyard from be hind the manor. A gang of workers carried a rectangular box out side through the front doors. The men were rough with long unshaven faces, scratchy wool work clothes, and the wiry energy of grey hounds. Seward assumed they were Holmwood's recruits.

They bid farewell to Lady Holmwood and joined Vambery in the coach. The Hungarian carried himself with the same assurance as Van Helsing: back held straight, trunk broad, gaze clear and given to an unintentional scowl of concentration. He was balding, but otherwise did not look his age. Van Helsing once told Seward that Vambery was born in the 1820s, yet he possessed the smooth, unwrinkled face and clear complexion of a man in his middle years, Van Dyke beard and waxed moustache dark brown and thick. His black coat, trousers, and vest were a popular Saville Row cut, his tie an iridescent blue silk as gay as that worn by any young man going courting. He was the immaculate image of a proper British gentleman—except for his breath, which carried the garlic-and-pepper smell.

Even had Vambery deigned to acknowledge his presence, Seward did not believe he could have spoken a single word without becoming ill. His stomach knotted around the congealed eggs and the meat. He forced himself to focus on the passing scenery until they wound their way into the city. He watched enviously as his fellow Londoners went about their unremarkable lives. A change unlike anything they might imagine moved amongst them and they knew nothing of its existence.

Seward gathered the sanitarium staff, advised them to leave and not return until instructed otherwise, extracting a guarantee from Holmwood they would continue to receive their wages. Then he hid in his office while the three conspirators assumed control of the asylum. He considered taking a chloral dose, but decided to walk the grounds until the sun set in a red-orange conflagration that consumed the horizon and painted the world with hellish colours.

In truth, he felt better than ever.

By the time he returned and made his way to the west wing and its array of padded rooms, twilight had come as soft as smoke and as heavy as the rising moon. Arthur's men had made good use of the remains of the day, undoing a decade of remodelling and expansion. Close-knit silver bars lined the walls and ceilings, while overlapping sections of silver plate covered the floors. Un-Dead hung in mid-air in each room, hellish angels, suspended by chains, naked and blinded and tooth less. Paired work men guarded the creatures, armed with cumbersome Smith & Wesson revolvers and Bowie knives similar to those favoured by the elder Quincey. It was strange, how the past still haunted Seward's steps.

He found the vampire from the wine cellar pinned to a gurney in the surgery. Van Helsing and Vambery skittered round like fledgling interns at their first dissection, lab coats turning red with blood as they quartered, skinned and parcelled out the pitiful creature as it writhed against its bonds.

Arthur stood to one side, encircled by four workmen. He smiled upon Seward's entrance. “I wondered whether I'd need to send my someone out to find you, John,” he said. “I was afraid you lost your way."

"I'm fine, Arthur.” Seward moved next to the gurney. The vampire stretched her head backward, screaming piteously, whining, neck muscles distended in agony. The empty eye sockets were dark pits. “I do have questions.” Questions he had wanted to pose to this Un-Dead if he had found it unattended—every condemned deserves the chance to cleanse their souls. Now, however, his inquiries for her would go unasked.

"Ask,” Arthur said.

"Who else knows?"

"Do you mean: do Jonathan and Mina know? Is our happy group once more whole and rejoined for this enterprise?” Arthur chuckled. “I am afraid they are wholeheartedly the lovers and doting parents. Poor, young Quincey will grow up the proper British gentleman of this new century."

Which was what Seward expected. He nodded and made to leave—he did not need to watch Van Helsing and Vambery proceed about their work—but Holmwood threw words at his back with the determination of a duellist and Seward turned back to face him.

"I invited Jonathan on safari to Africa several years ago,” Holm wood said, “but he told me he saw no purpose in stalking big game. ‘We should devote ourselves to helping those less fortunate rather than forcing them to serve us in our pastimes.’ Returning home through Egypt, I saw the wonders our countrymen uncovered along the Nile. Enough wealth so a man might question his own worth. Yet, that civilization perished.” He shook his head, his unlined face evincing the first emotion Seward recalled seeing since awakening this morning. “It is not right for an empire to fall."

Seward understood. Holmwood had lost Lucy, who had favoured his betrothal over that proffered by Seward and Quincey Morris. Her mother died, torn from life by the horror of Lucy's death. His own father passed, leaving him the Godalming title and all its responsibilities; a fading birthright. Tennyson captured the sentiment: Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done...

Seward still needed to query one of the captives. He could then weigh the right of this campaign. Any man could barter his soul into Hell if the prize was right, and virtual immortality surely would postpone judgment. Insanity tasted cold.

The larder emptied in less than a month, faster than Van Helsing expected. All six nosferatu were lean, hungry; they were ready to accept an offering of Seward's patients. Once those were turned, he could expand consumption and productivity, using the converts as a manageable seed stock.

Van Helsing and Holmwood were again in the chapel at neighbouring Carfax, Holmwood intent on inspecting how the work progressed on the venue for the coming gala. The rotting pews were gone, crusted layers of dust and dirt scrubbed from the cream-coloured flagstones. Heavy mahogany tables—able to seat a dozen—ran the length of the nave to the cracked marble altar. All appeared white and pure with the rays from the late October sun pouring through the mended stained glass windows. A smell of soap and fresh lilacs overwhelmed the sense of abandonment and unanswered prayers Van Helsing equated with this place.

"We offer up his patients tonight, Van Helsing,” Holmwood said. “Once we start, our course is set. I sent invitations to those who might profit from this endeavour and so favour it with their support."

Van Helsing knew Holmwood had not informed the guests the reason for the gala. Let alone what he planned to serve them. It would be a forced baptism, but the method was proving effective with Holmwood's workmen and the remnants of Seward's staff that had remained out of loyalty for their master.

When they returned to the asylum, it was to find Seward in the dining hall in an ebullient mood, entertaining the cooks and waiting diners with tales of his earlier life in Amsterdam. Some stories were bawdy, yet the normally reserved English folk appeared amused, perhaps because their respected employer was once more among them and in good spirits.

Van Helsing embraced the younger man. “I am happy you choose to join us,” he said.

Seward had not partaken of their meals, claiming a need to remain near his office and deal with the asylum administration. Van Helsing thought the reluctance stemmed from the rapid adaptations being made by his body. Now, they were united.

Seward laughed and remarked how his mind was at ease and settled upon his course. He went so far as to grab Holmwood by the shoulders and kiss him on both cheeks. Holmwood blushed and pushed Seward away, then smiled and laughed as the other man turned and kissed Van Helsing.

Dinner was a raucous celebration. Holmwood transferred his entire cellar in preparation for the coming gala, and Seward's conversion prompted the lord and patron in Holmwood to let the wine flow. Well into dinner, one workman climbed atop a front table, produced a fiddle, and picked out ‘A Light Heart's a Jewel'. The central tables cleared, Holmwood's workmen and the asylum attendants pairing off to dance, cheering and clapping.

Van Helsing moved into the safety of a bay window alcove from which he might observe rather than lose himself in the tumult. He preferred to save his renewed vigour for times when there was not a dearth of feminine companionship. Vambery did not show any such restraint. The figure he presented, coatless, sleeves rolled to his elbows, braces hanging about his legs as he danced first with Holmwood and then with one new partner after another, plainly illustrated the benefits soon to be offered to the lord's peers once Purfleet became fully functional.

Only after a bit did Van Helsing notice Seward was absent.

At first, he believed himself mistaken. Couples abandoned the makeshift dance floor at the conclusion of each song and new fiddlers spelled old; several revellers had moved to the tables and lowered their heads for catnaps brought on by an excess of wine and loud music. Surely, Seward was one of those who were spent. Then Van Helsing noticed how Vambery slumped across the head table and Holmwood reclined on a nearby bench surrounded by his ubiquitous guards. All were asleep.

Van Helsing licked his lips, seeking some taste of what drug Seward must have used. Was the sedative in the food, the wine, or both? Several were available at the asylum, and an addict like Seward, albeit a reformed one who also was a competent chemist, would know how best to employ any number of potions.

His sedentary nature throughout the evening, and the smaller amounts of wine he drank, apparently slowed the drug. His legs still fought his commands, though, making each step as unpredictable in motion as the first steps of a newborn. None of the few remaining dancers remarked on his weaving passage across the dance floor. He stumbled along the passage to the cell block, leaning first against one wall and then another while the floor seemingly tilted and swayed. His heart drove like a locomotive piston, pushing him through the asylum corridors but also speeding him towards the time when he would lose consciousness.

Six gurneys lined the oak-panelled passage. Each bore an asylum patient chosen at random for the jury-rigged feeding originally planned for later that evening. Every one was under sedation. Had he asked Seward to prepare them, placing the means of destruction in the younger man's misguided hands? Perhaps it was Holmwood, detailing in his hubris how their enterprise would make more nosferatu.

Van Helsing's feet hit a puddle across the floor, slipped. “John! Where are you?” He crawled to the nearest doorway, used the jamb to climb to his feet. Kerosene soaked his clothes.

The six guards Holmwood set on the vampires lay to one side, unconscious, arms shoved into strait-waistcoats, and trays of half-consumed food stacked beside them. The room's Un-Dead tenant—a male of middling age, no younger than a century but no older than two—strained against the chains despite how its flesh charred and smoked as its blood coated the silver. Even though it was blind, it still knew sustenance was within reach. It keened; its toothless jaws worked in frustration. Its brethren in the adjoining rooms answered its cry, a threnody born of starvation.

"John!"

"Here, Professor.” He stood at the end of the passage—a lit kerosene lantern in one hand, a revolver in the other.

"Why, John?"

Tears ran down his pale face. “I thought I could question them. That I could treat them as patients, root out this fascination with blood, and correct it. If we prey upon them, we are no better."

"These are noble thoughts, John.” Van Helsing edged forward. “Let me help you. You can study them as we make more. You can expand your science to its uttermost limits because you will have the time to do it."

Seward shook his head. “They're all mad."

The nosferatu cried out, as if in response to this assertion.

Van Helsing felt overcome with an unreasoning hatred towards them for all the unknown misery they surely caused during their long lives. “As Day replaces Night, so will man's discoveries in the natural sciences supersede their supernatural power,” he said, pointing the near vampire. “Now stop this, John!” He held his hand out, demanding lantern and revolver.

"I only wanted to end it all. I only wanted to kiss Lucy,” Seward said. “Physician, heal thyself.” His head slumped for ward until his chin touched his chest. He held out the revolver on an open palm. Van Helsing stepped forward—and then Seward dashed the lantern to the floor, spreading fire in every direction.

Vambery informed Van Helsing that three workmen, fighting off the drugs Seward administered, covered his blazing form in blankets when he rushed into the dining hall. They rescued a dozen others before the asylum burned to the ground. He explained in detail how Holmwood died, never stirring from his enforced slumber, forgotten by his minions.

The news did nothing to ease Van Helsing's pain. The fire had left him as little more than a husk. His eyes were gone, boiled from their sockets. His skin had shrivelled and his bones had cracked beneath the flames, twisting his body into a fetal curl.

Vambery questioned him about what happened, but Van Helsing could only utter one word in reply, a hiss driven by laboured exhalations, an echo of Seward's final words: “Heal."

And Vambery fed him.

Copyright © 2008 Steve Nagy

Worlds of Fantasy

Perhaps it's appropriate that the Beeb situated Worlds of Fantasy (late Feb/early March 2008), their three-part exploration and analysis of the genre, out in the relatively unknown broadcasting hinterland of bbc4, rather than the more familiar terrain of bbc2. After all, fantasy is the stuff of nerds and fanboys, of limited appeal to a mainstream audience. Except, of course, as the series demonstrated, the fantastic has never had such broad appeal as at present, with its influence and effect permeating so many areas of our recreational lives, from literature through gaming, from television to movies. Such has been the extent of fantasy's infiltration of the cultural mainstream that the fact that the mainstream has largely ignored the phenomenon until now seems almost inexplicable. So, given that the Beeb's scheduling represents a missed opportunity to engage fantasy's wider audience in the discussion, maybe a finger wagged in mild admonishment is in order. On the other hand, we should give Auntie a hearty slap on the back not just for recognising how far the fantastic permeates various strands of our culture, but also for exploring the subject in a largely balanced and intelligent manner.

To understand the significance of the series we need to remind ourselves of the cultural mainstream's familiar default stance towards the genre. Despite the fact that Lord of the Rings has consistently featured highly in polls of readers all time favourite books, the majority of commentators have persisted in discussing it as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than as a literary work. Each time J.K. Rowling published a new instalment of Harry Potter, the discussion focused more on the round-the-block queues and its huge sales, rather than how Potter fits into a particular tradition of British children's fantasy. The LOTR and Potter films, like the Star Wars films before them, are examined almost entirely from a financial perspective, as product, individual strands of a synergistic campaign whose other manifestations include action figures, computer games, T-shirts and movie tie-in books. How many times have we seen the ‘fun’ slot at the end of the regional news programme devoted to reports on a SF or fantasy convention, wherein the attendees are treated as mutant idiot offshoots of the human race? It's not Trekkies, Dr Who fans or Goths give genre a bad name, it's the lame-brained reporters who lack the nous to ask what makes people so passionate about the genre. When confronted directly with works of fantasy and SF, it's not just the news media who are dismissive—see almost any edition of David Langford's Ansible Link in our sister magazine Interzone for a panoply of sniffy and downright abusive views and misperceptions from literary writers and critics, and even from writers the genre has cleaved to its bosom.

Given all this, Worlds of Fantasy begins to look like a radical critical rethink about the genre on the part of the mainstream. Tracing the roots and development of fantasy over three episodes, the show adopted a pretty conventional tripartite structure, which posited the all-too neat thesis that contemporary fantasy evolved out of what was a specifically children's literature, by way of Tolkien and Peake, into the vast industry we see today. Whether you take issue with this depends on your own reading and experience of the genre, but whatever its limitations the first episode, which focused on a number of the key creators of children's fantasy, offered a range of considered and sometimes perceptive opinions on the work of Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie. More attention might have been paid to the extent to which writers like Philip Pullman and Alan Garner have responded to and rejected the moral certainties of their Victorian ancestors, but it was good to see credit being paid to the subversive nature of Roald Dahl's children's stories, which reminded us that kids don't mind their reading being leavened with a little cruelty and spite.

Inevitably, any attempt to examine the evolution of the genre would have to include some discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien, but to find at least a third of the second episode devoted to Mervyn Peake was, for this viewer at least, a genuine and thrilling surprise. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, given the increasingly pervasive influence Peake has had on recent developments in fantasy. Whether openly acknowledged or not, the dank fabric and oddity of Gormenghast has shaped the tone and feel of works by writers as diverse as Jeff Vandermeer, Storm Constantine, M. John Harrison, China Miéville and Michael Moorcock, with the latter two cropping up with valuable contributions throughout the series. Though the episode was at pains to point out that as fantasists Peake and Tolkien were at opposite ends of the pole, it also explored the ways in which their most famous works were shaped by their childhood, by landscape, and by their experiences of the two great conflicts of the twentieth century. The key difference between them and their approach to literary fantasy, it was suggested, lay in their perceptions of themselves as, in Tolkien's case an academic, in Peake's as an artist. It was to the programme's credit that accusations of Tolkien's literary and political conservatism were understated—without being ignored—with the focus primarily on the delight and intellectual rigour with which he approached the task of secondary world creation.

The final instalment examined the ways in which the genre had evolved since Peake and Tolkien. Particular emphasis was placed on Terry Pratchett and the manner in which the Discworld novels have developed from parodying LOTR and the ‘product’ of the assembly-line Tolkien wannabes, into a more wholly realised and individual creation which serves to satirise contemporary social and political preoccupations with race, sex, religion and death. Something that jarred a little was the space devoted to the ‘New Weird'. Without wishing to question the merits of individual writers who are perceived as belonging to this literary group, why this ‘movement’ should warrant discussion more than any other branch or sub-genre of fantasy, puzzles me. If writers like Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll, Lucius Shepard and others had bothered to adopt some convenient moniker to suggest shared thematic concerns or formal approaches, would they now be seen as the future of the genre? Of more interest was the discussion of the relationship between fantasy and cinema, with Guillermo Del Toro adeptly suggesting that all cinema—even Mike Leigh—is fantasy, because what it portrays are “ghosts through a magic lantern ... something that is no more, or is not there; it's like seeing the light of a star that died eons ago, reach you.” Another strength of this final episode was the discussion of fantasy gaming and the ways in which, to paraphrase contributor Ren Reynolds, game players were engaging with and constructing narratives on a level playing field with traditional fantasy writers.

Worlds of Fantasy was an intelligent and worthwhile exercise in trying to understand how and why the genre developed in the way that it did, and to examine the nature of its appeal to a wider and more demanding reading public than had been previously acknowledged. The series wasn't without flaws, however, and the two that most rankled were the undue emphasis given to the notion that fantasy started out and existed for some seventy or eighty years purely as a children's genre, and the absence of any discussion of the contribution of non-British—okay, American—fantasists to the genre's evolution. Lord Dunsany and William Hope Hodgson deserved mention if only to demonstrate that adults in the late 19th early 20th century were reading fantasy, and any overview of the genre that neglects to mention writers like Lovecraft, Leiber, Howard and Le Guin, could be accused of blatant Anglo-centricity. A shame, but maybe the BBC could redeem themselves with a series devoted to American fantasy—it will be interesting to see if they attempt to cast Poe as a children's author.

Copyright © 2008 Mike O'Driscoll

He pauses for a few minutes before actually getting to it, his back against a post and his arm draped along the length of the trunk's lid, his fingertips feeling the textures of its surface. It is his habit, this lingering until the moment is exactly right, even though he has already waited the requisite year to the day before ascending once more to this place.

He doesn't dispute that it is a curious habit. Which ones aren't? But it is, after all, his, and this establishes a worth beyond debate. In a world where few of us get to choose the nature of the present with which we are confronted, let alone the future, sovereignty over access to one's own past ought to be inviolate.

This has always seemed to him an inarguable position, albeit a privileged one. He knows such access isn't available to everyone. His very surroundings, the topmost level of this house in which he has lived his entire life, are confirmation of this under-regarded injustice.

All of my years are still here, he thinks. Overgrown with dust and cobwebs though they may be, they are here, all around him.

Though his vision at this point of the morning can still reveal little more than general shapes—the lack of urgency in turning on the lights being another aspect of his stubbornly protected habit—the surrounding shadows hold no mystery for him, each era of his life still available in carefully preserved boxes, trunks, garment bags and the like. It is the achievement of parents who, in the manner of all parents, held the past worthy of a greater reverence than did their children.

He closes his eyes in a brief moment of sympathy for everyone raised in an apartment and thus denied such a gift. It's a small and insignificant tribute, to be sure, but he feels the better for having granted it to a cohort whose own members might well be unaware of the deprivations they have endured. Most of them, anyway. Some of them must surely have thought about it, the sense of loss becoming evident the first time they went burrowing into the back of their biggest closet, certain this was where their once-precious baseball card collection must surely reside, or the graduation inscriptions of their elementary school classmates, or the most beloved toy of their childhood.

My pirate ship is back there somewhere, first mine and then Billy's, if only for a while. His eyes strain to see into the shadows, remembering the hours spent maneuvering the small plastic figures across the floor, over the deck, up into the rigging, his fingertips making swords flash, his voice filling his bedroom with screams of anger and then fear as perilous footing is denied by the slippery railings, rage turning to terror in the sudden fall to the cold grey water, where waiting shadows glide silently beneath the surface...

His heart soars at this memory, and he is touched by guilt at those denied such an experience, burrowing in vain for something, anything, of their own distant childhood.

All lost to them, all lost, the capacity of a single closet being limited, so that access to each era of one's past becomes a temporary matter, use-it-or-lose-it, first-in, first-out, as new replaces old. What would they have thought when the truth finally dawned on them, a hollow realization that their parents had consigned to oblivion, no matter whether with cruel eagerness or great pain, the artifacts of yet another increment of their lives?

But I've been spared. At least that, if not this. Beneath his fingertips, the wide leather belts with which he cinches shut the trunk each year have remained snug, the most recent twelve months of dust undisturbed until now. He tries to take some comfort in this, knowing that the contents have remained secure from all prying forays. But it's a cold comfort, this clearly academic point, since there is little threat of intrusion, prying or otherwise, beyond that offered by himself. Ultimately, security against intruders might be seen as little more than a lack of any interest beyond your own in anything you might possess. A distressing point, but an inarguable one.

I should come up here more often, I know I should. But I just couldn't bear it. This will have to be enough.

He turns to the trunk, then, and labors to loosen the belts, noting with some sense of irony the even greater effort that is required before the prongs can be coaxed from their holes, wondering whether old age will bring, just as it inevitably will with the attic's entry ladder, a moment when the requisite pressure will no longer be possible for him, and he will have to decide whether continued access justifies a ladder left always down, belts left perpetually unfastened.

It's not a choice I have to make today. At least I hope not. But it isn't lost on him that that there will be no choice possible if—when, actually—necessity should demand one. Maybe he should think about it, and sooner rather than later. It's a practical matter, after all. And as life is starting to demonstrate to him with an increasing urgency, reality is never to be trifled with. It's an odd lesson for an engineer to be learning only at this stage of his life, this notion that the laws of the universe apply not just to beams and buttresses but also to his own mortal structures, but better now than never.

An appropriate thought, he notes, as the last prong comes free of its hole and both straps lie free.

Time. It's time again. He closes his eyes, as he almost always does, and raises the lid, surprised as always by the smells that rise to greet him. They are not those of the fresh-baked bread and bubbling stew that would be so much more appropriate for the greeting of an old friend, but a mixture of equal parts dust and moth balls, each in its own way serving to confirm or stave off the ravages of age.

Though the smells are indeed familiar, the realization is not, and it is one he finds disturbing, this awareness that even within the confines of the trunk, the tendency of time to, as they say, march on, remains persistent.

It's that damned reality thing again. You just can't get away from it. Again, it's an odd notion for an engineer to have, and he wonders briefly what his colleagues might make of it, the problem presented to them for analysis and viable solution options, realizing only after this particular train of thought has begun that he has entered the realm of the hypothetical, being, as it were, the last man standing, his colleagues only memories, with even the hasty addition of friends, family, or any other category to the equation leaving that basic situation unchanged.

With the realization of his aloneness—and just how in the hell does something like that manage to sneak up on you?—comes an awareness that he is finally, a year to the day since last venturing to this place, once more arrived at the moment, the photograph having somehow found his hands, and he opens his eyes to find this captured moment unchanged.

Which has been the problem all along, since it is not only this particular moment that is a part of the grand permanence into which every passing second must immediately settle, but all the moments from then until now, as well, the joy shown in this bit of emulsion not really available to him in its pure and uncorrupted form, no matter how desperately he wishes it were so, but only within the raging context of everything that was eventually to follow, the pain of which he has spent a lifetime unable to ease.

It would have been so much simpler if the original specifications had called for modular memory. That's what I'd have done, anyway, if I'd been project manager. Or should that be Project Manager? He is not a religious man, neither by inclination nor training, and so does not spend an excess of time contemplating the potential blasphemy of this last point, though he does allow himself a wry smile at its whimsy, recognizing the limited boundary of his engineer's sense of humor and the occasional satisfaction to be found in reaching it.

Indeed, he has never been a total stranger to joy, not at all, there once having been, in fact, a time when this emotion seemed central to his life, the necessary disciplines of his profession notwithstanding. He believes this very snapshot to be evidence of this, and forces himself to look at it again, which is, of course, the point of this annual exercise.

The three of them, then, the infant boy with himself and Ann, the two of them sporting their summer smiles, assembled from equal measures of happiness and the defensive postures taken by eyes and mouth for as long as the photographer—whether friend or passing stranger he can no longer recall—forces them to stare into a blinding July sun, the child spared this ordeal, if not the one to come, by the shade of Carl's protectively raised hand.

They are at Coney Island, the memories even now as vivid an onslaught on his own senses as the reality must have been for the child. Even in the diminished state it had reached by mid-century, it remained a grand and magical place, so unpolished and raw in its promises and fulfillments as to be carnal.

They are at Nathan's, for where else to preserve the memory of a youngster's first visit than at the place where his very existence had once become inevitable? Coney Island—the very sound of the words enough to make you shiver in anticipation—was the place Carl still valued above all others. It was where every moment screamed its temptations, and Nathan's was, for Carl, the place where Coney's heart, in its primal simplicity, had always beaten its loudest, the soundtrack of an endless cycle of hungers aroused and satisfied, even if only temporarily, that being the nature of hungers.

He peers at the photo, not only at their own faces but at those of passers-by, believing he can divine in their blurred expressions something of those hungers, just a hint, really, if that wouldn't be asking too much. He needs a point of comparison, wondering, as he had begun to suspect even then, if those hungers had still lived in Ann, and whether he will ever truly know the moment of their death.

And they had died, that much he was certain of, changing state from there to not-there, which is a far cry from never having been there at all.

She had even been the one to say hello first, eight years earlier, almost in that very same spot. Not in so many words, of course. The rules of the time didn't allow that. She had had to conceal it in a stare composed of equal parts of horror, dismay, and quite-something-else as he had stepped away from the counter, making room for the next person and raising to his lips not the hot dog for which most in the line were waiting, but something, well, alien. To her eyes, anyway.

He couldn't miss that look, even at 17, and had somehow found the courage to respond, ignoring the certainty of humiliation that was the inevitable consequence of facing a creature such as this, all dark eyes and piled hair and unbreachable fortifications.

He can't help but smile at the memory.

"They're really very good.” Weak, Carl. Especially weak. He remembers the relief he'd felt about being by himself, with no friends to carry the tale home, and the no-less-blessed certainty that she was from another school.

Her look was unchanging, even allowing for the necessary movement of her lips, plump and beautiful long before the idea of collagen shots had made such lips available to the masses.

"It's a chow mein sandwich. On a hamburger bun. With fried noodles.” Even then, he'd been able to recognize an irrefutable argument, even if he hadn't yet learned to accept it.

"Really, you should try one.” Just as weak, but at least he'd managed to speak.

Had that been a half-smile, even a moment of consideration of his suggestion's lunacy, before she'd turned to the counter? Later events would confirm this, but he'd had no way of knowing it then. In the moment it had merely been a brutal confirmation of the humiliation he'd expected, and he'd done his best to avoid making too sudden an exit, to be seen as slinking away as she'd put forth her request for a “hot dog with everything"—everything meaning dark, spicy mustard and hot, steaming sauerkraut, for this was, after all, Brooklyn.

Dog in hand, she'd turned to walk away up Surf Avenue, slipping past him with a was-it-or-wasn't-it half-smile still on her face, certainly knowing he was watching, as all boys always had in a time when watching, just watching, was far more special than it was now, watching being as far as you were realistically going to get.

He pauses for a deep breath, the present with all of its memories having suddenly overcome the past with all of its hopes, and closes his eyes. There is no one here to see him cry, but he would like to avoid it, nonetheless. He believes it brings needless complexity to his efforts to solve this problem, to understand the death of love and hope in this person so dear to him, and he has always believed that the path to any solution involves turning away from complexity in pursuit of the simple. He wishes Occam were here to help him now, but understands he will have to wield the razor on his own, avoiding the nicks as best he can.

He looks at the snapshot again, letting the brightness of its self-contained sunshine draw him back, first to its own captured moment and then to what had gone before, his mind already seeking a schematic on which the invisible bypass around this most recent humiliation might yet become evident, stubbornness even then beginning to assert itself in a personality still under compilation.

It had been a hot day, and he had found himself drifting toward Spook-A-Rama. It had been his favorite ride since its opening the year before, and much of its track ran indoors, the high-backed cars rumbling through the cool darkness, twisting right and left as the monsters suddenly lurched up in front of you, the screams of other riders merging with the creepy sound effects.

Even from the perspective of a half-century, it had been damned good engineering. There had never been anything like it, and certainly nothing since, and he marvels at how those working with even today's most sophisticated optics and digitally-based technologies—let alone the incomprehensible budgets—have never managed to surpass what those early designers, little more than garage mechanics by today's standards, had been able to do. Fancier stuff? Sure, thinking of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, but not better, that's for certain. Nothing could beat the primal fright of those cellar-smelling masterpieces, the rumble of the tracks coming right up through the seat as you plunged forward into the darkness.

But they're all gone now, most of them anyway, falling apart or simply abandoned, left to rot. The image of the spider's catch comes to him again, hanging, waiting, and he quickly sweeps it aside. He still has time to figure things out. He has to.

But that day had had no such sense of urgency, and he had fallen into line at the Spook-A-Rama with an unusual sense of patience, knowing the cool darkness of the ride would soon put an end not only to the heat of the sun but to the aura of humiliation he imagined still persisted, marking him, even in the light of day, to the attention of every passer-by.

A few more minutes at most, he thought, comparing the line in front of him to the pace of the returning cars, their squinting passengers—parents with children, tight-teed tough guys, smiling couples—returning to the world of light. He stole glances at the couples, looking for blushes on the girls, rumpled clothing, lost in his teen-aged imagination.

"You kind of give up easily, you know? That's not a good thing in life.” The words were followed immediately by the sounds of chewing, the soft crunch of noodles. He could smell chow mein.

"And you were right. It is good.” This time he'd felt her warm breath, as well, fluttering lightly on the back of his neck. He remembers wanting to turn around, but having to wait until he had the right thing to say, his brain looping endlessly, searching frantically for something clever, then run-of-the-mill funny, even willing to settle for less-than-totally idiotic, just as long he could avoid hopelessly square, this last requirement as absolutely non-negotiable then as he is sure it must remain to another generation, though under what name he cannot say.

Then turning around to face her became moot as he felt her step forward, appearing suddenly on his right. There was a small poke in his ribs, in case he was missing the point.

"Hey. I can't be that scary, can I? C'mon—you're already past the hard part."

She'd been wrong about that. The hard part is always somewhere out in front of you. But nobody can know that at 17. Still, the specialness of being able to know so much by then, even allowing for the lack of what life would eventually teach her—even more important, to truly care about it—was something you don't find easily in this world, and even the unformed dolt he'd been back then had been able to sense it.

He's been this route before, of course, the memories retraced so many times there might as well have been a worn-down cart path through his brain. It was another place where he had to work hard not to cry.

Ann. The mention of her name, even in thought, is of as little help as always in that regard, but impossible to avoid.

Maudlin, Carl, just maudlin. How in the world is wallowing in it going to help?

But it isn't wallowing, not really. It's more like circling the problem from another direction, creating those grain-of-sand-in-the-oyster conditions that would eventually make a pearl—in this case the answer he believes is staring him right in the face, if only he'd open his damned eyes and see. He'd done it often enough at his board, what-iffing in completely new directions to ensure that the discussion of an architect's vision would take place in a newspaper's lifestyle section and not in a courtroom, the ticking of his office clock joining with the tap of his pencil as he stared patiently at his drawings, waiting for the solution that would make the numbers work, knowing it was simply a matter of waiting long enough, after all, and not giving up.

He wants to believe this works the same way; that given enough time, even enough willingness to suffer, if that's what it will take, the solution will eventually surface as it always has. The difference being that in this particular case there will be no changes possible to the drawing, no alteration of specifications that can make things right. For rightness is a condition no longer achievable. All that is left is to know—and perhaps understand—and that will have to be enough.

So he lets himself consider once more the moment of her joining him in the high-backed car that has now come to a stop before them on the tracks leading to the portal of Spook-A-Rama.

Almost dazed by the impossibility of what was happening, he had stood aside to allow her to board first, then stepped through the narrow opening to join her on the upholstered seat, its back rising high above them as the attendant brought down the safety bar and locked it into place.

"Hands in the car, please. And no standing up.” Was he kidding? He could hardly imagine any part of himself moving, let alone his hands, which remained fixed in his lap. How far away could she be? Six inches to his right? Three? Even less?

His breath had already staked out a position of refuge in his windpipe, stubbornly refusing to move either up or down, when her own motion made the answer easily apparent, her hips sliding along the seat until they met his own—oh, sweet fire—responding to his immediate withdrawal with a firm grasp of his upper arm with both of her hands, an unmistakable pull back in her direction, and a whisper in his ear, her breath teasing every fold and spilling down the side of his neck in that way he would come to know so well.

"Come on, now. Am I going to have to do everything myself?"

He remembers thinking that she just might, the idea of any movement beyond trembling—even simply breathing—still beyond him.

The car lurched into motion, and he felt her right hand slide down along his forearm arm to find his hand, her left maintaining its grip above his elbow and her hip staying just where it was, thank you, as they approached the double entry doors.

"My name is Ann, by the way,” she whispered, her breath once more flowing over his ear. “Do I get to know yours?"

You can handle this one, Carl, really you can. And he had willed his own breath to stir, climbing up from his throat to answer just before they slammed through the doors, the car making its own path as the dank smell of Spook-A-Rama rose up to envelop them, the doors snapping shut behind them, sealing off the world of light and handing them off to the darkness.

How can so many hours have passed? He hasn't felt them, but the reality is unmistakable nevertheless, each slat of the attic's vent like the blade of a sundial as the shadows of the advancing day inch their way across the roof trusses.

It was only a seven-minute ride. And as much as he would like to believe that these suddenly missing hours have been spent in contemplation of just those minutes and not of something else, his engineer's mind will not allow it. Nothing can reconcile such a disproportion, can force a temporal equality between even the most-detailed consideration of Spook-A-Rama's ghouls and skeletons and the evidence offered by light and shadow. He knows beyond any doubt that his contemplation has been of far-more-frightening and memory-intensive ghosts, their ability to remain just beyond the limits of his awareness notwithstanding. No matter how winding the course of the ride's tracks may have been, or how sudden the fears they were designed to exploit, the convolutions and terrors being readied in the world of light had proven far worse. So he has little doubt about where those lost hours must have drawn him, or of the importance, if this annual exercise is ever to end, of finally bringing them out to where they might be faced.

So. He has come to it again, and in that respect this year is much like its predecessors, a true-to-prototype performance that, if allowed to unwind along previously established patterns, would soon find him once more descending the ladder, the trunk lid squealing closed, its straps tightly refastened, the answers he seeks secure for at least another year until the entire process is repeated, his own creaking hinges and fastenings permitting. But in another respect he knows this year isn't like the others at all. Knows, in fact, that he cannot permit it to be.

For he is running out of time. Elusive though the answers he seeks may be, he no longer has the luxury of leisurely contemplation. He has spent his entire professional life dealing in the finite, and though he has carefully avoided, as all men do, at least younger ones, the application of such a standard to his own days, the jig, so they say, is clearly up.

Those shadows get to moving along the roof trusses pretty damn fast after a while. And then one morning the sun doesn't rise, at least not for you, and there simply aren't any more of them. Or nothing but shadows, depending on how you look at it.

He wonders when life became that way for Ann. Nothing but shadows from which even the sunshine of a young son was ever going to be able to pull her back. It is a question he has asked himself a thousand times, and he feels he is no closer to an answer now than on any of those other occasions, the truth dancing forever just beyond the orbit of his understanding.

Was it the day of their graduation, when they could at last leave high school behind? He remembers her joy over the beginning, finally, of their life together, the twin acceptances from Columbia meaning they could at least be spared the separation that might have made the long wait before marriage unbearable, and the third-floor walkup in a neighborhood just on the breathe-easy side of nervous, but close enough to campus to save the subway tokens. It was a joy—still unmistakable, no question—repeated on the day he got his master's, and then once more with the even more important PE certification that opened up his job options and landed him where they could actually set a date. And there was the drizzly Saturday morning in their next apartment three years later—an adult apartment, she had declared so emphatically on the day they'd moved in—when she had sat him down, her eyes staring into his with their characteristic intensity, and told him how their life was about to change forever.

She'd known what the pregnancy was going to mean to her own prospects, the unwritten dissertation still looming. Had even said she was fine with it. He'd known enough to have brought it up, at least, but not enough to have pursued the truth that later years had made so evident to him. You didn't plan a career in a subject like philosophy lightly. Of course you didn't. You needed to love it enough to let it serve as its own reward. And to then just give it up? She couldn't possibly have been fine with it. And how could he ever have thought otherwise?

She'd joked about it, mourning what the pregnancy might do to her figure, to her chances of being the first teacher able to induce an erection while teaching the terminally depressing Schopenhauer, her eyes smoking, knowing what was liable to happen, as a result of her remark, right then and there.

He looks again at the sunlit snapshot, his own squint mirroring those he sees in front of him, though for different reasons, keeping himself in check as much as possible, focusing on the task at hand.

She was still happy then, he is sure of at least that much. It hadn't been postpartum, nothing like that. Billy had been as much of a joy for her as he'd been for Carl, right from the start.

He remembers an evening with Patricia and George in the apartment, Billy all of three months, Ann gone off to the kitchen with her sister for his son's nursing, the two men left in the living room.

Guess you'll be buying that house now? I guess so. Ann wants it, and they like me at the firm. What about you and Pat? I don't know. I'm not sure we're going to have kids, and without them, it seems pointless to be in the suburbs. I mean, we like the city, you know?

Carl had known, and at some level deep down probably even understood why. Though he and Ann were Attic People, George and Patricia weren't. Even though he might not have put it that way back then, the unstated, even unthought-of, truth still would have applied. It was just a difference between them, their attraction to the city measured by different valences entirely, their being he and Ann's closest family notwithstanding. For Carl, the city had never held that much appeal, except for Coney Island, and that wasn't really what anyone would call uptown, or downtown, or anything in between. It was just Coney Island. He had his work, and he had Ann and Billy. And he hadn't thought he needed much else.

But I did need them. And I need them now.

His eyes move from their squint to a tight clench. But they can never clench tightly enough to darken the images that flash across the backlit screen of his mind, of fire engines, of water spraying from hydrant couplings to pool on black asphalt, of firefighters and police officers racing frantically across their lawn, of the grim expressions of helplessness on the faces of the emergency medics as he screams out for Ann and Billy, of the shock and pain that is simply too much to bear, even in memory, his engineer's mind unable, or perhaps unwilling, to accept the real world's most immutable examples of permanence, of death, of forever.

Murder-Suicide. It's a verdict that can roll with ease from the objective tongue of a coroner. How, then, to explain its lack of substance, of consistent meaning, to someone so much more personally involved?

He pictures Ann and Billy, wondering if their presence in the thought, agonizing though it may be, can somehow tether the term more firmly to his own particular piece of reality, against which it seems to nudge only occasionally, first granting the coherence he yearns for and then so mockingly withdrawing it. Even now, so many years after the fact, it is only by assessing the impact of Ann's act on his own hopes for all of them that he is able to see it as more than simply a sequence of characters, possessed of no more significance than might be apprehended by a desert nomad confronted by a cuneiform tablet.

He has always believed she would have made a great teacher, ready even to make the sacrifices in her own scholarship that would be demanded by such a commitment. She would have needed her students far too much to have sealed herself away in the castle of her own consciousness, wandering whatever dusty corridors it is that philosophers must wander as they pile hypothetical upon hypothetical, rejoinder upon assertion, answering all of the questions only they themselves would think to ask in pursuit of a level of rigor not even an engineer would require.

And he knows, knows, that this was what she would have demanded of herself had that commitment been chosen. Just as he knows she must have undertaken a similar process of analysis before justifying to herself the act of finality that would, years later, bring him to this place. There could have been no depression deep enough to have allowed otherwise. Not for Ann.

He closes his eyes and allows himself a sigh as he tries to imagine the price she must have paid, the nights spent lying next to him, perhaps not even aware of his presence, staring into the darkness, synapses crackling as she dispensed with each possible reservation and its implications, moving inexorably towards Armageddon.

What must it have been like for her? He understands that he is not the most psychologically perceptive of men, though he believes he does his best within the mental framework entailed by his profession. But his love demands that he at least try to approach an answer, even if it means taking on the very pain she must have felt. Or perhaps because of it. It would be the closest to her I'll ever get again. And through her to Billy.

He has thought often of what he might have helped Billy become, so much already being evident by the time his son turned nine. And though he knows his memories have been filtered through a father's eyes, a father's dreams, he has always tried to allow for that whenever permitting himself those memories, knowing the boy was half Ann's, after all—he might even have hated engineering, simply hated it—so that the problem-solving skills he was ever on the alert to spot, the inclination toward realities, might not have figured into Billy's career choice at all.

Half Ann's, indeed, and he wonders if she might not have considered that—at least just considered it—and is immediately ashamed, an image coming into his mind of Ann's hands, trembling, the matches ready as she closes the door behind them, the philosophy scholar trying to will her fear and sorrow into nonexistence, irrelevancies no longer worth considering when balanced against the demands of the entire question.

And why fire? Why so much pain? It isn't the first time Carl has considered this, and he has never been able to fathom any answer beyond symbolism, though of what he cannot imagine.

What was it she was trying to burn away?

That Billy would be smart would go without saying. How many smart parents fail to pass the gene on?

Seven. That's how old he'd been when Carl had finally yielded up the pirate ship, the boy's eyes glowing with delight that Christmas morning when he'd seen it under the tree. He'd been promised it since he was five, the toy always kept hidden in the attic, shaped in his mind strictly from Carl's descriptions, the date of transference always kept vague, but knowing now, to whatever extent such things are knowable to a 5-year-old, that its appearance was a distinctive rite of passage, daddy's endorsement that he was “old enough” to be a proper master of this most prized of Carl's own childhood toys, more significant in its own way than even his big-boy bed had been.

And he'd been good with it, two years without losing or breaking a single piece, eager to prove himself worthy of his father's trust. Even when he'd been packed off to Patricia's, so Carl and Ann could have the occasional weekend to themselves, the ship would arrive back at its home port unscathed, its youthful new captain ever mindful of the threats posed by such a daunting passage. It was part of a pattern that would become visible to Carl only in retrospect: the aimless digging on the beach evolving into sand castles of escalating intricacy; the circles and ovals so laboriously traced by a child's crayon first flattening to straight lines of no.2 lead and then bending, almost brutally, into a geometry devoid of curvature; the once-expansive questions about the accidents of life more and more addressing a concrete world defined by closed-end answers as the boy began to move inexorably toward Carl, every day becoming more his son and less Ann's.

She would have seen it from the start, though. Not like me. She would have known right away, with each painful affirmation of her loss fundamentally reshaping her psychic substance, as surely as if by the brutal impact of a sculptor's chisel.

Carl tries to summon up some memory of these changes, hoping to assign frequency and amplitude to her failures to laugh or even smile, to the flutters of discontent across her face at his suggestions for an evening out or for a getaway weekend with Billy left at George and Patricia's, or to her lack of sexual response and ultimately even inclination, until he finally hears himself sigh, almost as if he is watching an actor in a play, seeing as much as feeling his own head descend in shame.

Every day, I was taking him away from her, and I didn't even know it. It hadn't been his wish, not even for a moment, not ever. All he had wanted was for Billy to ... to...

To what? Even within the limited range of the psychological knowledge he is willing to claim for himself, Carl cannot deny that Billy's movement toward his own mental makeup seems, at least in retrospect, inexorable. There would clearly have been little surprise in his becoming an engineer. At the same time, there could have been little certainty attached to the possibility. In a world where even the past and present are difficult enough to fathom, who can possibly divine the future?

He looks at the photo again, tilting it this way in the late afternoon light, wondering if by shifting its angle he might perhaps bring about fresh illumination in other ways, as well.

He finds, however, that nothing has changed. The smiles of a summer day remain, unburdened by knowledge of what was to come, a day when those smiles would persist, save for this single fragment of emulsion, only in a memory that could barely sustain the feeling of them, engulfed as it would be by other fragments, by images of a terrible day of pain and sorrow, by three suddenly becoming one as a wife's frustration and rage erupt in flames that consume all, love and dreams alike crackling to ashes in the ruins.

Carl awakens from a dream in light barely enough to support vision, tenaciously clinging to a single persistent and terrifying image, enhancing it by sheer force of will until he can see it, feel it, refusing, in spite of his terror, to let it go.

It is Occam, or someone he imagines must be Occam, advancing upon him. A great blade flashes with each step, each swing taking its bit of flesh, propelling into the darkness all those pieces of himself that might no longer be relevant. For the first time in many years, he feels himself drawing closer to Ann, remembering what must have been her own agony at the hands of the sculptor's chisel, wondering if this similar violence he is experiencing might bring him closer still, redrawing his own psychic boundaries as he is now certain it redrew hers, finally opening, after all these decades, the trunk that has remained so stubbornly closed, the illusion of its yawning lid notwithstanding. He wants only to know why—to be allowed, if he cannot have lived his life with her and Billy, to at least die understanding why not, to live his final days with a grasp of the reasons why a mother can kill the son she has borne and once loved, leaving him behind to mourn them both, tormented forever by his imagined frescoes of their final moments of agony, walls and house collapsing upon them in a final, cleansing inferno.

He cannot bring himself to believe, remembering the fate of his wife and son, that his own pain, as Occam continues to wield his razor, can compare. It is undeniable that he is being cut to pieces, but only by truths he is about to see. He ignores the pain, in point of fact barely recognizing its presence. He is, after all, an engineer. And such truths must be his only concern.

But something is wrong. Terribly wrong. And even though the light has now left his attic entirely, he feels he is still able—must be able—to see, for these truths are all around him. As if to prove their presence he extends his hand, reaching out, then down, feeling, tapping, comforted by the presence of those truths on which he has always been able to depend, the verities of studs and joists, their integrity made certain by the rigidity of their specifications and the certainties of the loads they will bear, seeking in the clear realities of physics a sense of permanence in a world he suddenly senses has become one of illusion.

But there are no illusions. There can't be. Isn't everything around me proof of that? He lets himself once more feel the space that surrounds him and into which he ascends on this same day each year to seek his answers, the now-dark place that contains in its shadowed recesses all the days of his life, of their lives, here in this attic, in this house, bought with love to be the home they would share forever, the two of them entering the darkness that was the future with little thought that there could be anything but light even at its farthest extremities, the doors snapping shut behind them much as they had on that other day so long ago, never imagining what the source of that light might be, its brutal shades of orange and yellow stretching toward the night sky, devouring in its own brutal minutes of life all the days and years of their own, insatiable in taking it all, crackling in satisfaction as they engulf flesh and sinew, frame and shingle, until there is nothing left, nothing at all, and only one survived to tell the tale, darkness swallowing everything...

But that's not true. It can't have happened that way. The house is here, the trunk is here, everything is all around me. I'm in a place!

Carl reaches out once again and feels nothing, the expected sensation of a surface replaced by one of vibratory motion, a quivering he has never felt before. He would identify it as coming from his cellular level, a sensation of things coming loose, even seeking rearrangement, if such a thing were possible, but as an engineer he feels secure in his belief that it is not, forgiving himself the trespass into another's discipline.

He continues to reach out, his fingertips still encountering nothing. He finds he can no longer feel the floor beneath him, either, and if that is so wonders why he feels no sensation of falling, or even of differentiation from the structural surfaces that surround him, aware only in these final moments that he is not afraid, even as the distinction between the permanence of the space around him and the body he once was is disappearing, his last thought being one of sad regret that his question will remain unanswered.

"Bill?"

He is aware that Diane has crossed the room, her footsteps hollow on the hardwood floor. He's surprised how quickly they've emptied the place out. He glances up to look at her, grateful for her presence, and notices it's still pretty light out. Maybe they'll be able to finish today, after all.

She pulls the other folding chair up next to him, the last carton to be examined open at his feet, and sits down. She puts her hand on his arm. “How's it going?"

"Not too bad. At least until I got to this one.” He turns the framed photo so she can see it. It's one she hasn't seen before.

"Oh, God, Bill. Didn't Patricia always say there weren't any of the three of you?"

"Almost. She used to say it a lot. Then one day, I was fifteen or sixteen, I found what I guess must have been the original this was blown up from. I got to spend the day with it before she saw it and took it away. She told me later that she'd gotten rid of it. Maybe she'd had this one made before that. Or maybe she just lied again."

"Don't be angry with her, hon. Not now.” Widowed only a year, just coming to peace with it, Patricia has been gone less than a month.

He knows his anger is misplaced. He looks down at the photo again. “I guess she always figured it would have been too painful for me to see."

"Is it?"

"It hurts, but I think I would have liked to have grown up at least seeing them like this—all of us, I guess—just to know there'd been a time like this, you know?"

He feels her looking at him, knowing her eyes will be showing a shared pain.

She couldn't share all of it, of course. How the hell can anyone else know what it's like to grow up knowing your mother had killed your father and herself, burning them up together in the house you'd grown up in? He'd told her what he could, but how much was that, really? He'd been nine, for crissake.

"Did you know...” he starts, and has to draw a breath, start over again. “Did you know, that this photo—the one day I spent with it—is everything I had of him? Everything.” He starts to tremble, and is grateful for her closeness, for the warmth of her next to him, for the present she provides to balance his lack of a past. “When Aunt Patricia and Uncle George took me in, they had to start all over giving me a life. She'd burned down the whole house. There was nothing left. No clothes. No toys. Nothing. They brought me back to the city and it was like there'd never been anything before. How do you tell a nine-year-old that his Mom has not only made him an orphan, but burned up his whole life?"

He knows she wants to comfort him, suggest that there were at least memories, but has the good sense not to. They've had part of this conversation before.

He balances the photo in his hand, still trying, after so many years, to understand, perhaps even forgive.

"The hardest thing is to get into her head. The problems they were having, they were their problems. And she got to a place—God knows how, she was a fucking philosophy teacher—where killing both of them was a solution, no matter what it did to me, even if it meant I had to grow up without a father."

She squeezes his arm. There isn't really anything she can say.

"All these years I've worked to remember. Just to remember. I've thought about what he wanted for me, the things he taught me, even the toys he gave me.” An image of a pirate ship flashes into his mind and quickly fades, the shapes and colors not nearly as vivid now as they once were. I've even tried to imagine what he might have become, the career he might have had, the kinds of buildings he would have been involved in."

"Do you ever think about her? I mean in that kind of way?"

He pauses to think.

"I guess not. It's like she didn't give me anything, or that anything she ever did give me she wound up taking away."

He looks at the photo again, this single artifact of his past, and compares it to the barren apartment around him, as empty of memories now as it was during his years of growing up there.

"The thing of it is that even my memories of him are going away. Every year it's been getting harder just to keep that memory of him in focus, to remember the sound of his voice, even what he looked like."

She gestures to the picture, and reaches up to touch his face. “Maybe finding this will help."

He reaches up to take her hand and blinks back a tear. “I hope so,” he whispers. “I was sitting here before you came in, before I found it, trying to remember him.” Her own look reflects what he knows his own face must be showing. “And I couldn't. I couldn't remember him at all. I think he's gone, Diane. And I think I'm never going to get him back."

Bill looks at the photo again, feeling the stillness of the empty apartment around them, and sets it carefully aside. He reaches out and feels the quick brush of Diane's fingertips, her flesh against his own. He imagines her eyes. He pulls the remaining carton closer.

Copyright © 2008 Barry Fishler