The Mammoth Book of Terror (28 page)

A worrying thought came to her. Had she left the church door open when making her frantic escape? If so, Lewis and any accomplices he might have would realize that she knew their terrible
secret. Going to the window, she looked out into the street. It was still empty. From where she was she could not see the church doorway. She pulled the weighty velvet curtains closed. This at
least gave her a feeling of security and safety.

Anthea had stopped smoking some years previously but now she felt the urgent desire for a cigarette. She slumped into the armchair and thought.

There was no doubt that she must get away from Naysham as soon as possible. Tonight was certainly out, even though the fog had evaporated. She didn’t know the area and could easily become
lost. And yet if she stayed, would Lewis try to come for her in the early hours? The room door seemed to be solid enough and she doubted that the man could get in without rousing the rest of the
pub. But suppose that they were all in on it?
Stop it now!
she scolded herself – you’re becoming paranoid.

The best thing to do, Anthea concluded, would be to stay awake all night and make her getaway at first light. At this time of the year, that should be a little after four-thirty. She was fairly
fit and seven miles was not so far. By the time the village came to life she could be in Bresslingham Market, reporting the savage murder to the police there.

The thought of using the bed was attractive but Anthea resisted temptation. She turned the chair to face the door and then snuggled into it, trying to make herself as comfortable as possible.
She prepared to face a long night.

The room was flooded with the saffron glow of early sunlight. Anthea opened the window a little, peering out with caution. The village was quiet and she could neither see nor hear any sound of
life. Now was the time to be gone.

She wrote a cheque to cover her night’s lodging and clipped it to the bedspread with a safety-pin. Stealthily, Anthea drew the bolts and unlocked the door. She listened for a moment but
The Maypole was still. Taking up her shoes in one hand and her overnight bag in the other, she left the room and crept downstairs.

As she descended, imagination took over again. The pub door would be locked by an ancient iron key which was kept beneath the landlord’s pillow while he slept. She would not be able to
escape the place . . .

She need not have worried. The door was fastened by a simple Yale lock. Anthea left the premises and pulled the door shut behind her.

They were waiting for her at the first corner. There were four of them: Melissa Taybourne, Lewis, the rector and the publican. “Why, Anthea,” said the woman. “Don’t tell
me that you meant to leave us without witnessing our May celebrations?”

Shocked, Anthea lost power of movement and her case slipped from her hand. Jack Lewis stepped forward to pick it up. “I’ll look after this for you, Miss Moore.”

Anthea stared at the four. The men wore flowing white robes while Melissa Taybourne, hair loose and flowing, was clearly naked beneath her flimsy green gown. But it was the scintillation of
early sunlight on the sickle at Melissa’s belt which caught and held the eye rather than her lovely form.

“The maypole’s not very far away, Anthea,” Melissa said. “Just a short walk. I’m sure that if you’re not feeling well these gentlemen will lend you
support.”

Reverend Luckhurst took Anthea’s left arm in a firm grip. “It will be a pleasure, Miss Moore,” he said. Reg Feltham, with a friendly nod, grasped Anthea’s other arm.

“Shall we go?” asked Melissa Taybourne.

Anthea stumbled along with them, any will to resist drained from her. She became aware of a noise from somewhere ahead. It sounded like singing and clapping.

She had her first glimpse of the maypole at a distance and her mind tried to tell her that it was all right, that everything was normal after all. The singing came from a crowd of villagers
while others were dancing around the maypole in threes, each middle dancer holding the ribbon which spiralled around the tall shaft. It was just a simple village tradition.

Then as they drew near, Anthea knew that it was not all right. There was something truly strange about the dancers, or at least about the ribbon holders.

The flanking pair of each trio wore the long white robes but the middle dancers, men and women, were naked. And the ribbons were wrong. They were not gay strips of multi-coloured bunting but
thick and greasy-looking, aberrant purple-grey coils.

And then Anthea saw that the naked dancers’ chests and bellies were spattered with what seemed to be red paint, and seconds later she knew that it was not paint and that they were not
holding the ribbons but that the ribbons protruded from their lower bodies and were growing longer as they stumbled about the maypole.

“You’re all insane,” Anthea whispered.

Melissa Taybourne smiled and shook her head. “What is insane about propitiating the old gods of the land as our ancestors did?” She waved an elegant hand at the dancers. “These
are all volunteers. Thomas Comstock – you saw him in the church, Anthea – gave his blood for the fertility of the land but he has left his seed in many wombs. The ceremony of the
maypole is to ensure the fertility of that seed.”

“And you were sent to us for a purpose, Miss Moore,” said Jack Lewis. “From time to time it is only good and proper that an outsider be brought into our rites. Fresh blood, you
know, can only be beneficial to the community.”

“We thought that you, Anthea, of all people would understand this,” said the rector.

Anthea wanted to scream but she could only whimper. With firm gentleness her escort led her to the maypole. They cut away her clothing until she was quite naked, after which Melissa Taybourne
went to work with the sickle.

Then Anthea was able to scream.

TERRY LAMSLEY WAS BORN
in the south of England but lived in the north for most of his life. He currently resides in Amsterdam, Holland.

His first collection of supernatural stories,
Under the Crust,
was initially published in a small paperback edition in 1993. Originally intended to only appeal to the tourist market in
Lamsley’s home town of Buxton in Derbyshire (the volume’s six tales are all set in or around the area), its reputation quickly grew, helped when stories from the book were included in
two of the annual “Year’s Best” horror anthologies.

The book was subsequently nominated for no less than three prestigious World Fantasy Awards, with the story reprinted here eventually winning the award for Best Novella. Ramsey Campbell accepted
it on the author’s behalf, and Lamsley’s reputation as a writer of supernatural fiction was assured.

In 1997, Canada’s Ash-Tree Press reissued
Under the Crust
as a handsome hardcover, limited to just five hundred copies and now as sought-after as the long out-of-print first
edition. A year earlier, Ash-Tree had published a second, equally remarkable collection of Lamsley’s short stories,
Conference With the Dead: Tales of Supernatural Terror
, and it was
followed in 2000 by a third collection,
Dark Matters.

More recently, he has had stories in
By Moonlight Only, Don’t Turn Out the Light
and
Taverns of the Dead
, and a new novella appears in
Fourbodings
from PS
Publishing.

“Dove Holes is a real place,” reveals Lamsley. “People living there, not having much else to do a lot of the time, were in the habit of packing their families in the car, at
weekends and holidays, to have a day out rummaging about on the large Council tip on the edge of the village. Rumour had it that rich people from Buxton sometimes dumped valuable antiques
there.

“To get into the main part of the tip you had to have some bona fide waste material of your own to deposit, though a lot of people brought out a lot more rubbish than they took in. Or so I
was told. Whatever the truth of this, I have seen long queues of cars lined up at the entrance on sunny days. The Victory Quarry was much as I described it, at the time of writing.”

He blinked and shook his head in consternation. He had been feeling uneasy all day, all week even, and there was plenty in his life to feel uneasy about, but he had thought he was fairly fit.
Now, it seemed, his body was going to let him down, and play host to some sickness, on top of everything else. He slammed the steering wheel with the heel of his hand in disgust, wound down the
side window a couple of inches, and leaned forward tensely against his seat-belt.

As he drove through the tight, dusty village of Dove Holes he started to experience a sensation of more general disorientation. He saw a narrow turning forking to his left and, on impulse, took
it much too fast. The unfamiliar road curved and dipped between two low stone walls and, hardly slowing at all, he rocketed along it for a few hundred yards, feeling almost helpless, as though the
car had taken possession of him. He made an effort of concentration, to gain control of the vehicle, but a square, dark shape sprang up to the right of him, as though it had pounced out of the
earth, and plunged towards him. He swung the car to the left to avoid whatever it was – it seemed to be a huge black, windowless van – and rode wildly up and along a low, steep, grassy
bank. He sensed, rather than saw, the other driver staring down at him. The car scraped against a wall and he had a vague impression of stones tumbling away into the field beyond. The car pulled up
sharp at last, its front end pointing up to the sky.

Maurice glanced back to see what had happened to the other vehicle, but it had vanished. Could anything that size, travelling that fast, not have gone off the road?

Then he recalled that the van, or whatever it was, had made no attempt to avoid him. It had taken no evasive action in the seconds it had been visible, as though the driver had not even seen
him! Thoughts of insurance bleeped on and off in his mind as he freed his seat-belt buckle, opened the door, and stumbled out onto the road.

There was a strong, gusting wind blowing. He gulped air desperately through his half-open mouth, feeling its cold shock on his lungs, and cursed the world in general.

“Food poisoning!” he thought. The meal earlier on, at the reception. Something – the chicken? the pork pies? – had tasted strange, but he had eaten it anyway, in his
hunger. The contents of his stomach flipped over painfully, causing him to double up over the car bonnet.

He forced himself upright and went to inspect the damage. One of the front lights was smashed, the left wing dented, and there were scratches, some deep, along that side. He’d lost a lot
of paint. Still, it could have been worse. The wall he had hit some dozens of yards back must have been ready to collapse, or the car would have been in a very bad way.

He sat down on the grass bank and waited for his heart to stop racing. His head felt clearer, but things still didn’t look quite right; the world was still hazy and slightly out of
kilter.

Next to him the car clicked and sighed as the engine cooled. After a while he glanced underneath to check that nothing was leaking, got back inside, and carefully backed onto the tarmac. He
continued along the little back road at about ten miles an hour until a further spasm in his stomach made him shut his eyes in agony, and he had to stop again.

He got out, slammed the door behind him, and looked around.

He was near the top of a hill. Open countryside lay spread around him on all sides. Ahead of him a row of scraggy, dark-leafed trees stretched to the right towards acres of torn-up fields and
pyramids of raw earth; a scene of tortured ugliness. In front of them a deeply scarred path of churned mud led to a set of old diggings, called the Victory Quarry, that had partly been turned into
a tip by the Borough Council. A multitude of large skips, painted drab brown, sprawled away at all angles beyond the end of the line of trees; a porta-cabin guarded the entrance at the other side.
A skimpy gate of wire grill on an iron frame gaped wide to give access to dust carts and private vehicles arriving from time to time with cargoes of every kind of rubbish.