The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 (19 page)

He went over to the desk.

A sheaf of notes tucked under the border of a thick blotter. An open notebook filled with indecipherable scratchings. Behind the desk, an assortment of framed certificates from foundations around the country, including one from the Menninger Clinic in Topeka.

So that was it. He was a head man—some kind of doctor for the monkeys of the mind.

Is that what they think I need?

He took a step back. His shoulder touched one of the bookcases. He turned.

A row of glass vials sealed in resin, each larger than the last. They contained embalmed extractions of some strangely familiar organisms floating in various stages of growth. His eyes followed the sequence. Near the end of the line the vials became bottles, then jars.

What have they done with her? he thought.

A thump sounded at the far wall, from behind the door to the other side. Without thinking, he closed his fingers around one of the glass specimens.

The door clicked and started to whisper open.

His body jerked as his feet moved backward too fast. He fumbled for the door to the hall, found the knob and stumbled out

There was movement behind him but he did not look back. He heard the nurses’ crepe soles squeaking across the reception room floor. He heard their nervous, practiced, too-young voices, saw their grasping hands in a blur as he ran past. He saw the vinyl curling around the aging magazines, smelled the waft of preserved death in the air. He smelled the chemicals on their skin, felt the cold, smeared door and the sudden rush of night air on his chest. He tasted the darkness and the clot of fear in his throat.

As he ran, voices struggled to be heard within him.

The nurses. What had they been saying when he came in? It had sounded like—like—

We live by death,
he thought they had said.

And the newspaper vendor. Wasn’t there something more the blind man had been shouting?

None of the dead have been identified
, he thought it was.

And the old woman. What had she been trying to tell him?

We are the dead,
she had said.
We are the dead.

He wound down to a fast walk. He could almost see the ancient man who had been shuffling along the sidewalk earlier, away from the clinic. A man who had once, not too long ago, perhaps not too long ago at all been so much more than he was now.

He found himself at the corner, next to the flower stall. It was dark, empty except for the sickly-sweet scented wreaths and arrangements waiting in the shadows.

He shuddered and crossed the street swiftly, mechanically, trying to make it to the car.

He passed the hofbrau.

The faces were inside. They were grouped around the dark wood bar, all of them old beyond belief now and sick unto death, staring into their glasses, waiting. They reminded him of faces he had seen before.

Then he saw the flower girl.

He pushed his way inside.

She was standing there. Her voice alone was almost cheerful as she began to move among them, asking questions, giving advice, making arrangements. He noticed for the first time that she was armless on one side, her pink stump smooth and rounded under the opening in her summer dress.

How long has she been that way? he wondered. Or does it work the other way for her, too? He thought crazily,
Was she born with even less?

He stood shivering, watching her animated form and the vase of wilted flowers at the end of the dark, polished bar. After a minute she became aware that she was being watched.

Slowly he held out his hand to her.

“I brought you something,” he heard himself saying, still uncertain, trying to think of the right words as he handed her the bottle. “I—I thought you should see it. God damn you.”

She turned in painstaking slow motion, her muscles stopping and starting, stopping and starting with each part of the movement, until at last her eyes met his.

“What?” she said.

There was a pause that seemed to go on forever. Then someone offered up a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a deathrattle, and the black fear was on him.

Rosemary Pardoe has to date published two excellent chapbooks devoted to M. R. James, featuring articles relating to the work of the famed English writer along with new fiction written after the style of this master of the ghost story. Peter Shilston has had stories in both of these as well as in other amateur publications. While the reprinting here of “The Catacomb” may mark his first professional appearance as a writer of fiction, Shilston has over seventy articles to his credit on the subject of women’s gymnastics, in which sport he works both as a coach and as a correspondent for various British and American magazines.

Born in 1946, Shilston, who lives in Stoke-on-Trent, is a Cambridge history graduate and earns his living as a teacher of history. He became interested in fantasy at age eleven when he began reading J. R. R. Tolkien, followed by M. R. James and Jorge Luis Borges. “The Catacomb,” Shilston explains, “was actually based on a visit to Sicily two years ago. The town and cathedral represent Cefalu (the site, coincidentally, of Aleister Crowley’s famous ‘abbey’); the catacomb itself is the Capuchin cemetery in Palermo.” I shouldn’t consult my guidebooks for this cathedral, however.

I am retelling this story as it was told to me. Imagine if you can, a coach making a tour of the island of Sicily in the middle of August, carrying a couple of dozen English package holiday-makers on the usual lightning inspection of places of interest—Palermo in two days, Agrigento in another two, Syracuse meriting only one, a trip by chairlift up Mount Etna, and then home. The sort of people one finds on such tours are invariably the same: a number of schoolteachers, earnest retired couples, parents who have inappropriately brought children and are beginning to wonder why they didn’t save themselves trouble by going to the beach instead, and a handful of single unattached people. Furthermore, their behavior is always the same: some spend all their time grumbling at the quality of the hotels and food, the young men wonder why there are no available attractive young ladies on the tour, the children get bored, and the schoolteachers carry guidebooks and maps around everywhere and take enormous numbers of photographs. Others seem to show no interest in the historical sites at all, and spend all their time either sitting in the nearest cafe or buying various unpleasant souvenirs.

This particular coach party was a typical one, I think. Among its members was a certain Mr. Pearsall; a quiet, solitary, middle-aged man of vaguely scholarly appearance. He had enjoyed the tour, and had been duly impressed by the Greek temples of Agrigento and the mosaics in the great cathedral at Monreale, but he had not managed to make close friends of any of the other passengers, and now that the holiday had only a couple of days left to run, he was looking forward to getting back home again. Consequently he was mildly irritated when old Mrs. Tavistock in the back of the coach started to complain of stomach pains. She had been something of a moaner throughout the tour, but now she was looking genuinely ill, with the result that Giuliano the courier had to ask the driver to stop in the next town, so that a doctor could be brought.

The next town turned out to be a nondescript settlement nestling beneath an enormous cliff, with little apart from this huge overshadowing presence to distinguish it from any one of fifty other small towns that they had already passed through on their tour. Here Giuliano went in search of a medical man, leaving his charges dozing, idly reading their books or making desultory conversation. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was blazing fiercely. All sensible Sicilians were indoors having a siesta. Shutters were down on every window, and not a soul was visible in the street.

After a while, Giuliano returned, and regretted to inform them that they would have to wait at least an hour for Mrs. Tavistock to receive attention before they could proceed. In the meantime they could get out and stretch their legs, though it was unlikely that they would find anywhere open. The coach would sound its horn to call them back when it was time to go. Here he engaged in an animated conversation in Italian with Umberto, the driver, who made many emphatic gestures, the upshot of which was some more unencouraging information. The local people, said Giuliano, kept themselves very much to themselves, and there were really no facilities for tourists at all. No coaches normally stopped there, and there was little point in trying to explore the town; really it had nothing to offer. He expressed his regret again and had a few more words with Umberto. Mr. Pearsall’s command of Italian was not great, but he seemed to detect the phrase, “can’t come to much harm if they’re all together.”

Mr. Pearsall, however, did not intend to stay with the others as they stood around on the pavement in a pointless fashion. He had glimpsed a church down a side street as they drove into the town. It had looked old and surprisingly large for such an insignificant place, and he thought it might just be worth an exploratory visit. The “harm” Giuliano had mentioned (assuming he had understood him right), he took to mean thieves. They had been warned to beware of bag-snatchers in the major cities, but it was hardly likely that gangs of muggers would bother to patrol a town where no tourists ever stopped. The streets seemed absolutely deserted. Besides, Mr. Pearsall was still quite fit, and imagined he could hold his own against the average thief; or at the very worst, run fast enough to get away. So, taking his camera, he imparted his intended destination to a fellow passenger (who showed not the slightest inclination to accompany him) and set out at a brisk pace.

The side streets of the town were very narrow and ran steeply up the hill toward the great beetling overhang of the cliff. Some of them had steps in them. Mr. Pearsall wondered how claustrophobic it would be to live beneath that great black shadow, and also speculated whether the town was ever damaged by rockfalls. After a couple of turns into dead ends, he found himself in a little gravel-strewn square, as devoid of people as the rest of the town, facing the church itself. A glance at the sun told him that he was approaching it from the west end; the southeastern corner of it almost touched the base of the cliff. Because it had exactly the same color and texture as that towering mass, the church gave the slightly disturbing impression of having been carved by the hand of a giant in a single piece out of the living rock.

His first sensation, Mr. Pearsall tells us, was of great age and general dilapidation. The church looked far older than the Doric temples at Agrigento which he had admired earlier in the week, though his intellect told him this could not possibly be the case. He supposed it must be a Norman building, though possibly on an older foundation; Arabic or even Roman. The style was typical enough, though rather ill-proportioned. Two squat, heavy towers, with hardly any windows (and those very small) flanked a portico of three large pointed arches. What little decoration there had ever been was now barely discernible. There seemed at one time to have been fresco paintings inside the portico, but now the plaster was badly cracked and in some places fallen away entirely. Only a few dim outlines of human figures—presumably saints—could be discovered. There was a large wooden door, decayed and worm-eaten, with panels carved in what had once been ornate abstract patterns. Moorish influence, said Mr. Pearsall to himself, and tried the door. It was locked.

This was predictable under the circumstances, but still annoying. Mr. Pearsall retreated to the square to take a picture, and then looked at his watch. A mere fifteen minutes had passed since he left the coach, and he still had plenty of time to kill. The day was hotter than ever, and if there was any shops in this godforsaken place, they were resolutely shut. He decided to stroll round the outside of the church, for sheer lack of anything else to do. Besides, he would be in the shade for part of his walk, and it would be cooler. Without any great enthusiasm, he set out. He was a mild-tempered man, but if there was one thing that caused him irritation, it was suddenly finding himself with nothing whatsoever to do when he had expected to be occupied.

Along the south side of the church, the shuttered houses ran so close that the street was more like a tunnel. He had not gone far when he noticed a small side door. It should cause us no great surprise that he tried to open it, and much to his gratification, found it was not locked. Surprised at his good fortune, and congratulating himself on his persistence, he went inside.

At first there was nothing to be seen, so dark was the interior after the savagery of the afternoon glare outside. But soon Mr. Pearsall’s eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, and he was able to look around him. He knew at once that his walk had been worthwhile. In his tidy fashion, he began to classify what he could see. A long, high nave with aisles on either side; clearly another Norman church; with the pointed arches learned from the Arabs. But unlike some of the others he had seen on his visit, this church had not been revamped later on in the Baroque period. There was not a Corinthian pilaster to be seen. The capitals of the columns seemed to be a mass of grotesque carvings, but were so thick with grime that he could not distinguish them clearly. Indeed, the whole interior was very dirty; the pews were thick with dust and the candles so discolored that they looked as if they had not been lit in years. Clearly they were expecting no visitors, for there was not a guidebook or a postcard visible anywhere.

Then Mr. Pearsall saw the mosaics. He had already been initiated into the marvels which the Normans had bequeathed to Sicily in this field, in such staggering compilations as the cathedral of Monreale and the Palatine Chapel in Palermo; but even so, the examples of the art on display at this out-of-the-way place quite took his breath away. Here some nameless craftsman of the twelfth century had taken the Byzantine style and interpreted it with a vigor and a liveliness that were all his own. A veritable poor man’s bible of astonishing power covered the walls. Mr. Pearsall quite forgot the passing of time as he followed the treasures on display. Here was the creation of the world in a sequence of seven pictures, and there were Adam and Eve tempted by the serpent and expelled from Paradise. More scenes followed; Cain murdering Abel, the building of the Ark, the drunkenness of Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham and the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the sacrifice of Isaac; on and on, each one more startling than the last.