A little light came into the kitchen through a high back window. There was a two-ring gas cooker, a sink and draining-board with a drawer under the sink. I pulled open the drawer and felt about inside it. My nervous hand struck what was unmistakably a large box of matches, and – yes, the smooth heavy cylinder of a hand torch!
And all the time I was aware that someone was or might be slumped on a settee just a few swift paces away through the door to the living-room. With my hand still inside the drawer, I pressed the stud of the torch and was rewarded when a weak beam probed out to turn my fingers pink. Well, it wasn’t a powerful beam, but any sort of light had to be better than total darkness.
Armed with the torch, which felt about as good as a weapon in my hand, I forced myself to move back into the living-room and directed my beam at the settee. But oh, Jesus – all that sat there was a monstrous grey mushroom! It was a great fibrous mass, growing out of and welded with mycelium strands to the settee, and in its centre an obscene yellow fruiting body. But for God’s sake, it had the shape and outline and look of an old woman, and it had Lily-Anne’s deflated chest and slumped shoulder!
I don’t know how I held on to the torch, how I kept from screaming out loud, why I simply didn’t fall unconscious. That’s the sort of shock I experienced. But I did none of these things. Instead, on nerveless legs, I backed away, backed right into an old wardrobe or Welsh-dresser. At least, I backed into what had once been a piece of furniture. But now it was something else.
Soft as sponge, the thing collapsed and sent me sprawling. Dust and (I imagined) dark red spores rose up everywhere, and I skidded on my back in shards of crumbling wood and matted webs of fibre. And lolling out of the darkness behind where the dresser had stood – bloating out like some loathsome puppet or dummy – a second fungoid figure leaned towards me. And this time it was a caricature of Ben!
He lolled there, held up on four fibre legs, muzzle snarling soundlessly, for all the world tensed to spring – and all he was was a harmless fungous thing. And yet this time I did scream. Or I think I did, but the thunder came to drown me out.
Then I was on my feet, and my feet were through the rotten floorboards, and I didn’t care except I had to get out of there, out of that choking, stinking, collapsing –
I stumbled, crumbled my way into the tiny cloakroom, tripped and crashed into the clock where it stood in the corner. It was like a nightmare chain reaction which I’d started and couldn’t stop; the old grandfather just crumpled up on itself, its metal parts clanging together as the wood disintegrated around them. And all the furniture following suit, and the very wall panelling smoking into ruin where I fell against it.
And there where that infected timber had been, there he stood – old Garth himself! He leaned half out of the wall like a great nodding manikin, his entire head a livid yellow blotch, his arm and hand making a noise like a huge puff-ball bursting underfoot where they separated from his side to point floppingly towards the open door. I needed no more urging.
“God! Yes! I’m going!” I told him, as I plunged out into the storm . . .
After that . . . nothing, not for some time. I came to in a hospital in Stokesley about noon the next day. Apparently I’d run off the road on the outskirts of some village or other, and they’d dragged me out of my car where it lay upside-down in a ditch. I was banged up and so couldn’t do much talking, which is probably as well.
But in the newspapers I read how what was left of Easingham had gone into the sea in the night. The churchyard, Haitian timber, terrible dry rot fungus, the whole thing, sliding down into the sea and washed away for ever on the tides.
And yet now I sometimes think: Where did all that wood go that Garth had been selling for years? And what of all those spores I’d breathed and touched and rolled around in? And sometimes when I think things like that it makes me feel quite ill.
I suppose I shall just have to wait and see . . .
CHARLES L. GRANT’S CAREER has spanned more than thirty-five years and during that time he has won, among other honours, three World Fantasy Awards and two Nebulas from the Science Fiction-Fantasy Writers Association. A recipient of the British Fantasy Society’s Special Award and the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, he was also named Grand Master at the 2002 World Horror Convention.
A prolific short story writer and novelist, he has cultivated his unique style of “quiet horror” in many novels and collections, including The Curse, The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, The Sound of Midnight, The Grave, The Bloodwind, The Soft Whisper of the Dead, The Nestling, The Tea Party, The Orchard, The Pet, For Fear of the Night, In a Dark Dream, Dialing the Wind, Stunts, Something Stirs, Jackals, The Black Carousel, Tales from the Nightside, A Glow of Candles and Nightmare Seasons. More recent titles include the first two X Files novelizations, Goblin and Whirlwind, the “Millennium Quartet” inspired by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the “Black Oak” series about a security team of paranormal investigators. Grant has also published a number of books under the pseudonyms “Geoffrey Marsh” and “Lionel Fenn”.
As an editor he is responsible for two dozen anthologies, including the influential Shadows series (twelve volumes) along with Nightmares, Midnight, Greystone Bay, The Dodd Mead Gallery of Horror and Gothic Ghosts (with Wendy Webb).
With his wife, editor and novelist Kathryn Ptacek, Grant lives in a century-old haunted Victorian house in Sussex County, New Jersey.
“I also write and edit books like this one,” explains the author, “ones that if all goes well will give their readers a good dose of the chills, the shudders, and the outright shrieks now and then. After all, if the truth be known, we haven’t grown up all that much; the fears we have now aren’t the same as they were when we were children, but they’re fears just the same. They make our palms sweat, they give us nightmares, and they’re sometimes powerful enough to alter our characters.”
IN A LIVING ROOM, sparse and battered furniture had been formed into a square so that, in her darkness, the old woman could find them, avoid them without the tap of her probing white-tipped cane. There were neither rugs on the floors nor pictures on the walls, and only a single shadeless lamp. No matter the day or the weather, she always wore the same dress, an oddly shapeless garment whose colors seemed dead for centuries. Her hair was decades long, braided and coikd into a silver basket round the top of her head, and her face and arms and thin-strong legs were shadowed with ancient wrinkles.
But as she sat at her piano, her hands glided out from long, laced sleeves, and they were beautiful.
Eric sat quietly on the family-room floor, his short legs pulled up tight in awkward Indian fashion, his back resting stiffly against the dark oak paneling that covered the walls to the ceiling. His hands, as pinkly puffed as the rest of him, were folded in his lap, and for a moment he smiled, thinking of how his teacher would approve. Caren lay on the overstuffed couch, her white-blonde hair sifting down over her face. One hand dangled almost to the floor, and when, in her sleep, she whimpered once it jerked up to her cheek, touched, and fell again. He was tempted to wake her but didn’t want to move, didn’t want to whisper. The slightest sound might spoil the battle, might make him miss the music, and then it would be too late.