Dark Companions Read online

  Dedication

  for Carol Smith

  for many reasons

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to thank those editors who bought various of these stories:

  Charlie Grant, for “Mackintosh Willy” (Shadows 2, Doubleday) and “The Little Voice” (Shadows, Doubleday)

  August Derleth, for “Napier Court” (Dark Things, Arkham House)

  Lin Carter, for “Down There” and “Calling Card” (Weird Tales, Zebra)

  Stuart Schiff, for “Heading Home,” “Out of Copyright” (Whispers magazine), “The Chimney,” and “Above the World” (Whispers and Whispers II, Doubleday)

  Ed Ferman, for “The Proxy” (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)

  Gerry Page, for “Drawing In” (Year’s Best Horror Stories VI, DAW)

  myself, for “The Pattern” (Superhorror alias The Far Reaches of Fear, W. H. Allen)

  Hugh Lamb, for “Baby” (Star Book of Horror No. 2, Star) and “In the Bag” (Cold Fear, W. H. Allen)

  Michel Parry, for “Conversion” (The Rivals of Dracula, Corgi)

  Kirby McCauley, for “Call First” (Night Chills, Avon) and “The Companion” (Frights, St. Martin’s Press)

  Introduction

  To the interviewers’ favourite question—why do you write horror stories?—there are many answers, all of them true. Here are some. My most vivid memories of my early childhood are of being frightened: by Hans Andersen and the girl cutting off her feet to rid herself of the dancing red shoes; by the deformed creatures that swarm out of the mine in The Princess and the Goblin; by (most unlikely of all) an edition of The Rupert Annual, a British children’s book, in which a Christmas tree stalks home to its forest one night, creaking away in the dark and leaving a trail of earth through the house. The cinema got to me too: I spent most of Disney’s Snow White in a state bordering on panic, and then there was the scene (meant as a joke) in Danny Kaye’s Knock on Wood where a corpse is hung up like a hat and coat on the back of a door. I began to read adult horror fiction when I was eight or nine years old, but I’d already known for years that fiction could be terrifying.

  So when I began to write stories, they had to be tales of would-be terror. At the age of eleven I had finished a short book of ghost and horror stories, patched together like Frankenstein’s monster from fragments of tales I had read. Most writers start by imitating their favourites. Mine, three years later, was H. P. Lovecraft, now that I’d found a complete book of his stories. Lovecraft’s style seemed easy to imitate, and so did his monsters. I wrote half a dozen stories in the manner of Lovecraft, with titles such as “The Tower from Yuggoth”, and sent them to August Derleth of Arkham House, Lovecraft’s American publisher. Derleth liked them enough to tell me how to improve them—by describing fewer things as eldritch and unspeakable and cosmically alien, for a start, and by rereading the ghost stories of M. R. James to learn suggestiveness—and eventually he published a book of them. You can tell I was seventeen when I finished the book—one character thinks nothing of buying a house sight unseen—but all the same, it began my career.

  Literary imitation is rather like ventriloquism—trying to say things in someone else’s voice—and just about as limited a skill. My next book was a reaction against this, and sometimes so personal as to be wilfully incomprehensible. By now I’d left school and was working in the tax office, where I wrote stories at my desk in the lunch hour, surrounded by bureaucratic activity and ringing phones. No wonder my surroundings began to appear in my stories, and so did my growing obsession with movies and the dying cinemas where I caught up with films of the previous thirty years. Since my first book was an imitation of Lovecraft’s horrors, it had been a way of sidestepping my own fears—I sometimes think that is why so many amateur writers imitate Lovecraft today—but now I was beginning to write about them, perhaps because I was gaining enough confidence as a writer to be more honest about myself.

  While the supernatural elements in these new tales weren’t autobiographical, the feelings were—particularly the descriptions of how it felt to be afraid. During my schooldays I’d often been terrified of going to the Catholic grammar school, where they were fond of using corporal punishment, but now that I was growing up I found that there were many other things to fear: women, and answering the office phone, and talking about myself, and going to parties where I knew almost nobody… Well, I needn’t go on; most of it is in my stories somewhere. All the same, I’m convinced that good horror stories nourish the imagination, and so I hope these stories do.

  I had four years of the tax office, and another seven of public libraries. It wasn’t until my second collection was published that I decided to try to write full-time. I was growing bored with irrelevancies: at least everything you do as a writer is relevant to the job—no cramming yourself for examinations (a pet hate of mine) with facts you will never use again, no dressing up and looking servile at interviews. The first couple of years were hard; if my wife hadn’t then been working, they would have been impossible. At least writing for a living persuaded me to make myself clearer, and so, I suppose, did reading my stories to audiences—for me, the most enjoyable part of my work. I use many of the stories in this book.

  With the exception of “Napier Court”, all the way from 1967, the stories here were written since that freelance plunge in July 1973. They can more or less speak for themselves, I hope. The very short stories (“Heading Home”, “Out of Copyright”, “Calling Card”, “Conversion” and “Call First”) are the best of a group of tales I wrote as a kind of tribute to the old EC horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, which in fact I never read until my twenties. Horror and humour have much in common, and it was often difficult to see where the horror comics ended and EC’s other comic, Mad, began; perhaps these tales of mine are black jokes. “Out of Copyright” is one of my attempts to be clearer, since another acrostic tale of mine (“The Words that Count”, where the entire story was an acrostic) left many readers bewildered. “Calling Card” was written (as “First Foot”) in response to a commission from the Liverpool Daily Post to write a ghost story for Christmas and the New Year, which the newspaper then refused to publish. “Drawing In” probably belongs with these stories, since I was trying to discover if there was still any terror to be had from the best-known (and most domesticated) horror character of all. Many of the stories grew out of their settings; the setting of “Mackintosh Willy” is real, and so is the graffito that gave me the idea for the story; the location of “Above the World” is real, down to the hotel, a favourite of mine; the cinema in “The Show Goes On” was real until they knocked it down—and so on, for almost all the settings. Of course, they may not look quite like that to anyone else but me.

  Three of the stories have been given awards. “Mackintosh Willy” tied with Elizabeth Lynn’s “Woman Who Loved the Moon” for the World Fantasy Award in 1980; “The Chimney” took the same award in 1978, again for best short story of the previous year. “In the Bag” was given the British Fantasy Award for best short story in 1978. (The story was published in November 1977. Up to that time the award had been based on the previous calendar year, but after that, for one year only, it was based on the period from July to June. Harlan Ellison’s “Jeffty is Five” became eligible for a second time, and this time it won, all of which has caused some confusion in reference books.) All three stories are about childhood in some way; make of that what you will—perhaps that I often return to the theme that deep down, we are all still as vulnerable as we were in childhood; sometimes it takes very little to break through our defences. It’s a disturbing thought, but then I believe that horror fiction cannot be too frightening or too disturbing. Too much of it seeks to reassure, often by re
inforcing prejudices.

  And that’s as good a way to end as any. Now you’re alone with the stories and yourself.

  Wallasey, England

  23 December 1980

  Mackintosh Willy

  To start with, he wasn’t called Mackintosh Willy. I never knew who gave him that name. Was it one of those nicknames that seem to proceed from a group subconscious, names recognised by every member of the group yet apparently originated by none? One has to call one’s fears something, if only to gain the illusion of control. Still, sometimes I wonder how much of his monstrousness we created. Wondering helps me not to ponder my responsibility for what happened at the end.

  When I was ten I thought his name was written inside the shelter in the park. I saw it only from a distance; I wasn’t one of those who made a game of braving the shelter. At ten I wasn’t afraid to be timid—that came later, with adolescence.

  Yet if you had walked past Newsham Park you might have wondered what there was to fear: why were children advancing, bold but wary, on the red-brick shelter by the twilit pool? Surely there could be no danger in the shallow shed, which might have held a couple of dozen bicycles. By now the fishermen and the model boats would have left the pool alone and still; lamps on the park road would have begun to dangle luminous tails in the water. The only sounds would be the whispering of children, the murmur of trees around the pool, perhaps a savage incomprehensible muttering whose source you would be unable to locate. Only a game, you might reassure yourself.

  And of course it was: a game to conquer fear. If you had waited long enough you might have heard shapeless movement in the shelter, and a snarling. You might have glimpsed him as he came scuttling lopsidedly out of the shelter, like an injured spider from its lair. In the gathering darkness, how much of your glimpse would you believe? The unnerving swiftness of the obese limping shape? The head which seemed to belong to another, far smaller, body, and which was almost invisible within a grey balaclava cap, except for the small eyes which glared through the loose hole?

  All of that made us hate him. We were too young for tolerance—and besides, he was intolerant of us. Ever since we could remember he had been there, guarding his territory and his bottle of red biddy. If anyone ventured too close he would start muttering. Sometimes you could hear some of the words: “Damn bastard prying interfering snooper…thieving bastard layabout…think you’re clever, eh? … I’ll give you something clever…”

  We never saw him until it was growing dark: that was what made him into a monster. Perhaps during the day he joined his cronies elsewhere—on the steps of ruined churches in the centre of Liverpool, or lying on the grass in St John’s Gardens, or crowding the benches opposite Edge Hill Public Library, whose stopped clock no doubt helped their draining of time. But if anything of this occurred to us, we dismissed it as irrelevant. He was a creature of the dark.

  Shouldn’t this have meant that the first time I saw him in daylight was the end? In fact it was only the beginning.

  It was a blazing day at the height of summer, my tenth. It was too hot to think of games to while away my school holidays. All I could do was walk errands for my parents, grumbling a little.

  They owned a small newsagent’s on West Derby Road. That day they were expecting promised copies of the Tuebrook Bugle. Even when he disagreed with them, my father always supported the independent newspapers—the Bugle, the Liverpool Free Press: at least they hadn’t been swallowed or destroyed by a monopoly. The lateness of the Bugle worried him; had the paper given in? He sent me to find out.

  I ran across West Derby Road just as the traffic lights at the top of the hill released a flood of cars. Only girls used the pedestrian subway so far as I was concerned; besides, it was flooded again. I strolled past the concrete police station into the park, to take the long way round. It was too hot to go anywhere quickly or even directly.

  The park was crowded with games of football, parked prams, sunbathers draped over the greens. Patients sat outside the hospital on Orphan Drive beside the park. Around the lake, fishermen sat by transistor radios and whipped the air with hooks. Beyond the lake, model boats snarled across the shallow circular pool. I stopped to watch their patterns on the water, and caught sight of an object in the shelter.

  At first I thought it was an old grey sack that someone had dumped on the bench. Perhaps it held rubbish—sticks that gave parts of it an angular look. Then I saw that the sack was an indeterminate stained garment, which might have been a mackintosh or raincoat of some kind. What I had vaguely assumed to be an ancient shopping bag, resting next to the sack, displayed a ragged patch of flesh and the dull gleam of an eye.

  Exposed to daylight, he looked even more dismaying: so huge and still, less stupefied than dormant. The presence of the boatmen with their remote-control boxes reassured me. I ambled past the allotments to Pringle Street, where a terraced house was the editorial office of the Bugle.

  Our copies were on the way, said Chrissie Maher the editor, and insisted on making me a cup of tea. She seemed a little upset when, having gulped the tea, I hurried out into the sudden rain. Perhaps it was rude of me not to wait until the rain had stopped—but on this parched day I wanted to make the most of it, to bathe my face and my bare arms in the onslaught, gasping almost hysterically.

  By the time I had passed the allotments, where cabbages rattled like toy machine-guns, the downpour was too heavy even for me. The park provided little cover; the trees let fall their own belated storms, miniature but drenching. The nearest shelter was by the pool, which had been abandoned to its web of ripples. I ran down the slippery tarmac hill, splashing through puddles, trying to blink away rain, hoping there would be room in the shelter.

  There was plenty of room, both because the rain reached easily into the depths of the brick shed and because the shelter was not entirely empty. He lay as I had seen him, face upturned within the sodden balaclava. Had the boatmen avoided looking closely at him? Raindrops struck his unblinking eyes and trickled over the patch of flesh.

  I hadn’t seen death before. I stood shivering and fascinated in the rain. I needn’t be scared of him now. He’d stuffed himself into the grey coat until it split in several places; through the rents I glimpsed what might have been dark cloth or discoloured hairy flesh. Above him, on the shelter, were graffiti that at last I saw were not his name at all, but the names of three boys: MACK TOSH WILLY. They were partly erased, which no doubt was why one’s mind tended to fill the gap.

  I had to keep glancing at him. He grew more and more difficult to ignore; his presence was intensifying. His shapelessness, the rents in his coat, made me think of an old bag of washing, decayed and mouldy. His hand lurked in his sleeve; beside it, amid a scattering of Coca-Cola caps, lay fragments of the bottle whose contents had perhaps killed him. Rain roared on the dull green roof of the shelter; his staring eyes glistened and dripped. Suddenly I was frightened. I ran blindly home.

  “There’s someone dead in the park,” I gasped. “The man who chases everyone.”

  “Look at you!” my mother cried. “Do you want pneumonia? Just you get out of those wet things this instant!”

  Eventually I had a chance to repeat my news. By this time the rain had stopped. “Well, don’t be telling us,” my father said. “Tell the police. They’re just across the road.”

  Did he think I had exaggerated a drunk into a corpse? He looked surprised when I hurried to the police station. But I couldn’t miss the chance to venture in there—I believed that elder brothers of some of my schoolmates had been taken into the station and hadn’t come out for years.

  Beside a window that might have belonged to a ticket office was a bell you rang to make the window’s partition slide back and display a policeman. He frowned down at me. What was my name? What had I been doing in the park? Who had I been with? When a second head appeared beside him he said reluctantly “He thinks someone’s passed out in the park.”

  A blue and white Mini called for me at the police statio
n, like a taxi; on the roof a red sign said POLICE. People glanced in at me as though I were on the way to prison. Perhaps I was: suppose Mackintosh Willy had woken up and gone? How long a sentence did you get for lying? False diamonds sparkled on the grass and in the trees. I wished I’d persuaded my father to tell the police.

  As the car halted, I saw the grey bulk in the shelter. The driver strode, stiff with dignity, to peer at it. “My God,” I heard him say in disgust.

  Did he know Mackintosh Willy? Perhaps, but that wasn’t the point. “Look at this,” he said to his colleague. “Ever see a corpse with pennies on the eyes? Just look at this, then. See what someone thought was a joke.”

  He looked shocked, sickened. He was blocking my view as he demanded “Did you do this?”

  His white-faced anger, and my incomprehension, made me speechless: But his colleague said “It wouldn’t be him. He wouldn’t come and tell us afterwards, would he?”

  As I tried to peer past them he said “Go on home, now. Go on.” His gentleness seemed threatening. Suddenly frightened, I ran home through the park.

  For a while I avoided the shelter. I had no reason to go near, except on the way home from school. Sometimes I’d used to see schoolmates tormenting Mackintosh Willy; sometimes, at a distance, I had joined them. Now the shelter yawned emptily, baring its dim bench. The dark pool stirred, disturbing the green beards of the stone margin. My main reason for avoiding the park was that there was nobody with whom to go.

  Living on a main road was the trouble. I belonged to none of the side streets, where they played football among parked cars or chased through the back alleys. I was never invited to street parties. I felt like an outsider, particularly when I had to pass the groups of teenagers who sat on the railings above the pedestrian subway, lazily swinging their legs, waiting to pounce. I stayed at home, in the flat above the newsagent’s, when I could, and read everything in the shop. But I grew frustrated: I did enough reading at school. All this was why I welcomed Mark. He could save me from my isolation.