The Year's Best Horror Stories 22 (1994) by Karl Edward Wagner

'So, then. What is a horror story?"

Readers unfamiliar with The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII may prefer to read these notes only after reading the anthology..

  His cat ran urgently toward him across the road, then changed its mind, and scampered back. Something behind the privet hedge, near the spot where the cat had changed direction, moved heavily, shaking the bushes. Maurice stared hard, but could see nothing through the darkness under the tight, trimmed leaves.

  A shadow passed swiftly across his lawn towards the house, as though a large bird had passed above.

  But that was impossible! Nothing had moved below the streetlight, that could cast a shadow!

  Then he saw something tall and thin, like the trunk of a narrow tree, in his neighbor’s garden. He was sure it had jerked into brief motion; had scuttled quickly a little closer, then gone still.

  It did it again, seeming to cover ten feet of ground in a split second. It was now close enough for Maurice to form some idea about what manner of creature it was.

  It had many legs.

  Maurice ran inside and slammed the door. He locked and bolted it.

  The door bell was operated by batteries. He removed them and put them into the pocket of his dressing gown. He sat on the stairs watching the front door for ten minutes, waiting for the bell to ring. He knew that it couldn’t, but thought perhaps it would.

  He ran upstairs and threw himself into bed. He lay facedown, with a cushion over his head, cocooned in his sheets and blankets.

  Later, he heard a movement on the roof. Something had climbed up there, and was making its way along the gable above his bedroom. It made harsh, scratching sounds on the tiles, and dislodged some of them. Maurice heard them crashing down into his garden. From the sounds, he judged that whatever it was had clambered out to a position just above his window.

  As if to confirm this speculation, there came a loud, spasmodic tapping on the glass.

  Maurice half sat up. He was glad that his curtains were pulled shut. As he stared at them, the window behind was shattered and one of them twitched open. A long, gray, scrawny limb, perhaps an arm, but without a proper hand on the end of it, waved a little bundle at him. It dropped the bundle and withdrew.

  There were more scampering sounds from above as Maurice fled from the room.

  He didn’t go near the packet; he thought he knew what was in it.

  Something he didn’t want….

"Under the Crust" by Terry Lamsley

---

As a writer about fiction, I am always coming up with schemes and outlines. My focus and enthusiasm for such projects fizzles within a week or two, unless the fizzle is in a tenth of that time. 

The plan to read all twenty-two volumes of the DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories series has been one such project. Over the years I've waxed and waned about it: some years I write-up a single volume; other years I make myself seasick with multiple volumes. 

Embarking today on Volume 22, my instinct is to delay. This is the final volume of the series, published in late 1994 and covering the year 1993. Editor Karl Edward Wagner, on board since volume eight, died in October 1994.

At age forty-nine.

There are plenty of places to get the facts about Wagner's fine career and bitter end. Until the end, he was an outstanding writer and anthologist. It would be a mistake to read his volume 22 introduction and editorial choices as any kind of last testament, except to say every writer hopes their final day of work displays as much passion for the field as their first day.

As always, notes and quotes are below.

*   *   *

Introduction: But Is It Horrific? by Karl Edward Wagner

So, then. What is a horror story?

[....] Why bring it up again? Because the times they are a-changing. Perhaps.

            Once upon a time horror stories were easy to categorize. Look for haunted ruins, creepy old houses, ghostly figures, bloodthirsty monsters, forbidden old tomes, eccentric scholars, teenagers misbehaving, teenagers dismembered—and a chainsaw-wielding vampire and a flesh-eating zombie or two, and you’ve got your genre defined from Gothic to gore.

  Not that easy anymore....

  After fifteen years as editor of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, I’m seeing a change in the wind. (Read a few thousand horror stories during the year, and you’re sure to start seeing things.) To wit:

  The enormous proliferation of small press publications has fostered a whole new generation of horror writers.

  Those writers who were good got better with experience; some of them now rank among the best in the horror genre.

  The axis of horror is shifting with that maturity, and with that shift comes a new concept of horror fiction.

  True. There are still tons of stories to be read each year about the never-learning massacred teenagers, the ever-flowing body fluids, the ever-hungry vampire/zombie/monsters, the ever-slashing serial killer. Some of these stories are damn good, and you’ll discover a few of them here. However, the same-old-same-old, if not in retreat, seems increasingly to be passed over by many writers in favor of exploring new and forbidding themes.

  Once again. What is horror?

[....] the same-old-same-old, if not in retreat, seems increasingly to be passed over by many writers in favor of exploring new and forbidding themes.

That is as far as Wagner got in eliciting answers from contributors (and himself) about horror definitions.

But he "knows it when he sees it," as most do. The fact that there was so little overlap (Wagner reports) between his choices and those of competing anthologists is testament to instincts enriched over decades, and a healthy Wagnerian contrary streak.

"The Ripper's Tune" by Gregory Nicoll is a well-observed story about Jackie and the Rippers, a rock trio on the rise. Their song lyrics, alas, quote Jack the Ripper's historic notes. And Jack doesn't like that. 

            She’d been tied to the back railing of her apartment building, her hands bound with guitar strings. The coroner estimated that the murderer spent more than a quarter of an hour working on her with his knife. The worst was what he’d done after he killed her.

  The police couldn’t find him. What they did find was another note, written in the same ragged script.

  It said, “I told yu to stoppe playing mi songges.”

rockband, murder, JacktheRipper, lyrics, obsession

T. E. D. Klein is a writer's writer. “One Size Eats All” is a clever and ghoulish short story, more E.C. Comics than the stories in Dark Gods. It details the coming of age of a bullied younger brother, and the concatenation of coincidences that led to him becoming a wiser only child.

The horror, a mist circling the story's opening pages, descends thickly when Andy, Andy's pal Willie, and Andy's older brother Jack camp by a trail on Wendigo Mountain. As night falls, Andy gets into what he thinks is his new sleeping bag. Its motto: “One size eats all.” Made in Hungary. 

          The walls of the bag felt smooth and, moments later, warm. Too warm. Surely, though, it was just the warmth of his own body. 

          He pushed both legs in further, then slipped his feet all the way to the bottom. Lying in the darkness, listening to the sound of Willie’s breathing, he could feel the bag press itself against his ankles and legs, clinging to them with a weight that seemed, for goosedown, a shade too heavy. Yet the feeling was not unpleasant. He willed himself to relax.

Klein handles this uncanny bedtime scene with grace: the unfamiliar/familiar camp/tent/sleeping bag coalesces into a nightmare of everyday items made strange. 

camping, sleepingbag, brothers, Hungary, monster

“Resurrection” by Adam Meyer is a chilly examination of one man's madness. First-person narrator Jay is driven to find out what afterlife–if any–awaits him. From a woman steeped in ritual, he finds out how to resurrect–or at least reanimate–the dead.

             “I was dead,” she says with an expression not unlike awe. She sits up and swings her legs off the bed. Her hands go to her back, reaching for the gaping wound between her shoulder blades. When her hands reappear, they’re covered with sticky, half-dried blood. “I was dead. Wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, you were. But I brought you back.”

  Donna’s eyes narrow suddenly. “Jay, you murdered me.” She says that word like an obscenity, comprehending for the first time the magnitude of what has happened.

  “I know, Donna. I know. How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Any pain?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Dizziness?”

  “No.”

  “How’s your memory?”

  “Okay, I guess. Jay, you ...” She stands up and begins to sob. I expect to see tears, but there are none. I suppose they’ve dried up….

“Resurrection” is a realtime one-scene verbal interrogation. Like previous explorers of the afterlife, Jay discovers there is no royal road to certainty. Donna, on the other hand, experiences what female companions of such fragile specimens as Jay have historically suffered: knowing all too well what horror she must repeatedly face.

death, obsession, experiment, murder, regret

“I Live to Wash Her” by Joey Froehlich is a brief mood piece about listening to anecdotes one hopes are not true.

             It wasn’t normal to dwell in the past like that. I was sure the girl was dead. I had gone to the funeral only the week before. And here he was going on about her as if she was still alive. Going on about when he first met her, talking about her blonde hair and blue eyes and what he lived for as if that mattered….

grief, obsession, delusion, past, memory

“A Little-Known Side of Elvis” by Dennis Etchison begins by counterposing Hollywood newcomers desperately networking as they meet by chance after work at a dog park. The dog park overlooks a ravine studded with wealthy homes. Subtly, as dusk gathers, Etchison shows those homeowners crowding their balconies to observe the fun at closing time.

  The breeze became a wind in the canyon and the black liquid eye of a swimming pool winked at him from far down the hillside. Above, the sound of the music stopped abruptly.

  “You don’t think she went down there, do you?” said Stacey. There was a catch in her voice. “The mountain lions ...”

  “They only come out at night.”

  “But it is night!”

  They heard a high, broken keening.

  “Listen!” she said. “That’s Greta!”

  “No, it’s not. Dogs don’t make that sound. It’s—” He stopped himself.

  “What?”

  “Coyotes.”

  He regretted saying it.

  Now, without the music, the shuffling of footsteps on the boards was clear and unmistakable. He glanced up. Shadows appeared over the edge of the deck as a line of heads gathered to look down. Ice cubes rattled and someone laughed. Then someone else made a shushing sound and the silhouetted heads bobbed silently, listening and watching.

  Can they see us? he wondered.

Hollywood, dog park, fame, obsession, disappearance

“Perfect Days” by Chet Williamson may be an even better nursing home horror story than “Bubba Ho-Tep.” 

  “Mrs. Jenks!” said Marianne, used to dealing with the quirks of the aged. “It’s only our Mr. Richards.”

  “It’s him!” said Mrs. Jenks through a mouthful of loose dentures. “It’s him, he’s the one!” The claws attempted to point, but to no good effect. It looked more, thought Richards, like the gesticulations of the Witch of Endor. The other hand plucked at the loose scarf around her neck as if it was cutting off her breath.

  “Mother had a bad experience some years back,” said the man breathily. The long push in the wheelchair appeared to have tired him. “She was ... almost attacked.”

  “Ah,” Richards said sympathetically, trying to ignore the woman’s babbling.

  “It was after my father died—”

  “It’s him, David ...”

  “She was rather old to be—”

  “I tell you it’s him.”

  “—to be attacked like that. She’s never been able to—”

  “Listen to me, listen, he’s the one who did it!”

  “—put it out of her mind. Now, Mother, it’s all right, this isn’t the man ...”

  “You can’t leave me here, not here with him. He’ll kill me, kill me, do awful things to me.”

serialkiller, retirementhome, murder,retribution

“See How They Run” by Ramsey Campbell is a macabre comedy of transference. It begins when Mr. Foulsham serves on a jury. Mr. Fishwick, arrested several murders, is the defendant.

  “More worried about him than about his victims, are you?” the tobacconist demanded, and the optician intervened. “I know it seems incredible that anyone could enjoy doing what he did,” she said to Foulsham, “but that creature’s not like us.”

  Foulsham would have liked to be convinced of that. After all, if Fishwick weren’t insane, mustn’t that mean anyone was capable of such behavior? “I think he pleaded guilty when he realized that everyone was going to hear all those things about him he wanted to keep secret,” he said. “I think he thought that if he pleaded guilty the psychiatrists wouldn’t be called.”

  The eleven stared at him. “You think too much,” the tobacconist said.

  The hairdresser broke the awkward silence by clearing her throat. “I never thought I’d say this, but I wish they’d bring back hanging just for him.”

  “That’s the Christmas present he deserves,” said the veterinarian who had crumpled the evidence.

juryduty, murder, drawings, obsession, guilt

In "97 Shots Downed, Officer Fired" by Wayne Allen Sallee, a cop's descent into madness is depicted through fragmented memories and hallucinations. Sallee's shorthand style and louche milieu are consistently beguiling.

alcoholism, delusion, murder, regret, family

"David" by Sean Doolittle is about a man who is stalked by a stranger who repeatedly asks him to kill him. Doolittle's story is a surreal and unsettling exploration of obsessions that are contagious, even for the victim-spectator. There is a truly dread-inducing note struck here, akin to the conceit in Fincher’s “Se7en.” 

stranger, obsession, murder, request, pursuit

"Portrait of a Pulp Writer" by F.A. McMahan toys with the newfangled personal computer word processor as mercurial killdozer.

writersblock, creations, attack, death, imagination

The wonderfully macabre folk horror of "Fish Harbor" by Paul Pinn begins as a feuding couple's vacation in Lanzarote takes a dark turn: they witness a disturbing nighttime ritual at a local fishing boat anchorage. Spectatorship, sacrifice, obsession, and the unsettling power of the sea all lead one spouse to a very serious misunderstanding.

Canary Islands, vacation, cult, sacrifice, transformation

"Adroitly Wrapped" by Mark McLaughlin: 

           “ ‘What’s in the Sack?’ Sounds like a game show.” Punkin’s nervous gait sped into a loping gallop, so that Anthony had to run to keep up with him. Odd slitherings and slappings issued from the burlap sack as it bounced in the dust. “I’ll give you three guesses,” the pale youth said.

A young man receives a disturbing birthday gift from his eccentric friends. McLaughlin's story is a bizarre and unsettling exploration of identity, creation, and the dark side of desire.

birthday, mannequin, creation, transformation, obsession

"Thicker Than Water" by Joel Lane features a journalist investigating the disappearance of children in a canal district, uncovering a dark secret. Cool servings of urban decay, social unrest, and the horrors that lurk beneath the surface of society are plentiful. As with many Lane tales, if you don't appreciate the build up, character work, and local color, the open-ended ending will not satisfy.

family, illness, canal people, violence, suspicion

Spirits will have their little jokes at our expense. "Memento Mori" by Scott Thomas comes and goes with such deadly speed, it demands immediate rereading. Two women's fascination with gravestone rubbings leads to what initially seems like epiphany: the beloved dead still need our help. 

tombstones, rubbings, messages, death, mystery

A dystopic-nostalgic present-day future marketing of the supposed "The Blitz Spirit" (by Kim Newman) turns everyday life into a referential heckscape. A journalist chronicles a London under siege. 

            A family of refugees was holding up foot traffic on Wardour Street. The police were checking papers with some trouble. None of the adults spoke any English, and a sullen, bone-weary schoolgirl was having to translate to her three apparent parents, converting terse British sentences into lengthy Mittel Europa circumlocutions.

World War II, Blitz, nostalgia, time travel, alternate reality

The power of mirrors to reveal and otherwise is central to "Masquerade" by Lillian Csernica, a backstage pass to the theater world. A lighting technician at a theater becomes obsessed with the actresses and their transformations. 

theater, closing night, reflections, obsession, escape

"Price of the Flames" by Deidra Cox combines obsession, sacrifice, and the dangers of hitchhiking.

            He hit the exit ramp with a strange sense of relief mixed with sad wonder. He turned to the boy. “Just a few minutes now. Then we’ll be home.” 

            The boy sneered. “Is Auntie Em and Dorothy gonna be there, too, Pops?”

painter, model, portraits, obsession, fire

After Covid, adult children returning home to face–what?--has lost some of its shock potential. In "The Bone Garden" by Conrad Williams a man moves into his grandparents' house, uncovering a dark secret in the garden. 

family, new home, graveyard, bones, transformation

"Ice Cream and Tombstones" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman is somber, poignant, and superbly short. A young girl encounters her dead mother perched on her tombstone.

mother's grave, ice cream, flowers, guilt, obsession

Crime is thirsty work. "Salt Snake" by Simon Clark gives us a kitchen-sink snapshot of criminals hiding out in a seaside house, wherein they are menaced by fog and –perhaps?--a creature. Excellent use throughout of dialogue-as-action.

            There was no one else. The cellar was full of dusty bottles of wine. They opened some, but it tasted like vinegar. A few bottles they smashed against the whitewashed walls in explosions of red like blood. Spuggy laughed and babbled on about dropping nuns out of helicopters. He used to be funny. Now he was just a pain. Viper told himself he’d blow him out when they got back home.    

            “Christ, it’s getting like cottage cheese out there. You don’t get fog like that on the Warwick estate.” 

            Joe set half a dozen packs of Carlsberg Special Brew on the table.

vacation, sea, fog, disappearance, transformation

Atelier horror the equal of Robert W. Chambers, "Lady's Portrait, Executed in Archaic Colors" by Charles M. Saplak is wonderful: superb prose, wonderfully complicated and historicized. An artist's model is seduced by a painter's obsessional style. It's art, devotion, and the blurred lines between life and death, along with castle flashbacks.

….She had stopped off in a coffee shop near her apartment, and there he was, sitting at one of the booths. She couldn’t have explained exactly how she knew it was he; she just knew. He had greenish eyes and hair of an indistinct color which was thinning, but which was thinning all over, not in the usual pattern. He had a sketch pad open on the table top in front of him. A cup of weak-looking tea sat cooling near his right hand; the morning light passed through faint vapors of steam above the cup. His hands were exceptionally slender and his fingers exceptionally long. His right hand was poised over the blank page of the sketch book, and his ring finger was bent so that the pad of the fingertip could rest on the paper. He moved his finger in a lazy, slow, delicate circle, over and over. 

            “I recognize you,” he said.

artist, model, portrait, obsession, colors

In "Lost Alleys" by Jeffrey Thomas an unhoused wanderer stumbles upon a secret fighting ring where the combatants battle themselves to the death. Slop-bucket urban nihilism.

city, drugs, fighting, self-harm, transformation

"Salustrade" by D.F. Lewis features navigators in a labyrinthine city filled with strange agendas. Can an astronaut really live in a fleabag rooming house and walk with his landlady/inamorata to the launch pad? Lewis's experimental style and surreal imagery is typically disorienting.

StarshipCity, rocket launch, sabotage, aliens, transformation

It's called arithmomania, and if you don't suffer from it before reading "The Power of One" by Nancy Kilpatrick, don't worry. A woman's obsession with numerology leads her to a desperate attempt to control her future. Kilpatrick's story is a chilling exploration of obsession’s destructive power. A great tale.

            By the time Mira reached home she had convinced herself that the universe was sending her a message. Dr. Rosen was the medium. Atonement was possible, despite the dismal view of life her father had drummed into her head. Change was in store. She began in the kitchen. Mira cut off the broom handle to add a fifth leg to her kitchen table. Four chairs with four legs each made sixteen, plus the five table legs. Twenty-one. Two plus one equaled the fortuitous three. Next she cleaned out the cupboards, chucking a tin of tuna so that the cans numbered nine. There were nineteen leaves left on the Boston lettuce. One went into the garbage chute in the hallway. Glasses, dishes, her mother’s good silverware that she’d begged her dad for when she’d been old enough to appreciate it, were counted. The number of napkins left in the package. The pages of each cookbook.

doctor, patient, heart attack, obsession, numbers

"The Lions in the Desert" by David Langford strikes a great cosmic horror note.  Two security guards at a mysterious library uncover a dark secret about the nature of reality. 

desert, lions, riddle, trap, transformation

If–like me–you have only read her nonfiction, the short story "Turning Thirty" by Lisa Tuttle is a great place to begin. It has the compressed and shocking power of a story by Poe.

            Lust is, for me, a particularly intense variety of memory. I can’t imagine feeling it for a stranger. For someone I’ve just met I might feel interest or attraction, but not lust—no more lust than love. Nick was the first man for whom I ever felt lust without loving, and even with him it was hardly lust at first sight. I thought him attractive in a kind of young, funky, nonthreatening way. My reasons for contemplating sex with him had more to do with my feelings for my husband than for Nick. I was furiously angry with Peter, desperate to right the balance of our dying marriage by taking a lover. When Nick made it obvious he was attracted to me, I felt a resurgence of a female power which Peter had all but destroyed in me.

Are we only ghosts of our sated desires? 

affair, regret, reunion, obsession, murder

"Bloodletting" by Kim Antieau: 

            Anna sought solace in the papers. Perhaps she could find an answer there. The Cramer Building man had been in an auto accident before he began shooting. The man in the park had had his appendix removed a week earlier. She hurried through the papers, looking back, trying to find more clues. Maybe they had all been in the hospital; they could have all gotten blood. Maybe it had belonged to just one maniac and now it had spread and they were all going crazy. Or perhaps it was a conspiracy. Some other country was trying to sabotage the U.S. through the blood supply. Of course! She read the papers; she listened to the news. She knew there were plenty of people out there trying to get her and everyone else.

car accident, blood transfusion, voices, murder, madness

"Flying Into Naples" by Nicholas Royle is a fine tourist horror story about missed connections, reconnections, and other elements of an Aickmanesque phantasmagoria.

Naples, hotel, doppelganger, obsession, disappearance

"Under the Crust" by Terry Lamsley is equal to the other strong stories in Volume 22 by Pinn, Williamson,.Morton, Langford, Kilpatrick, and Saplak. 

After surviving a rural car accident, a man's encounter with scavengers at a landfill uncovers a dark secret about the history of the land. 

  “At least you can tell me about it,” Maurice added, “if I promise to keep the information to myself.”

  “I don’t know much,” the man admitted, “just what old Mr. Snape told me. He knows all the history of this area. Got loads of books about it. Goes about with a metal detector all the time. He’s found a lot of stuff. There was a thing about him in the paper not long ago. He found the remains of a village or something, up on Combs Moss. Well, I told him about it, because he’s done me favors, bought bits from me that have turned up at the tip, and given me a good price. He’ll keep his mouth shut, I know.”

  The old man scratched his chin anxiously, as though he wasn’t quite as confident as he sounded, or perhaps he had lice in his stubble of beard.

  “So whose graveyard is it?” Maurice asked, wanting to get to the nub of the matter.

  “Some miners. Hundreds of years ago. It’s a local legend, according to Mr. Snape. He’s read about it in one of his old books. They were digging, and they found something they weren’t looking for, deep underground, not far from where we are now. Some sort of cave, I suppose it was, though they thought they’d dug their way down into hell. They had a name for it; they called it ‘The Devil’s Spawning Ground.’ They found things there, and saw things that scared the daylights out of them, but I’m not sure what. They brought out some objects that looked like eggs and, would you believe it? they started eating them. It was a bad year, the crops must have failed, Mr. Snape thinks, so they were all starving. They’d eat anything, in those days, of course.”

  “They were poisoned?” Maurice ventured, thinking he could foresee the end of the tale.

  “Not exactly. It wasn’t like that. Something dreadful did seem to happen to some of them at once; though old Snape says he thinks that part of the story was probably just invention. Something to do with the ‘folk imagination.’ He says when one strange thing happens, people add an extra half dozen other things in the telling to spice it up. And you can’t believe tales of men and women turning into something else, can you?; into tall, thin, spidery things, overnight?”

  Maurice shook his head, but peered uneasily out towards the line of trees.

  The old man slung the dregs of his tea out the door and wiped his shirt front round the rim of his mug. “As for the others,” he continued, “for a while, nothing happened to them. Then they started changing, behaving different. They developed nasty habits, and people roundabout didn’t like them.”

  “What sort of habits?”

  “I don’t know. Mr. Snape didn’t want to go into that side of things. He’s like that, he doesn’t talk about anything unpleasant. He just said that people started avoiding them, and for good reasons.”

  “They became isolated.”

  “That’s it. Formed their own little community. That got a name, too. They called it Devil’s Hole. Old Snape thinks, over the years, it got shortened to Dev’s Hole, then the locals forgot the original name, and it got twisted to Dove Holes, but I don’t know about that. Anyway, things went on without too much trouble, until some of the miner’s wives started having babies. The kids weren’t right at all, and the women tried to hide them. There was something unpleasant about them.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  The old man shook his head. “Snape wouldn’t say. But they were bad enough to force the miners and their families up onto Combs Moss, out of the way, where they couldn’t be seen. They built a little village of sorts, the one Mr. Snape found the remains of.” The old man took a step towards the door and pointed a grubby hand at the lines of rock that marked Black Edge and Hob Tor. “Just there, I think.”

  “It seems they made a deal with the other villages hereabouts to keep out of their way, in exchange for food and other things they needed to survive. They used to send a few people down from the Moss with hand carts, to collect stuff. That went on for years, then those children I mentioned started to get loose, started roaming about the countryside. It seems they looked very strange. People didn’t like the look of them at all. And bad things happened.”

  Once again, Maurice would have liked more details, but the old man was plainly unable to provide them, so he didn’t interrupt. The story, odd, even outlandish as it was, had the ring of truth, and was exacerbating a feeling of unease that had dominated Maurice’s mind and body since just before the accident, prior to his visit to the tip. He was still feeling wretchedly ill, and the medicine wasn’t working.

  “Things got so bad,” the old man continued, “that one day, people for miles around got together, went up onto Combs Moss, and slaughtered everyone there, kids and all. They brought the bodies down and buried them in a pit they dug here, near the cave they’d found. They sealed off the cave and filled in the diggings that led to it.”

  “And those were the people whose remains you’ve found?”

  “So Mr. Snape says. If anyone knows about these things, it’s him. It seems right, as though there may be some truth in it, when you looked at some of those bones.”

  Maurice glanced down at the blanketed bath tub, and imagined the peculiar things hidden there. “You should put them back,” he said. “I’ll help you. They should be reburied, right now, at once.” Suddenly, he was convinced that such action was urgent and necessary.

  At first, perhaps from simple laziness, the old caretaker was reluctant to cooperate. He shook his head and made a woofing noise, as though he was being intolerably harassed. “Never mind that now—” he said, but Maurice decided to act.

  He pushed his way deeper into the cabin and lifted the tub of bones up to his chest. He was a big man; the sort few people would chose to argue with, and the old man decided not to even try.

  “Come with me,” Maurice ordered. “There’s a spade over there. Bring it with you. And show me where they found these bones.”

business failure, marital problems, tip, creatures, transformation

*   *   *

So, then. What is a horror story?

Yes, you and I know it when we read, hear, or see it.

It usually begins where we, the protagonists, live. 

It often ends with an epiphany: that wrongness is not abnormal, but lawful.

Horror takes everything. 

Jay

7 July 2024