The five senses of horro.., p.3
The Five Senses of Horror, page 3
You’re free of the cellar, but on your back you’re helpless. The slowing door is more mobile than you. All the muscles you’ve been using can only work aimlessly and loll in the air. You’re laid out on the hall floor like a laboratory subject, beneath the steadying flame.
Then you hear the butcher call to your wife “I’ll see” and start downstairs.
You begin to twitch all the muscles on your right side frantically. You roll a little towards that side, then your wild twitching rocks you back. About you the light shakes, making your shadow play the cruel trick of achieving the movement you’re struggling for. He’s at the halfway landing now. You work your right side again and hold your muscles still as you begin to turn that way. Suddenly you’ve swung over your point of equilibrium and are lying on your right side. You strain your aching muscles to inch you forward, but the laboratory is feet away, and you’re by no means moving in a straight line. His footsteps resound. You hear your wife’s terrified voice, entreating him to return to her. There’s a long pondering silence. Then he hurries back upstairs.
You don’t let yourself rest until you’re inside the laboratory, although by then your ache feels like a cold stiff surface within your flesh, and your mouth tastes like a dusty hole in stone. Once beyond the door you sit still, gazing about. Moonlight is spread from the window to the door. Your gaze seeks the bench where you were working when he found you. He hasn’t cleared up any of the material that was thrown to the floor by your convulsions. Glinting on the floor you see a needle, and nearby the surgical thread which you never had occasion to use. You relax to prepare for your last concerted effort, remembering.
You recall the day you perfected the solution. As soon as you’d quaffed it you felt your brain achieve a piercing alertness, become precisely and continually aware of the messages of each nerve and preside over them, making minute adjustments at the first hint of danger. You knew this was what you’d worked for, but you couldn’t prove it to yourself until the day you felt the stirrings of cancer. Then your brain seemed to condense into a keen strand of energy that stretched down and burned out the cancer. That was proof. You were immortal.
Not that some of the research hadn’t been unpleasant. It had taken you a great deal of furtive expenditure at the mortuaries to discover that some of the extracts you needed for the solution had to be taken from the living brain. The villagers thought the children had drowned, for their clothes were found on the river bank. Medical progress, you told yourself, has always involved suffering.
Perhaps your wife suspected something of this stage of your work, or perhaps she and the butcher had simply decided to rid themselves of you. You were working at your bench, trying to synthesise your discovery, when you heard him enter. He must have rushed at you, for before you could turn you felt a blazing slash gape at the back of your neck. Then you awoke on the cellar floor.
You edge yourself forward across the laboratory. Your greatest exertion is past, but this is the most exacting part. When you’re nearly touching your prone body you have to turn round. You move yourself with your jaws and steer with your tongue. It’s difficult, but less so than tonguing yourself upright on your neck to rest on the stairs. Then you fit yourself to your shoulders, groping with your perfected mind until you feel the nerves linking again.
Now you’ll have to hold yourself unflinching or you’ll roll apart. With your mind you can do it. Gingerly, so as not to part yourself, you stretch out your arm for the surgical needle and thread.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer.” He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky and Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach. He recently brought out his Brichester Mythos trilogy, consisting of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, The Pretence and The Booking are novellas. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, Fearful Implications and By the Light of My Skull, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain, where a film of The Influence is in production. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.
Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com.
SOFT
Darrell Schweitzer
EDITOR’S NOTES: This next selection is something I’d first discovered over twenty years ago, probably in early college about 1995, when I’d picked up a value edition hardback of Best of Weird Tales. I’d read author Darrell Schweitzer before, as he’d been writing horror fiction for the prior quarter century (and still going strong today!), but none of his works stayed in my youthful and receptive, Grateful Dead-groovin’ mind quite like Soft.
While there’s no scientific fact or condition to relate or extrapolate for this following dark fantasy tale, the boundaries of tactile sensation are nonetheless expanded in strange and penetrating ways, relating what it might feel like to ply certain things that should not be malleable.
After a monumental argument, Richard lies in bed next to his wife while contemplating divorce. He tries to remember just one “perfect” moment with her, and if only he could mold her . . .
Heartbreaking yet hopeful, weird yet insightful, and multi-layered to the sense of touch—For don’t we all wish we could perhaps shape those around us, even if just a bit?
“His fingers left a deep, firm impression in her flesh, as if she were a clay figure and he had just ruined the sculptor’s work . . . ”
RICHARD NEVER KNEW WHY it happened, or how, but, in the end, he thought he understood what it meant. And perhaps that, at the very end, was enough.
***
The screaming was over. The completely inarticulate fits of obscenities they’d both descended to when they’d run out of real words were gone too, passed like a sudden summer storm.
He felt merely drained. He stood alone in the living room, listening to the ticking of the clock on the mantel, and, beyond that, to the silence of their disheveled apartment. When at last he made his way to the bedroom, he found, much to his surprise, that his wife had left the door unlocked.
He turned the handle slowly.
“Karen?”
The bedroom was dark.
“Karen?”
She muttered something he could not make out, a single word like a profound sigh.
“What?”
She did not answer.
His only thought had been to slip through the bedroom into the bathroom, then come out again and retrieve his pajamas and a blanket from the closet so he could spend what would very probably be his last night in this apartment on the sofa.
But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that she had rolled over to one side of the bed, the way she always did. When he was ready, he got into bed beside her, more out of habit than any hope or conviction.
The bedsprings creaked. If he listened very hard, he could still hear the clock over the mantel in the living room.
Karen muttered something again. She was talking in her sleep. It was just like her, it seemed to him then, just like the self-absorbed, overgrown child she had become, or perhaps had always been, to go straight to bed after the domestic war to end all wars and sleep it off like a Saturday night’s drunk.
He lay still for a while beside her, staring at the ceiling, his hands joined behind his head.
It was beyond apology now, beyond groveling, beyond absurd bunches of roses with absurd cards. Everything was decided, and there was some relief in that, a release from all doubt and tension. It was over. They were getting divorced as soon as possible.
That was a simple fact he could cling to.
But the fact didn’t seem so simple as he lay there. He spent a long, masochistic time rehearsing their early years together in his mind, not dwelling so much on her, but on how he had felt, the sensation, the satisfaction of being perfectly in love for just one perfect day. There had been one perfect day, he somehow knew, and everything had declined subtly from it. Yet he couldn’t find the day in his memory, for all he was sure there had been “one, brief, shining moment,” as the phrase went, and he wept softly for the loss of it.
Then he turned angrily on his side, his back to Karen, his fists tight against his chest, and he cursed himself for the sort of fool who would go back for punishment again and again and never learn.
He listened to the clock ticking, and to Karen breathing. Once again she babbled something in her sleep. It seemed to be a single word over and over. He still couldn’t make it out.
Perhaps he slept briefly. He was aware of some transition, a vague disorientation, as if a few minutes had been clipped from the filmstrip of his life. Still he lay in the darkness on the bed, his back to Karen.
He couldn’t hear the clock. There was only the silent darkness holding him like a fly suspended in amber.
And a word. He felt it forming on his own lips, and he had to speak it aloud just to know what it was.
“Soft,” he said.
What followed was temptation. Part of his mind laughed bitterly and remembered the old Oscar Wilde gibe about the only way to deal with temptation being to give in to it. Part of his mind watched, a disinterested observer, as his body turned toward Karen, as his lips said again, almost soundlessly, “Soft.”
She was wearing a sleeveless nightgown. The same compulsion that made him turn, that made him speak, now caused him to reach up, ever so gently, and touch her bare shoulder.
“Soft,” he said. He squeezed, and his detached puzzlement grew as he felt that her shoulder was indeed soft, like warm, living clay. His fingers left a deep, firm impression in her flesh, as if she were a clay figure and he had just ruined the sculptor’s work.
He ran his fingers into the grooves and out again, confirming what he felt.
Then he drew his hand back quickly and lay still, afraid, his heart racing. He stared at the dark shape of his wife on the bed beside him. He thought he could make out just a hint of the disfigurement.
It was impossible, of course, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell himself that, to say aloud, or firmly in his own mind, You must be dreaming. People do not turn into silly-putty, not in real life.
Part of him wanted to believe.
The word came to him once more. The urge to reach out to her followed, like a child’s uncontrollable desire to pick at a scab, to touch a sore.
“Soft,” he said, kneading the whole length of her arm like dough. She didn’t seem to feel any pain. Her breathing remained the same regular in-out of deep sleep.
Again she mumbled something, her breath passing through flapping lips almost as if she were trying to imitate a horse.
He touched her. He felt the warm flesh passing between his fingers, never breaking off the way clay would, but losing all shape as he squeezed again and again. He felt the hard joint of her elbow for only a second before it too became flaccid, endlessly plastic.
“Soft,” he said, and with horrified fascination he stretched her arm until it reached down past her ankle, then flattened it until it was like the deflated arm of a balloon figure. That was what she was, he decided, an Inflato-Girl ordered from the back pages of a men’s magazine. That was what she deserved to be, he told himself, and his anger suddenly returned. He knelt over her now, astride her, and he touched her flesh again and again, smearing her face out on the pillowcase, crushing her other shoulder, while he thought how much he hated her and could not find the words until he arrived at Poe’s perfect phrase, the thousand injuries of Fortunato.
“Yes,” he whispered as he pressed her, as her flesh flowed and changed and spread across the covers. “Yes. Fortunato. Soft, Fortunato. Soft.”
And finally, reaching into the ruin of her chest, pushing his hands under the layers of flesh as he might under a heap of old clothes, he held her beating heart between his fingers.
Still she breathed gently, her distended, lumpy body rising and falling as if someone were making a feeble attempt to inflate the Inflato-Girl.
Then his anger passed, and once again he wept, and lay motionless on the bed, atop her, beside her, her flesh all around him, her steady breathing caressing every part of him. He felt himself becoming sexually aroused, and he was afraid and ashamed.
He listened to the silence of the apartment where he was spending his last night and wondered what precisely he should do. He laughed aloud, bitterly, at the prospect of going into the street now, at whatever late hour it was, approaching a policeman and saying, “Er, excuse me officer, but I’ve squeezed my wife a little too hard and—”
He imagined the expressions on the faces of the nurses at the hospital emergency room as he brought Karen in draped over himself like a poncho, her face and hands dangling down by the floor.
Her breathing caressed him, and he said again and again, “Soft. Soft. For you, my dearest Fortunato, soft forever.”
Once more he wept, then laughed aloud hysterically, then hushed himself in sudden, desperate dread, terribly afraid that he might wake her.
He lay paralyzed, and swiftly, without the slightest effort on his part, the memory he had been searching for came to him, and he remembered that day ten years ago when they were both twenty-three, about six months before they were married, when he took her on a picnic to some scenic spot up the Hudson, near Tarrytown perhaps, where the towers of Manhattan were like gray shapes of cloud just around a bend in the river.
Nothing much happened, but he remembered lying beside her on the blanket in the warm sun, gently stroking her hair while an orange and brown butterfly flapped around their faces and neither one of them bothered to brush it away.
It was a moment of perfect harmony, perfect agreement, and their futures seemed so certain. It was a relief, a release from all doubt and tension.
She had risen on her elbow, holding her chin in her hand, and smiled down at him.
“I love you,” she said. “When they made you, they broke the mold.”
“You too,” he said.
***
He awoke with a feeling like a sudden drop, as if he’d stepped off a cliff in a dream.
It was dawn. By the first gray light seeping through the Venetian blinds he could make out the dresser against the far wall and the bathroom door hanging open.
Something stirred on the bed, touching him from many directions at once, caressing him.
He closed his eyes desperately, and groped about in this self-imposed, utter darkness, weeping again, sobbing, “Soft, soft, damn it, one more time, please,” as he tried to gather her flesh together, to shape it, to reassemble the ruined form into some semblance of the original.
But he was no sculptor.
By full light of day he had to, at last, open his eyes and behold his attempt.
He screamed.
She opened her eyes.
He felt her flesh closing over his hand, his fingers giving way, mingling with hers.
She spoke out of a gaping wound that might have once been a mouth.
“Soft,” she said.
Darrell Schweitzer is the author of three fantasy novels, The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, and The Mask of the Sorcerer, plus about 300 short stories which have appeared in many anthologies and magazines. His most recent collection is Awaiting Strange Gods from Fedogan & Bremer. Others include Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out, Transients, Nightscapes, The Emperor of the Ancient Word, etc. He is also a critic, essayist, the author of books about H.P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, and a former editor of Weird Tales magazine. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award four times and won it once.
FEEL THE NOISE
Lisa Morton
EDITOR’S NOTES: As dreadful a condition as this next story relates, it’s based on medical legitimacy, and something that in one form or another affects about 4.4% of the human population, although not necessarily considered adverse to those afflicted. Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which two or more of the senses are united, so that the stimulation of one sense leads to automatic experience in another: Auditory-tactile synesthesia causes sounds to produce sensations of touch; lexical-gustatory synesthesia causes words to have taste; smell-color synesthesia brings colors to scents. Other anomalies cause colors to be felt, tastes to have sounds, and numbers to be flavorful.
In the following, Private Jackson Howard unfortunately suffers from a jumble of them all.
The immensely talented author and screenwriter Lisa Morton brings us into the world of Scrambleheads, where nothing is sensed as it should be, and even communication is an exercise in neurosis. Lisa has written across the genre’s board from gore to ghosts to mystery to nonfiction, though nothing may be more frightening than her sketch of experiencing this affliction’s symptoms in the worst way, and the magnitude of its associated confusion, when Pvt. Jackson wakes from injury to discover he can Feel the Noise.
