The 14th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories

STARVATION DIET

By Ken Burke

Two men, Doc and the rather fleshy Andrew, are the only survivors from a shipwreck, and find themselves cast up on a tiny desert island.

The injured Andrew had just begun to believe "the only thing which could save them now was a miracle", when the Doc informs him of a crate of tinned soup and pork rashers which has washed up along the beach.

Oh, and by the way Andrew, your injured arm needs to come off.

I really have read too many of these stories now, I am sure.  For, just with the title and a couple phrases on the first page: 

"he used to be a capable man once"

and

"his injured leg - the Doc later told him it was broken" 

I could predict pretty much the route this one was travelling, right down to the fanciful reason for the sudden arrival of a food supply.

The only aspect I failed to divine was the sort of happy-ish ending.  I had thought Andrew may wake from his drug induced sleep to find Doc had deliberately allowed the passing ship to pass on by, so he could finish what he had started unhindered.

So - kudos to Mr. Burke for wrong-footing me at the death, so to speak.

THANATOS PALACE HOTEL

By Andre Maurois

Investment banker Jean Monnier has been more than a touch reckless with his investment choices.  And a concurrent financial crisis has cost him his job, his wife and his joie de vivre.

He receives a letter from the Thanatos Palace Hotel, which offers to take care of all his suicide requirements.  So the unhappy Jean checks in to check out, as it were.

But, on his first evening, he is introduced to the beautiful Mrs. Kirby-Shaw, and begins to have second thoughts.

A true indicator of a well-written short story, I feel, is when one turns a page to be disappointed to see the end of the yarn in sight.

Such it was with this one, for the author had drawn up such a situation ripe with all manner of intriguing possibilities, and populated it with characters about whom I wished to know so much more.

But then again, "Leave 'em wanting more" is another entertainment adage.

BLIND MAN'S BUFF

By H. R. Wakefield

Mr. Cort is out and about house hunting, and has identified a manor house available for the bargain price of just £7000 (it is 1929).  False directions given to him by a mischievous local means he does not arrive at the property until after dark.  Cort does not much like the look of place, but decides to give it the once over all the same.  

Upon entering the property, the door closes behind him leaving the large hallway in complete darkness.  Never mind, thinks Mr. Cort, I will just get my matches from the car and strike a light.  

But where on earth has the door gone?

A beautifully and economically written short story this one, as the author dextrously invites the reader to share in poor Cort's increasing unease and then panic, as he discovers he cannot get back out of the house.

There is no back story to who or what is preventing him from leaving, other than one of the locals cryptically stating at the subsequent inquest into Mr. Cort's demise, "none of us chaps goes to manor after sundown".

Not that this omission from the narrative detracts in any way from the power of this short, sharp shocker.

 

POLISH THE LID

By Terry Tapp

Boorish Earnest Perryman has managed to wangle his sensitive son Ian his first employment.....with a firm of undertakers.  Each evening Ian is badgered by his dad for gory details of what the job entails.

One evening, Ian tells him.  Dad doesn't ask again.

There is sufficient anti-funeral industry invective here to make me think the author was perhaps venting his spleen a touch, following a bad experience.  But that is not enough to save this from being a rather dull entry.

Ian is likable enough young chap - even if he is prone to unrealistic swings from cowed weediness to assertive aggression in his dealings with his dad.  A dad who is painted as just a bit too much of a stereotypical imagination-free pipe 'n' slippers man.

We are never quite sure, at the end of the tale, if the grosser details of the cremation gone awry actually occurred.  Or if Ian made them up just to shut his dad up.

In either case the outcome was the same.

LOT No. 249

By Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle

Abercrombie Smith occupies the top floor of an undergraduate residence at Oxford college.  On the floor below lives the rather unpleasant character Edward Bellingham, who appears to share his rooms with some unknown person, with whom he whispers away with after midnight, and who can be heard padding about when the rooms are supposedly empty.  

Rather more disconcertingly, it has recently become the case that anyone who has fallen out with, or has in someway irked, Bellingham appear to be being targeted.  One being half-throttled one evening, with another tossed headlong into the local river.

Coincidence, surely.

Whilst Stoker's Dracula helped popularise the notion of The vampire, I rather doubt Lot No. 249 would have done the same with mummies.  For this one is vastly inferior fare.

Incidentally, his was not the first yarn to have utilised the concept of a re-animated mummy; that honour generally regarded as probably going to Jane Webb's 1827 novel The Mummy!

It is an entertaining enough (if overlong) read, I suppose.  Even if, I am sure, few of us today would be able to relate to the lives led by the privileged toffs who inhabit the narrative.  

Who knows what most modern, or indeed most 1800s, readers would make of: 

"I row Mullins for the Vice-Chancellor's pot on Wednesday week", 

or (when describing a friend on the cricket pitch):

"Buddicombe is..... inclining to fast, with a work from leg.  Comes with the arm about three inches or so".

Even more anachronistically, we have another character, who knows the secret of Bellingham's "friend", and aware of the mischief it has been up to.  But feels he cannot properly warn Abercrombie Smith why his life is in real danger, because he had given Bellingham "a very solemn promise" that he would not.

But the real flaw to the plot, is the flacid denouement in which Abercrombie Smith simply strolls into Bellingham's rooms, cuts the mummy into bits and tosses it onto the fire, along with the parchment on which is written (we assume) the incantation used to animate it.

No drama, no peril, no suspense.  Just a neat matter-of-fact tidying-up job.

Not unlike the flabby ending to Dracula, when I think about it.

SO TYPICAL OF ELEANOR

By Roger Clarke

Little Octavius and his irritating and controlling elder sister Eleanor go for a walk to the nearby Yafford water mill.  But only Octavius returns.

Although Eleanor does come home a week later.

A run-of-the-mill (pun intended) ghost story this one, with little to distinguish it from probably dozens or so similar ones I have read over the years.

In fact, the most intriguing aspect to the story is the fact there actually exists a Yafford water mill, on the Isle of Wight.  It is now a private residence and, upon discovering this fact, I wondered if the current inhabitants knew their home was once the scene of a murder.  Albeit a fictional one.

THE BIRD

By Thomas Burke

Captain Chudder of the SS Peacock was generally regarded as a "normal, kindly fellow".  Until, that was, he acquired a large white parrot on a stop in the Solomon Islands.  A parrot with remarkable mimicry skills.  

From this point on Chudder was a changed man; bad tempered and cruel.  His crew believing that the bird was, in some way, influencing their captain for the worse.

On a voyage back from China to London, the captain brings on board a young Chinese boy whom he mistreats dreadfully on the journey.  Upon arrival back in London, Chudder disembarks looking forward to a few days' general sailor-in-port debauchery.  

But he is unaware his unaware is footsteps are being dogged by a young Chinaman with a grudge.

The Bird is one of a collection of short stories written by the author, published as Limehouse Nights in 1916.  The racist terminology would not pass muster in these more enlightened times perhaps, but it is an entertaining read nonetheless.  Even if few readers will not have worked out the gruesome denouement before it is finally revealed.

Quite what the poor Chinese boy suffered at the hands of the captain during the long voyage is not detailed, the reader being chastely informed "the bestialities of Captain Chudder could not be told in words".  

HEADLAMPS

By Tony Richards

On a remote mountain in north Colorado resides Old Harry.  He has lived there feral these past 35 years, ever since he was involved in a vehicle collision which left him hideously disfigured.

He takes out his rage on the world in general by forcing unsuspecting travellers off the mountain track with his truck, and into the wooded chasm below.

Fourteen drivers has he edged to their deaths in this manner.  And it looks as if number fifteen has just shown up, in the shape of an MG driver who has taken a wrong turning.

With pretty much all of the entries to these collections, the reader has to be prepared to indulge in at least a modicum of belief suspension.  But this one does ask a lot of the reader.

For here we have a chap, severely burned in an accident, who has lived for 35 years in the woods surviving off berries and nuts and little critters.  He has also succeeded in maintaining a large truck if not quite road-worthy, then usable, for the same length of time, with just a "tool kit, hand-crank generator, spare battery and three jerrycans of extra fuel."

Not to mention that fact he has murdered over a dozen individuals over the piece, without the local police becoming anything more than mildly interested.

But despite all this, the yarn holds the reader's attention throughout.

Much of this is a result of the split narrative approach taken by the author.  For we have the Old Harry Vs The MG Driver business going  - reminiscent of John Carpenter's Duel, interspersed with a couple of villagers providing us with all the expositional dialogue we need to fill in any blanks.

I was a touch puzzled by the last couple of of sentences, though.  Was Old Harry and his lorry somehow still on the go, and had he just driven off the mountain?  

Or was there some sort of automotive Ghost Riders in the Sky thing going on?

THE GHOUL

By Sir Hugh Clifford

We are in Malaya here, sometime during the British colonial period, and our narrator is boring his guests with his extensive knowledge of Malay superstitions.  

All except Middleton, who has a tale of his own to tell of an encounter with a pôlong; a spirit "which men bind to their service by raising them up from the corpses of babies that have been stillborn, the tips of whose tongues they bite off and swallow after the infant has been brought to life by magic agencies."

An enjoyable romp this one, as a pair of ill-matched Englishmen (Middleton and his annoying naturalist friend Juggins) venture into the heart of the Malay jungle encountering leeches by the thousand and a tribe of primitive Sâkai, before witnessing a decidedly unnerving post-mortem exhumation of a stillborn child. 

The author, Sir Hugh Clifford (1866-1941) was a career diplomat, who was British High Commissioner in Malaya for a period.  He wrote extensively on the country, generally sympathetically and empathetically to the native culture.  

But the evidence of this story would suggest he did not have much time for the indigenous Sâkai peoples.  He describing them here as having "only partially emerged from the animal", "jabbering like monkeys" and living in "dirty lairs.

THE BOOREES

Dorothy K. Haynes

The Boorees of the title are small imp-like creatures who live up chimneys, "squatting on sooty ledges, with their feet tucked in and their heads on their knees, half asleep".  They are a fairly benign bunch, who generally limit their actions to making a bit of a racket when the fire is lit during winter.

However, as the narrator is warned by her mother, they can be quite vindictive when annoyed.

When the narrator (now an adult, and working as a nanny) retells the Boorees story to her charge - a noisome little oik called Dennis - he is naturally sceptical.  But, nevertheless decides to see if he can burn the little chaps out.

Dorothy Haynes was a Scots writer, so I have to assume this yarn is set in Caledonia somewhere.  But as one who grew up in Scotland in a house with a coal fire, I have to say I had never heard of this particular piece of folklore.  

Perhaps Boorees didn't deign to inhabit council hooses?

AKIN TO LOVE

By Christianna Brand

The ghost of a long dead man, who had been a bit of a debauched hedonist in his day, appears to a young woman in the bedroom she is staying in as a guest.

He tells of his doom to spend eternity in this bedroom for his sins, only able to find release "through a woman’s forgiveness: a woman who could love enough to forgive."

The women cannot love him, but naively offers pity and her virginity instead.  Both of which are taken by the ghost.

The author's rather po-faced writing style and the unrealistic dialogue make this a difficult tale to warm to.  Indeed, the whole narrative feels like a metaphor for something I am not smart enough to figure out.  Perhaps a crooked retelling of the Faust fable?  Indeed the ghost himself states at one point "It is like the child’s fairy story—isn’t it?"

The ease with which the ghost is able to persuade the young woman to part with her underwear is particularly unrealistic, and perhaps suggests at least of modicum of desperate desire on her part.

THE VIGIL

By Robert Haining

"Come and look at the mirror of our love. It is ours to share."  That's Anna, two months wed to Paul and still very loved-up, indicating the woodland pool on their estate.  

Paul isn't quite as contented.  They've yet to consummate the marriage - Anna keeps putting him off - and the fact that her father bought the house and provided butler and servants feeds his sense of failure.  As their relationship deteriorates in the face of his drinking and her frigidity, so the pool turns stagnant and revolting.  Anna packs her bags, Paul tries to restrain her, and, in the final exchange of hostilities, lashes out.

The rooks solemnly gather on the overhanging branches as Paul drags his wife's corpse to the pool.

I have to admit to not yet having read this story, and have shamelessly lifted the above precis from the excellent website Vault of Evil.

THE WITNESS

By Mary Danby

Middle-aged Sylvia Harrison is visiting her elderly Uncle Arthur, at his large esplanade house.  Having recently been made redundant herself, she decides to nudge the old chap towards the grave, so she can inherit the big house and convert it into an hotel.

But getting rid of Uncle Arthur's cat proves to be rather more challenging than dispatching the old boy himself.

More than a touch of the Lady Macbeths about Sylvia's demise here.  With her guilt-induced Damned Spots stretching beyond blood to sooty paw-prints and burn-holes in the brand new stair-carpet.

Tossing herself from a height, similarly mirrors Lady Macbeth's death in Orson Welles' film of Shakespeare's play.