Supernatural Horror Short Stories Read online

  This is a FLAME TREE Book

  Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells

  Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck

  Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker

  Thanks to Will Rough

  Publisher’s Note: Due to the historical nature of the classic text, we’re aware that there may be some language used which has the potential to cause offence to the modern reader. However, wishing overall to preserve the integrity of the text, rather than imposing contemporary sensibilities, we have left it unaltered.

  FLAME TREE PUBLISHING

  6 Melbray Mews, Fulham, London SW6 3NS, United Kingdom

  www.flametreepublishing.com

  First published 2017

  Copyright © 2017 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd

  Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78664-182-3

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78755-242-5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The cover image is created by Flame Tree Studio, based on artwork by Slava Gerj and Gabor Ruszkai.

  A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library.

  Introducing our new fiction list:

  FLAME TREE PRESS | FICTION WITHOUT FRONTIERS

  Award-Winning Authors & Original Voices

  Horror, Crime, Science Fiction & Fantasy

  www.flametreepress.com

  Contents

  Foreword by Roger Luckhurst

  Publisher’s Note

  Caterpillars

  E.F. Benson

  The Boarded Window

  Ambrose Bierce

  John Bartine’s Watch

  Ambrose Bierce

  Bones of the Dead

  Daniele Bonfanti

  In the Court of the Dragon

  Robert W. Chambers

  Crossroads

  Carolyn Charron

  The Mourning Woman

  E.E.W. Christman

  The Fifth Gable

  Kay Chronister

  The Dream Woman

  Wilkie Collins

  The Upper Berth

  F. Marion Crawford

  For the Blood is the Life

  F. Marion Crawford

  Lot No. 249

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  She’s Gone

  Morgan Elektra

  The Spider

  Hanns Heinz Ewers

  Carmilla

  J. Sheridan Le Fanu

  The Southwest Chamber

  Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

  The Doom of the Griffiths

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Swim At Your Own Risk

  Matthew Gorman

  Edward Randolph’s Portrait

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  The Voice in the Night

  William Hope Hodgson

  Worms of the Earth

  Robert E. Howard

  The Mezzotint

  M.R. James

  Casting the Runes

  M.R. James

  Merry-Go-Round, Never Broke Down

  Jason L. Kawa

  The Murmur of Its Name

  Stephen Kotowych

  The Shunned House

  H.P. Lovecraft

  An Idle Dream, Quite Gone Now

  G.L. McDorman

  The Pool of the Stone God

  A. Merritt

  This Time, Forever

  Michelle Muenzler

  The Power of Darkness

  Edith Nesbit

  The Wondersmith

  Fitz-James O’Brien

  William Wilson

  Edgar Allan Poe

  The Vampyre

  John Polidori

  Tracks in the Snow

  Cody Schroeder

  John Johnson

  Oliver Smith

  Magdala Amygdala

  Lucy A. Snyder

  My Brother Tom

  Mariah Southworth

  The Judge’s House

  Bram Stoker

  The Bride

  Angela Sylvaine

  The Floating Girls: A Documentary

  Damien Angelica Walters

  The Final One Percent

  Desmond Warzel

  The Flowering of the Strange Orchid

  H.G. Wells

  The Red Room

  H.G. Wells

  Midnight Snack

  Michaël Wertenberg

  The House of the Nightmare

  Edward Lucas White

  Manipulation

  Trisha J. Wooldridge

  Biographies & Sources

  Foreword: Supernatural Horror Short Stories

  This collection of classic tales stretches all the way from John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819) to H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shunned House’ (1937). Polidori’s story was the Romantic tale that first introduced the vampire as an aristocratic libertine to literature – Lord Ruthven is clearly the model for Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. Polidori had worked as Lord Byron’s doctor, before being fired for cramping his boss’s style. When ‘The Vampyre’ was first published anonymously in London it was read as a sensational confession of Byron’s secret life.

  The most recent of the classic fiction was a pulp horror by Lovecraft, published in the American magazine Weird Tales just before the Second World War. It is written in Lovecraft’s baroque style under completely different conditions from Polidori’s shocker: this is sensational horror fiction written for a mass audience that read the ‘shudder pulps’ that poured off the New York presses of the 1930s in their hundreds of thousands. That culture of reading was all to disappear with the onset of war in 1939.

  These tales bookend a remarkable century, often considered the golden age of the ghost story. It was an era in which the religious framework of the old Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe and her myriad followers was replaced by something much more uncertain, anxious, and riven with doubt. That was mainly the fault of scientists such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, pioneers of geology and biology, whose theories challenged the Biblical account of the creation of the world. Darwin, uncertain himself about the implications of his theory of natural selection, famously held off publishing The Origin of Species for as long as he could. After that, the authority of the sciences steadily grew while religious believers felt ever more hemmed in with doubt. This transition produced a lot of strange symptoms: new religions, a revival of the occult, and respectable intellectuals chasing empirical proof of spirits at the séance table.

  Ghost stories and horror tales are also symptoms of this era. Ghosts thrive on hesitations: we know they are dubious stories from outdated, superstitious days. Yet, as Sigmund Freud once observed, a simple creak of a door or a bump in the night can throw the modern cynic back into childhood, paralysed with fear. Ghost stories are compromise formations, fictions that let us entertain the fugitive possibility that the supernatural may still be hiding in the natural.

  The authors in this collection represent the range of beliefs. E.F. Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury no less, yet wrote tales of particularly nasty hauntings. Ar
thur Conan Doyle trained first as a medic but ended his life as the leading advocate of Spiritualism. H.G. Wells was one of the first to be formally trained to teach biology in the 1880s and was (mostly) an atheist, although never as vitriolic in the view of a cruel and indifferent universe as the pitiless Lovecraft. There are many ways of coming to horror, it seems.

  Edgar Allan Poe influentially suggested that the best tales were read in one sitting, to achieve a full ‘unity of impression.’ This collection is perfectly designed just for that: bite-sized stories perfect for producing shivers of unease. Do enjoy, but maybe check behind the curtain.

  Roger Luckhurst

  Publisher’s Note

  This latest title in our deluxe Gothic Fantasy short story anthologies crawls with the dark fingers of terror, the chilling sensation of another presence sitting alongside you while you read the tales of horror laid out before you. From mysterious deaths to cursed objects, haunted houses and terrifying creatures – the array of masterfully penned classic fiction on offer in Supernatural Horror Short Stories will make you shudder to your very soul. We’ve included beloved works such as John Polidori’s The Vampyre and M.R. James’s ‘Casting the Runes’ alongside lesser-seen but no less terrifying works like Hanns Heinz Ewers’ ‘The Spider’.

  Every year the response to our call for submissions seems to grow and grow, giving us a rich universe of stories to choose from, but making our job all the more difficult in narrowing down the final selection. We’ve loved delving into so many dark and haunted spaces, and ultimately chose a selection of stories we hope sit alongside each other and with the classic selection, to provide a fantastic Supernatural Horror book for all to enjoy.

  Caterpillars

  E.F. Benson

  I saw a month or two ago in an Italian paper that the Villa Cascana, in which I once stayed, had been pulled down, and that a manufactory of some sort was in process of erection on its site.

  There is therefore no longer any reason for refraining from writing of those things which I myself saw (or imagined I saw) in a certain room and on a certain landing of the villa in question, nor from mentioning the circumstances which followed, which may or may not (according to the opinion of the reader) throw some light on or be somehow connected with this experience.

  The Villa Cascana was in all ways but one a perfectly delightful house, yet, if it were standing now, nothing in the world – I use the phrase in its literal sense – would induce me to set foot in it again, for I believe it to have been haunted in a very terrible and practical manner.

  Most ghosts, when all is said and done, do not do much harm; they may perhaps terrify, but the person whom they visit usually gets over their visitation. They may on the other hand be entirely friendly and beneficent. But the appearances in the Villa Cascana were not beneficent, and had they made their ‘visit’ in a very slightly different manner, I do not suppose I should have got over it any more than Arthur Inglis did.

  The house stood on an ilex-clad hill not far from Sestri di Levante on the Italian Riviera, looking out over the iridescent blues of that enchanted sea, while behind it rose the pale green chestnut woods that climb up the hillsides till they give place to the pines that, black in contrast with them, crown the slopes. All round it the garden in the luxuriance of mid-spring bloomed and was fragrant, and the scent of magnolia and rose, borne on the salt freshness of the winds from the sea, flowed like a stream through the cool vaulted rooms.

  On the ground floor a broad pillared loggia ran round three sides of the house, the top of which formed a balcony for certain rooms of the first floor. The main staircase, broad and of grey marble steps, led up from the hall to the landing outside these rooms, which were three in number, namely, two big sitting-rooms and a bedroom arranged en suite. The latter was unoccupied, the sitting-rooms were in use. From these the main staircase was continued to the second floor, where were situated certain bedrooms, one of which I occupied, while from the other side of the first-floor landing some half-dozen steps led to another suite of rooms, where, at the time I am speaking of, Arthur Inglis, the artist, had his bedroom and studio. Thus the landing outside my bedroom at the top of the house commanded both the landing of the first floor and also the steps that led to Inglis’ rooms. Jim Stanley and his wife, finally (whose guest I was), occupied rooms in another wing of the house, where also were the servants’ quarters.

  I arrived just in time for lunch on a brilliant noon of mid-May. The garden was shouting with colour and fragrance, and not less delightful after my broiling walk up from the marina, should have been the coming from the reverberating heat and blaze of the day into the marble coolness of the villa. Only (the reader has my bare word for this, and nothing more), the moment I set foot in the house I felt that something was wrong. This feeling, I may say, was quite vague, though very strong, and I remember that when I saw letters waiting for me on the table in the hall I felt certain that the explanation was here: I was convinced that there was bad news of some sort for me. Yet when I opened them I found no such explanation of my premonition: my correspondents all reeked of prosperity. Yet this clear miscarriage of a presentiment did not dissipate my uneasiness. In that cool fragrant house there was something wrong.

  I am at pains to mention this because to the general view it may explain that though I am as a rule so excellent a sleeper that the extinction of my light on getting into bed is apparently contemporaneous with being called on the following morning, I slept very badly on my first night in the Villa Cascana. It may also explain the fact that when I did sleep (if it was indeed in sleep that I saw what I thought I saw) I dreamed in a very vivid and original manner, original, that is to say, in the sense that something that, as far as I knew, had never previously entered into my consciousness, usurped it then. But since, in addition to this evil premonition, certain words and events occurring during the rest of the day might have suggested something of what I thought happened that night, it will be well to relate them.

  After lunch, then, I went round the house with Mrs. Stanley, and during our tour she referred, it is true, to the unoccupied bedroom on the first floor, which opened out of the room where we had lunched.

  “We left that unoccupied,” she said, “because Jim and I have a charming bedroom and dressing-room, as you saw, in the wing, and if we used it ourselves we should have to turn the dining-room into a dressing-room and have our meals downstairs. As it is, however, we have our little flat there, Arthur Inglis has his little flat in the other passage; and I remembered (aren’t I extraordinary?) that you once said that the higher up you were in a house the better you were pleased. So I put you at the top of the house, instead of giving you that room.”

  It is true, that a doubt, vague as my uneasy premonition, crossed my mind at this. I did not see why Mrs. Stanley should have explained all this, if there had not been more to explain. I allow, therefore, that the thought that there was something to explain about the unoccupied bedroom was momentarily present to my mind.

  The second thing that may have borne on my dream was this.

  At dinner the conversation turned for a moment on ghosts. Inglis, with the certainty of conviction, expressed his belief that anybody who could possibly believe in the existence of supernatural phenomena was unworthy of the name of an ass. The subject instantly dropped. As far as I can recollect, nothing else occurred or was said that could bear on what follows.

  We all went to bed rather early, and personally I yawned my way upstairs, feeling hideously sleepy. My room was rather hot, and I threw all the windows wide, and from without poured in the white light of the moon, and the love-song of many nightingales. I undressed quickly, and got into bed, but though I had felt so sleepy before, I now felt extremely wide-awake. But I was quite content to be awake: I did not toss or turn, I felt perfectly happy listening to the song and seeing the light. Then, it is possible, I may have gone to sleep, and what follows may have been a dream. I thought,
anyhow, that after a time the nightingales ceased singing and the moon sank. I thought also that if, for some unexplained reason, I was going to lie awake all night, I might as well read, and I remembered that I had left a book in which I was interested in the dining-room on the first floor. So I got out of bed, lit a candle, and went downstairs. I went into the room, saw on a side-table the book I had come to look for, and then, simultaneously, saw that the door into the unoccupied bedroom was open. A curious grey light, not of dawn nor of moonshine, came out of it, and I looked in. The bed stood just opposite the door, a big four-poster, hung with tapestry at the head. Then I saw that the greyish light of the bedroom came from the bed, or rather from what was on the bed. For it was covered with great caterpillars, a foot or more in length, which crawled over it. They were faintly luminous, and it was the light from them that showed me the room. Instead of the sucker-feet of ordinary caterpillars they had rows of pincers like crabs, and they moved by grasping what they lay on with their pincers, and then sliding their bodies forward. In colour these dreadful insects were yellowish-grey, and they were covered with irregular lumps and swellings. There must have been hundreds of them, for they formed a sort of writhing, crawling pyramid on the bed. Occasionally one fell off on to the floor, with a soft fleshy thud, and though the floor was of hard concrete, it yielded to the pincerfeet as if it had been putty, and, crawling back, the caterpillar would mount on to the bed again, to rejoin its fearful companions. They appeared to have no faces, so to speak, but at one end of them there was a mouth that opened sideways in respiration.

  Then, as I looked, it seemed to me as if they all suddenly became conscious of my presence.

  All the mouths, at any rate, were turned in my direction, and next moment they began dropping off the bed with those soft fleshy thuds on to the floor, and wriggling towards me. For one second a paralysis as of a dream was on me, but the next I was running upstairs again to my room, and I remember feeling the cold of the marble steps on my bare feet. I rushed into my bedroom, and slammed the door behind me, and then – I was certainly wide-awake now – I found myself standing by my bed with the sweat of terror pouring from me. The noise of the banged door still rang in my ears. But, as would have been more usual, if this had been mere nightmare, the terror that had been mine when I saw those foul beasts crawling about the bed or dropping softly on to the floor did not cease then. Awake, now, if dreaming before, I did not at all recover from the horror of dream: it did not seem to me that I had dreamed. And until dawn, I sat or stood, not daring to lie down, thinking that every rustle or movement that I heard was the approach of the caterpillars. To them and the claws that bit into the cement the wood of the door was child’s play: steel would not keep them out.