The Pan Book of Horror Stories

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Why do we like reading about torture, sadistic monsters, cruel people? Why do we like frightening ourselves by reading about events which we would hope never to see, let alone participate in? Is it not the memorable and age-long custom that we like ‘being taken out of ourselves’? And is there not a slight feeling of smugness, that while sitting in our (we hope) comfortable armchairs we can safely read of the ingenious and terrifying things men do to men?

Despite the so-called advance of civilization, we have witnessed wars, revolutions and crimes that are often more terrifying than fiction; as witness C. S. Forester’s story.

In short, truth is stranger than fiction. Even so, we feel that the stories in this book are such that if your nerves are not of the strongest, then it is wise to read them in daylight lest you should suffer nightmares, for these authors know their craft, and they have not hesitated to expound it with little thought of sparing you from the horrifying details.

H. Van Thal

JUGGED HARE Joan Aiken

“You look sumptuous.” He said it with dispassionate admiration, and she nodded, lazily agreeing. On the bleakest winter day, with her great ramparts of corn-coloured hair and magnificent petal skin, she could seem to any man like an evocation of summer; she was an orchard in bloom, with promise of fruit, a wheatsheaf, an armful of lilies. . . .

“You’ve established yourself very handsomely; were you expecting me?”

“You? No. Why should I? I just like to be comfortable. Nobody comes here, you should know that. Henry has quarrelled with them all. And you had better not stay here gossiping; he is somewhere about shooting, and he’s been getting so jealous and queer lately that it makes me nervous.”

Her provocative smile, however, belied the words, and Desmond Colne continued to linger and eye her appreciatively.

She had slung her metal-and-silk hammock beside the towering hedge of guelder rose and Queen Anne’s Lace, which supplied her with a frothing background of white blossom. Against it she idly swung, one ankle dangling, the month’s epitome, while June arched overhead.

“What’s this, crochet?”

“Tatting,” she corrected, taking the spider webbing from him and beginning to flick the shuttle in and out.

“What for?”

“Lace scarves, frills for petticoats. . . .”

“Frills!” he said, and, suddenly chuckling, “What are those great shiny sweets, honey humbugs? No, satin cushions. That’s what you remind me of, a satin cushion. Gorgeous and golden and curving and brittle and hard.”

She was delighted. “No one’s ever compared me to a honey humbug before. Doesn’t it sound like the last line of a poem?

They were still laughing when something flew between them with a savage whip and whine of unexpected sound. It anchored itself dithering in the ground beside her hammock.

Colne jumped back with a sharp exclamation.

“You see what I mean,” said Sarah flatly, though the shock had driven all the blood from her face. “One of his little accidental-on-purpose games.”

She glanced with revulsion at the thing beside her—a three-foot arrow, which had pinned her cloudy tangle of tatting to the grass.

“But, good god, the man’s not safe, he might have hit us. . . .”

“Oh, heavens no. Henry’s a marvellous shot. If he’d wanted to hit either of us, believe you me, he would have. This is just a gentle hint that you’ve come here to sell him machinery, not gossip with me. Better get on with it.” She pulled the arrow out with a jerk as Henry Hargreaves came towards them, unstringing his bow. “Here,” she called, “take your blasted thing; you’ve ruined my afternoon’s work.”

“So sorry, my dear. The wind must have caught it. But look at my afternoon’s work. Tender eating, eh?” He dangled proudly at them the long, limp, gingery body of a hare, its ears dabbled with blood.

Sarah turned her eyes away.

“I don’t know how you can,” she said. “One’s just about able to endure the thought of shooting them with a gun, but with an arrow—ugh!”

“You don’t understand it at all,” Henry said shrilly. His eyes were shining. “I only wish we had some deer—there’d be twice the satisfaction in shooting something so big. You could really choose your mark—the neck, the flank, the eye. As it is, you have to shoot at anything you see.”

“Oh, shut up,” Sarah said angrily.

“Where did you bag the hare?” Desmond asked in polite diversion.

“In what we call the hidden road. When they cut the new highway they left the old lane that goes through my woods. No one uses it now, it’s nearly grown over, and it makes an excellent game run. Well”—he flipped the hare’s ears dismissingly—“got the specifications with you, Colne?”

“In my car,” Desmond said. The two men turned across the grass towards the car, which stood beside the house. Sarah, with a flash of petticoats marked by Desmond out of the corner of his eye, swung herself out of the hammock, gathered up her tatting, and followed them.

“Is this your car?” she said, yawning, as Henry studied the papers Colne gave him. “It’s very pretty, but what a melodramatic number, HEL 999. Is that help, murder, or the Mark of the Beast?”

“Neither, I trust.” He was not good at this fooling with Henry’s eye upon them.

“I think it’s ominous.” She yawned again. “A good journey to you, anyway. Didn’t you say you were driving up north tonight? And Henry’s running down to Aylmouth to catch the ten o’clock tide for his yacht race; what busy, purposeful lives men lead.”

Her husband shot her a narrow glance. He was a thin, hot-eyed man, with crusted lips and hands that trembled continuously and nervously, except when he was holding a bow or a tiller; then they calmed and steadied.

“And what will you do with yourself, my dear?” he inquired.

“I shall have a delicious, solitary evening. I shall go to bed early and curl up with a box of chocolates and several thrillers, and then I probably shan’t read a word. I shall go to sleep thinking of you energetic people speeding through the night, and how much more I am enjoying myself than either of you.”

And it was true, too, Desmond thought in exasperation. He could not ever convince himself that when he was out of her sight she spared him a single thought, or that, if she did, he was regarded as anything more than a pleasant garnish to a comfortable existence.

“Goodbye, Mr . . . Colne,” Sarah said, indolently moving towards the house. “Supper when you want it, Henry.”

“You’ll let me know, then, as soon as these are available,” Henry said to Desmond, tapping the papers.

He watched the car go, following it with his eyes until it was out of sight, like a suspicious watchdog who has as yet no proved grounds of enmity. Then he walked indoors, staring at the ground as if he hoped to see spoor on it.

“I’ve put up your sailing food in the canvas bag,” Sarah called. “It’s all ready for you.”

After Henry had driven off to catch his ten o’clock tide, Sarah fulfilled her programme to the letter, dozing over the thrillers and the chocolates until she smiled and roused herself and went to bed. She switched off all the lights and listened for a moment to the trees; the wind was rising. Henry will have to reef right down, she thought, and felt in imagination the rasp of wet, stiff rope on her fingers. Then, dismissing both men from her mind, she went to sleep.

She was roused by the cold touch of lips on her arm: lips that had come fresh from exposure to the wind outside.

“Hullo,” she said, half waking. “Oh, it’s you; how very pleasant.”

“Weren’t you expecting me?”

“I had no idea; I thought you might have been put off by Henry’s arrow.”

“But he’s well away by now, surely? Rocked on the deep. Rocked is the word, I may say; he’ll be lucky if he finishes without some broken spars. Listen to it.”

She lifted her head from the pillow and listened to the wind. Desmond was moving quietly about the room. He was a big man, with intent, staring, sardonic eyes, which were often so preoccupied, watching faces for revelations of hidden motives, that they missed the obvious. Sarah was a perpetual enigma to him because she was so simple.

“Wouldn’t it be curious if Henry were to drown?”

“Most curious. Should you be pleased? I suppose he’d leave you quite well off?”

“It would be a relief,” she said reflectively. “He really has been most trying lately, snarling like a savage dog if I so much as pass the time of day with any other man; he was quite vile about a couple of books he found that Eric Ames lent me.”

“It’s lucky I’m not in the habit of lending you books,” said Desmond, chuckling. He kissed her ear and picked up a handful of the honey-coloured hair. “But why does Ames lend you books, anyway? Haven’t you enough to read here?”

“How absurd you are. Don’t say you’re starting to get jealous, too?” She turned to him, leisurely smiling, unambiguous as the sun on a field of barley.

“Of course not,” he said, stifling the thought. “Look, I brought a bottle of Beaune. Shall I put it down near the fire?”

“Marvellous; but pour me a glass first. Just listen to that wind. Heaven help poor sailormen on a night like this.” She raised her glass to him. It winked red in the firelight.

A couple of hours later Desmond looked at his watch.

“Better be off,” he said.

“Do you have to?”

“I really am going up north. Have to be in Stockport by eleven tomorrow morning.”

“How long shall you be gone?”

“A month, two months,” he said, picking up the empty bottle, tilting it against the light, and tossing it into the wastepaper basket.

“I shall be bored.”

“Still, if Henry’s acting suspicious and odd, it’s probably quite a good thing. He’ll have simmered down when I come back.”

She made no reply, but lay idly watching him as he knotted his tie. “Where did you leave the car? You’re going to get wet,” she remarked, as a gust of rain slapped the window.

“Out in your hidden lane. Not far to run. It makes a grand hiding place. Well——”

“Well.”

He raised his eyebrows, briefly kissed her goodbye.

When he was gone, Sarah rolled over in drowsy luxury and stretched, thinking, ‘How delicious to have the bed to oneself from time to time.’

She had nearly dropped off to sleep again when she was woken by a splitting, tearing crash, followed a few seconds later by another, equally loud. Then silence, except for the hushing of the wind.

Sarah looked at her watch. The tiny green gleam showed three o’clock.

‘If this was a thriller,’ she thought sleepily, ‘it would be important to remember the time. If this was a thriller I’d seize my torch and revolver and dash out to investigate. . . .’

A tidal yawn engulfed her, she slid an arm beneath the pillow into her accustomed position, and slept.

Next morning, in the glimmering watery light of the dying gale, Henry came home. He was tired, unshaven, and hollow-eyed; his mouth was framed by two deep grooves like geological faults.

“Weather conditions hopeless,” he told Sarah. “The race was scratched. Just as well for me. Mainsail split while we were still in harbour. Hell of a mess.”

“It did blow,” Sarah said placidly. She glanced out at the lawn, covered with broken wreckage of trees. “I wondered about you.”

His eyes nickered at her, and the twitch at the corner of his mouth that might have been a smile or just a muscular spasm jerked twice. He strolled out into the porch, picked up his bow and quiver, and said tonelessly, “I’m going through the wood. Always some injured birds after a gale like that.”

She nodded without reply and twirled her filament of tatting. If the thought of possible tyre marks came to her, she ignored it. He watched her inimically for a moment or two: fresh, graceful, composed, she sat in the window seat among her gossamer artefacts. Her nimble wrists and smooth, capable forearms emerged from the drooping Restoration sleeves of a corded silk housecoat, but there was nothing provocative about her today; she was as self-contained and aloof as a cat embarking on its morning toilet.

He shrugged and went out into the wet garden.

The grass was bent and silvered; heavy drop-laden spiderwebs swung and dangled from bush to bush. In the hidden road the scent of broken, wet greenery was strong and steamy.

A hundred yards along the overgrown lane a brighter flash caught his eye among the wet leaves and he nodded sourly to himself in acknowledgment of his unexpressed suspicions: Colne’s car stood there. Two huge elm boughs had dropped across it, pinning it as securely as a beetle to an entomologist’s board.

“HEL 999,” Henry said aloud, still with his sour smile. “The Mark of the Beast, eh?” He walked up to the car, wondering what excuse Colne would offer for its presence, and then his smile grew fractionally wider as he saw that the owner was still inside. He must have made an attempt to get out when the first bough fell, and had been caught half in and half out. It would not have been comfortable. He must have lost a considerable amount of blood; quite a pool of it had dripped into the leaf-filled rut below the car. Looking at him attentively, Henry saw that he was not yet dead, though unconscious; perhaps it was even possible that he could be saved.

“Still, we won’t bother about that,” Henry murmured; he often talked to himself when he was in the woods. “No one else ever comes this way; we’ll just leave him to cool, eh?”

His eye caught a chattering grey squirrel among the branches, and he drew out an arrow but changed his mind. He had wished for larger game, and now he was presented with it. He thought of Sarah, lolling so composedly, her wrists flashing among the lace; thought of her with a hunter’s voluptuous possessiveness. He was quite prepared to wait; he would give her six months, perhaps a year even, until Colne’s tragic accident was out of people’s minds and would not be connected. Then—an accident in the garden, a freak of wind as she swung in her hammock, a horrible mischance for which, knowing Henry to be a devoted and uxorious husband, no one could have anything but the deepest sympathy.

He swallowed deeply, savouring this prospect, took, with keen enjoyment, a last look at poor Colne who had met such unexpected retribution, and then turned back towards the house, mentally making an inventory of all his arrows and trying to decide which was the best for his purpose. The ironwood, perhaps; or the teak; or the rowan he had made himself, fitting on it for fun a flint arrowhead he had picked up in the park.

And then at last, slowly and with infinite satisfaction, he began pondering the choice that was to take him through so many months of long-drawn-out pleasure, the choice of which mark to aim at: the neck, the heart, or the eye?

“Lunch, Henry,” Sarah called through the porch window. “Jugged hare.”