The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

the pain in his legs and the part of him that even now was calling for his attention, was screeching its fear of this impossible situation.

She came closer still, her features resolving, streaks forming on her skin in a pattern of delicate brushstrokes. Her hair moved in clumps, strands matted together, painted together. Her arms were outstretched and suddenly Mandeville thought about her, about her pressing herself against the glass of the sun corridor, about her seeing the outside world at night and spending most of her time trapped under boards, locked inside the paint, alive and claustrophobic and alone except for creatures without mouths or intellects, just cocks made to love her.

How terrible must her life have been these last years, he suddenly thought, trapped here day in night out, with no one to look at her, no one to feast themselves upon her, how awful it must have been.

And what damage had it done to her?

Her face twisted into a snarl as she came, lips drawing back from teeth that seemed suddenly too large and too white and too hard, her arms stretching forward, the skin of her hands broken by paintbrush swirls that reminded Mandeville of the sucking pads of the octopuses and squid that served attendance upon her.

Sharks darted between her legs, and still she came and Mandeville saw the hate in her eyes, the desperation to hold him and own him, to take him from the outside and bring him in and keep him so that he, too, could look at her and worship her, and he turned and ran.

The two cats were waiting for him on the stairs between the foyer and first floor, brown and wooden yet terribly fluid, moving back and forth with a restless energy. Trapped between them and her, Mandeville stopped on the first floor and turned a full circle, looking for an escape route.

The bar was blocked to him; the third cat still stood in its entrance, back on its board but its mouth open in a rictus of teeth and ravenous appetite. He debated running back to the second floor, losing himself in the place where Gravette and Priest’s hold had been comprehensively removed, but the woman was already between him and it.

A vast octopus, stretching an impossible height from the floor, moved behind her, its black eyes gleaming, and around it circled the sharks and the smaller fish. She was smiling, possessive, absolute, still coming on, placid and inexorable.

That left only the sun deck.

Mandeville ran to it, crashing against the door and forcing the cheap lock in one stumbled fall of his body weight. One of the cats leaped at him, snagging its teeth into his leg, but its grip was weak and he managed to kick it off. The octopus came past the woman, spreading its arms in an effort to reach him but he ran, dodging past it and out onto the wooden apron of the deck.

He had time to wonder why, if they wanted to get out, the woman and her entourage didn’t simply come out here, and then he was at the concrete wall with its pictures that moved as he saw them, writhing and trying to grasp at him, and then he was over the wall and was airborne.

In the moment before he hit the ground, Mandeville suddenly realised: art, true art, has no urge to escape to the outside, it wants instead to bring the outside in, to make itself the centre of a world that it defines.

The last thing he saw as he fell past the sun corridor’s floor-length windows were the myriad images that the woman had left of herself across the inside of the glass, and he smiled.

Falling, colliding, escaping, these were human things and he was, at least, human and free to fall.

EVANGELINE WALTON They That Have Wings

EVANGELINE WALTON (1907–96) was the pseudonym used by Evangeline Wilna Ensley. Born to a Quaker family in Indianapolis, Indiana, she suffered from chronic respiratory illness as a child. Treated with silver nitrate tincture, her fair skin absorbed the pigment and turned blue-grey, which continued to darken as she aged.

She grew up reading the works of L. Frank Baum, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and James Stephens, and most of her fiction was written between the 1920s and the early 1950s.

Inspired by the Welsh Mabinogi, her first novel, The Virgin and the Swine was published in 1936, but it was not until it was reissued as The Island of the Mighty in 1970, as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, that the subsequent three books in the series — The Children of Lyr, The Song of Rhiannon and Prince of Annwn — saw print. All four novels were collected in an omnibus volume, The Mabinogian Tetralogy, in 2002.

Meanwhile, Witch House was published in 1945 as the initial title in the “Library of Arkham House Novels of Fantasy and Terror”, and her other novels include The Cross and the Sword and The Sword is Forged.

More recently, Centipede Press has published a new collection of the author’s work, Above Ker- Is and Other Stories, which includes four previously unpublished tales, and an expanded re-issue of her second novel, Witch House, which again contains bonus material.

During her lifetime, she was honoured with three Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards and two Locus Awards. She also received the World Fantasy Convention Award in 1985 and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1989.

At the time of her death, Walton left behind a number of unpublished novels, poems and a verse play. The author’s family has been working with Douglas A. Anderson in going through her papers, where they also discovered a handful of unpublished short stories. These include the tale that follows, which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Although the author had one story published in Weird Tales (“At the End of the Corridor” in the May 1950 issue), it appears from a letter to her agent, dated 8 May that same year, that “The Unique Magazine” rejected “They That Have Wings” for being “too gory”.

So, after more than six decades, it is my great pleasure to present this “lost” Weird Tales story of World War II by one of the genre’s most meticulous practitioners.

**

TWENTY-NINTH MAY: BERT Madden, Ronnie Lingard and I are in flight through the White Mountains. What will happen to us, God knows; we have become lost from the others, and there is no hope of succour. Nobody will come to look for us unless it is the Germans; nobody can come to look for us. We have known, ever since the at tempt to retake the Maleme airdrome failed, that Crete was lost.

We could go faster if it were not for Ronnie. He is British, a flier, who was left behind hospitalized when what remained of our wrecked air force (not over a dozen planes, I think) was or dered out of Crete. He is slight, fair- haired, a boy not yet out of his teens, I am sure, though he casually told us that he is twenty. To say that makes him feel more dignified; I know boys. He has a leg wound that causes him to limp, and Bert and I take turns supporting him. Bert tries to do more than his share; he is a huge man, tough and burly, a stockman from western Queensland. But al though I, John Ogilvy, was only a New Guinea schoolmaster before the war, scrawny and civilised and not used to using my muscles, I am as tough as he. As well able to help the lad.

If and while anybody can help him. There is still snow on the White Mountains. The winds cut like knives, and the barren rocks all about us rise to sharp points. Rocks that a man with two good legs can hardly climb. Not since yesterday have we seen any sign of human habitation, of other living beings. At first we did not mind; it was so good to get out of sight and sound of the Stukas, of the bombs and bullets that had been falling among us like a deadly, fiery hail. Little things that in a moment could change a man to a screaming, mutilated lump of flesh. Or leave no man at all; only a silent, bloody carcass.

But now we are beginning to be afraid. We must rest; we have stopped now; that is how, for the first time in days, I happen to be writing in this diary; it is easier to do that than to keep my hands still. But we cannot stay here; there is not an inch of dryness, of shelter, anywhere. Twice already Bert has helped Ronnie move. The boy does not want to; he wants nothing except to lie still. But if he does so for long at a time the warmth of his body