The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

decidedly hostile crowd. Then Gaunt took up a piece of white linen and wrapped up the plate. As he handed the bundle to me he said: “Take this and place it in the girl’s room. Close to her as you can get it. She’ll be all right then.”

I took the thing to humor him. By that time my only thought was to get out of the place before I ended up as mad as he was. Doubtful of my ability to find the way out, I asked if the old woman could show me back to the door. In the candlelight his expression became more than ever that of a malevolent satyr as he answered “There’s no old woman living in this house.”

That did it. I got out of the room as quickly as I could and made my own way through the dark labyrinth of the house. If there were any light switches, I didn’t find them so I stumbled through the piles of papers in the passages, ridiculously afraid of coming upon that wizened old woman who, in Gaunt’s ambiguously stressed expression, did not live in the house at all. It was just an irrational fear of the dark, I told myself, but that didn’t help me one bit. By the time I found the door and let myself out into the deserted streets, my nerves were in a sorry state.

Let me admit that my only thought was to go home and forget all the mumbo-jumbo. I actually got to my own front door, but I didn’t go in. Something told me that I was right about Diane being in danger, if only from the drugs that Hallam was so fond of. And if Gaunt was an example of the adherents of this Ku cult, Diane’s sanity was doubly in danger.

So despite the lateness of the hour, I made my way to Diane’s house. I got no reply to my knock, and all the windows were in darkness, but when I looked through the letterbox, I glimpsed the distinctive fur lining of Hallam’s overcoat hanging in the hall.

All the tension of the previous few hours came out in anger. I began pounding at the door and shouting through the letter box. Just as curtains were drawing back all over the street and shouts of complaint began, I heard a sound of bolts drawn, and Hallam’s face appeared in the doorway.

At first he refused to let me in, but when I began to shout about the police he had a sudden change of heart. The house was unheated, but Hallam was bathed in sweat. He was dressed in a black robe with wide sleeves and a thrown-back hood that gave him the look of a sensual and worldly monk, an impression compounded by the smell of some heavy incense that hung in the air. If Hallam intended to keep me talking in the hall, he was out of luck. A glance had shown that the living-room was in darkness, and that a light was glinting through the crack of the bedroom door. Before he had a chance to say, or do, anything, I had crossed the hall and thrown open the door.

The image frozen by my sudden entry will never fade from my mind. Diane lay on her bed, her face pale and slick as a mask of white silk. She was naked, and running with sweat, or some glistening unguent. A heavy gold plate, or plaque, lay over her groin. The air in the room was thick with incense and pulsed with a deep, throbbing that troubled the eardrums without creating a sensation of actual sound. Rose Seaford stood over Diane, her hands gesturing over the throat and breast regions with the movements of one warming her hands over a fire. Rose’s hair was disheveled, her yellow skin glinting with sweat. She wore a long, diaphanous garment of flame-colored silk, gathered at the waist with a single black cord. On her forehead was a disk of polished metal. A heavy choker at her throat held a second disk and suspended from it on a fine chain hung a variety of geometric shapes.

There was nothing languid or sickly about the gaze she turned on me then. She radiated quite diabolic power. Hallam began to say something, but she silenced him with a venomous look, and returned her wide, white gaze to me. The gash of her mouth tightened hard, and the muscles of her jaw flexed spasmodically. I really thought she was about to launch herself on me like a great cat. Instead she straightened up and extended her arms in my direction. I felt a crawling over my flesh, and the atmosphere grew suffocating, as though the very pressure in the room had increased. Suddenly, I felt fear, a blind, unreasoning urge to run, to escape the stifling radiation that beat out from her like waves of intolerable heat. My brow felt as though it would burst. And then the face of Rose Seaford began to change.

How can I describe what happened in the pulsing, smoky atmosphere of that room? If I say she grew old, you will not understand. She became ancient, as the visage of the Sphinx is ancient, as the colossi at Memnon are ancient. It was a face that might have gazed for eons upon desolation, or brooded through time in some jungle- draped ruin. And out of her body, coiling thickly down both arms, came a black flowing of serpents.

But this was not the greatest horror. For she multiplied before my eyes, generated a host of identical snake goddesses on every side, until the spiraling black coils of her hatred filled the space between us, and the air became black with it.

Against that onslaught a puny human could have done nothing. I was frozen with terror, and could only close my eyes and wait to be engulfed in the seething blackness.

Then the pulsing on the air stopped, and the room became very still. I opened my eyes and saw that the blackness had dispersed. There was only one figure before me, one Rose Seaford staring with a look of puzzlement at the region of my chest. I felt a warm, bracing sensation radiating from that spot, like a gulp of brandy on a cold day. The source was the inside pocket of my coat, where I had placed Gaunt’s amulet.

With trembling fingers I drew it out and tore off the linen wrapping. Holding it before me I moved toward the bed, and as I did so Rose Seaford drew back and skirted the room until she and Hallam stood between me and the door. Close to, I could see that the metal plate on Diane’s groin was engraved with animal-headed gods and snakes. I picked the thing up and shied it at the watching couple. It was probably just as well it missed them. The impact took a two-inch chunk out of the wall. Hallam scooped up the plate and took Rose’s arm.

“Come on,” he said levelly. “You’ve got what you wanted. “Turning to me he added, “You wasted your time, Lenihan. We’d finished with her tonight in any case.”

When they had gone I breathed for what seemed to the first time in minutes, and covered Diane with a sheet from the floor.

Diane recovered in time, but she was never quite as vital again. She was devastated when Hallam would have nothing more to do with her, and, ironically, blamed me for driving him away. Hallam, she said, had done everything he could to cure her “loss of energy” and my interference with the rites had offended him! We were never as close after that, which was a pity.

One bitter December night the following year, I made the short journey to the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead to see Coward’s The Vortex, which by only its second week had ensured a successful run in the West End, establishing once and for all the name of its already famous young author. I caught one of the last performances before the play left the confines of that “converted drill-hall” for the more salubrious setting of the Royalty. It seemed to me in my naivete a tremendously powerful piece, and the wild response of the audience could not but have an unsettling effect on a ragged-arsed clerk a whole year older than the author whose hour of triumph he had just witnessed. I left the theater dizzy with fantasies of suddenly discovered talent and critical acclaim. It was with something of a shock that I glimpsed those two familiar faces in the buffeting crowd. Slipping behind a nearby stanchion, I paused to watch them.

Hallam was deep in conversation with a young couple, smiling the smile of one who has no need of dreams to sustain him. He was wearing immaculate evening dress, and a cloak thrown back at the shoulders to reveal the crimson lining; all very Mephistophelean. In fact, with his elegant appearance and those bloody gashes at the shoulders like torn wings, he looked every inch the fallen angel. Rose stood beside him, her arm linked so lightly with his that her gray leather glove barely compressed his sleeve. There was no clinging with her, no sacrifice of her independence for anything as human as love. Her tawny hair was drawn tightly back into an elaborate knot at the nape of her neck, displaying the fine, strong line of her jaw. She was engulfed in a mist of gray furs piled pillow deep behind her head and tucked snugly under her chin like a winter blanket. She stood apart, even in the crowd, sweeping the passersby with her cold, heartless expression. As I watched, her other, unseen companion must have whispered something, because she smiled that nasty secret smile. And I knew that somewhere they had found another victim and completed the dreadful process of reparation. This knowledge did not come from the smile of Rose Seaford as she scanned the crowd flocking home through the December darkness. It was the healthy bloom of her skin, and her eyes, no longer blank and dead, but ablaze with replenished inner fire.

THE OUTSIDER