The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

yards from the house when a taxi drew up outside and Hallam emerged, followed by a woman in a dark coat and slouch hat. Even without the familiar clothing from the night of the wild chase, the slow pantherine sway would have identified Rose. Hallam paid the driver, put his arm around her shoulder and together they entered his flat.

I walked by and kept on walking. The realization that Hallam was seeing both women did not surprise me overmuch but Diane’s state made the whole thing seem doubly squalid. There was something petty and two-faced about pulling such a trick on a sick girl, especially as Hallam was in all probability the one who had made her sick in the first place. It was then that I decided to set my scruples aside and get down to some serious prying.

An afternoon in the reading room of the British Library with Hallam’s published works proved edifying. All the books were de luxe, privately printed editions with exquisite bindings. Some were poetry, metrically dextrous and clearly influenced by Baudelaire and Swinburne. Others dealt with Egyptian Magic, Tibetan Tantric Yoga and the erotic temple sculptures of India. One work entitled The Serpent of Khem had an acrostic on the title page that spelled out the identity of the personage whose worship was recounted within.

Serpent of Khem, by old mysterious Art.
Allures with the coiling favors of the Worm.
Twines with the knot of love about my heart.
Abomination in beguiling form!
Nature supreme who rules our every part!

Altogether a charming dedication. Little that I read made sense to me then, but I could hardly fail to notice the constant references to drugs, from peyote to the deadly refinements of heroin. In the powers of magic I did not at that time believe, but in the deleterious power of drugs I certainly did.

One of the most striking features of these wonderfully printed books was the wealth of weird and disturbing illustrations by an artist called Alphonsus Gaunt. That name rang a bell. I remembered a quite terrifying edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that had overshadowed much of my early childhood. The plates accompanying one of Hallam’s poetic effusions—Hymns to the Nephilim—surpassed that dark masterpiece by a long way. Then I made a significant discovery. In one of the volumes was a frontispiece drawing of Hallam and Gaunt and both faces were equally familiar. Alphonsus Gaunt was the satyr I had seen speaking to Rose at Diane’s party!

That threw me for a moment. Either Gaunt had been a boy-genius when he illustrated the Grimm’s, or he was older than he looked. In any case I might have found a source of inside information on the Hallam menage.

Alphonsus Gaunts were not plentiful in the street directory. I traced him to a basement flat of a once-grand house in Deyton Street: not quite the residence I had expected of a distinguished artist! My ring was answered by an incredibly pale and shriveled old woman, who nodded at the mention of Gaunt’s name and gestured me to enter.

The flickering radiance of a candle cupped in her hand gave enough light to show the way between stacks of magazines and newspapers smelling of damp. We passed through a kitchen with a huge sink and cold-stone flags underfoot, where an immense range lay, long ago choked on soot and fat. There was a sound of dripping water. Coming at last to a great door of oak, she threw open the carved panels and shrank away into the gloom. I stepped through and the door closed behind me.

Many candles were burning in the room. I saw skulls of men and animals; distorted, elongated sculptures of stone and clay; the tattered spines of a thousand old books. And I saw a host of faces watching me.

In the candlelight were faces benign and malevolent, beautiful and hideous. One I will never forget, bony and blotched, with a cruel, wet-lipped mouth and obliquely-slanting eye-pits, watery, yellow and alive with a vile intelligence. The head was crowned with a thatch of white, downy fur, and above it, as though unfurling from a hunched back, immensely powerful wings, serrated and membranous like those of a bat, but gnarled and shaggy at the joints like the forelegs of a dray horse.

Then my eyes adjusted and I made out frames and easels. They were paintings, wonderful, living faces on canvas and wood, even on the sound boards of old radio sets. Then one face, a benign and monumental Greek head, let out a slow breath and moved.

It was Gaunt, seated crossed-legged before an odd little altarlike table. He held a pencil, which was moving swiftly over a sheet of paper. It seemed the pencil lead was kindling a black fire on the page, tongues and billows of a sinuous burning that licked and swirled to engulf the virgin parchment. Out of the swiftly and perfectly formed flames and smoke, faces began to form, receding ranks and columns of profiles, sphinxlike and vigilant. Soon a half- formed monstrosity of a face emerged, growing under the moving pencil, a soft, twisted mask that watched me with living eyes. It was a shock to realize that, in order to produce an image that was the right way up for me, Gaunt had to be drawing it upside down. But not as great as the one I got when I looked closely at the artist, for his eyes were tightly closed.

He was himself as singular as anything in that weirdly disturbing place. I could now put his age at around forty, but he had a honed, hawklike handsomeness of features and an unruly thatch of dark, curly hair that would give an impression of youth from a distance. He was dressed not in some garment of ritual, but in a threadbare jacket over a tattered, paint-spotted pullover and no shirt. He might have been a laborer hardened by hears of toil in the sun and wind. Yet there was about him the look of a magus.

Laying down his pencil, he opened his eyes and looked on me without the slightest sign of surprise. The appearance of strangers in his room was apparently a common occurrence. Leaning forward, he touched my arm.

“A flesh and blood visitor for a change,” he observed mildly. “Who are you, an emissary from the parasites and eaters of filth? Another sleepwalker from the dung heaps of society?”

“I saw you at Diane’s party. You were with Rose Seaford—”

“The whore of Hell,” he interjected. “Do you follow the cult of the Ku?”

I hesitated, unsure of the answer that was most likely to win his confidence. The delay betrayed me.

“No, you don’t, do you? What are you here for? My work is no longer for sale.”

“I’m not here to buy—although I do find your work fascinating.”

My choice of words seemed to please him. Encouraged, I poured out the whole story of Hallam’s activities. When I’d finished, he pondered a moment, then offered a tobacco tin full of roll-ups. When I refused he lit one up himself and proceeded to make a pot of tea. There was something incongruous about that figure, who looked, in the smoke of his cigarette like an alchemist crouched over his alembics, engaged in so domestic a task.

The tea, however, was strong and good. Gaunt sized me up for a while, then said abruptly, “When I called her the whore of Hell just now—it wasn’t an insult. It was a title—” He took a sip of tea. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” His voice was heavy with contempt. “That silly little girl of yours—has she any idea what she’s involved in? I thought not. Sleepwalkers! She’s in real danger, boy!”

“I know. Hallam uses drugs—”

“I’m not talking about drugs, fool! Do you think a book like Hymns to the Nephilim can be made without a cost? They have to be lured to visible appearance and that takes energy. What is drained has to be replenished. The Kiss of the Shade, boy—the Mors Osculi. The soundless reverberation of silent gongs. Get your girl out of it now, right away. Tonight! Stay with her—keep them away!”

Despite myself, I was letting him get through to me. I felt terrified. I must have looked it, too, because Gaunt shook his head and said, “Wait—I may have something that will help you.” I found myself thanking him.

“I’m not doing it for you—or that stupid girl. I have a difference of opinion with Hallam over Rose.”

He produced, of all things, a small plate or shallow dish painted with spirals of looping script and a symbol reminiscent of the outline of a bat. Holding it up before his face, he focused all his attention on it.

As I sat waiting, my mind began to play strange tricks on me. It seemed to grow darker in the room, and much colder. I swear that some of the paintings seemed to move, so that I seemed to be sitting in the middle of a