Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,48

from A to B.”

In our fiction, Melanie’s monsters usually are ultimately either vanquished or accepted, while at the end of my stories you often find out that the darkness in one form or another lives on and on. There’s no escaping it, and I question whether you should try to escape it in the first place.

Since words can only approximate both the monsters and the vanquishment, we wrote each other worried notes in the margins of this story.

“I don’t know if we can really use the word ‘divine.’”

“If someone looked inside your dreams, would they really see only darkness?”

It was hard for us to write this piece.

“This upsets me,” Melanie would say.

Steve would nod. “Maybe we can’t do this.”

“Oh, we have to,” I’d insist. “We’ve gone too far to stop now. I want to see what happens.”

This piece is about writing and horror and fear and about love. We’re utterly separate from each other, of course, yet there’s a country we share, a rich and wonderful place, a divine place, and we create it by naming all of its parts, all of the angels and all of the demons who live there with us.

What happens next?

There are so many stories to tell.

We could tell

another story:

The Great God Pan

M. John Harrison

But is there really something far more horrible than ever could resolve itself into reality, and is it that something which terrifies me so?

—Katherine Mansfield

Journals, March 1914

Ann took drugs to manage her epilepsy. They often made her depressed and difficult to deal with; and Lucas, who was nervous himself, never knew what to do. After their divorce he relied increasingly on me as a go-between. “I don’t like the sound of her voice,” he would tell me. “You try her.” The drugs gave her a screaming, false-sounding laugh that went on and on. Though he had remained sympathetic over the years, Lucas was always embarrassed and upset by it. I think it frightened him. “See if you can get any sense out of her.” It was guilt, I think, that encouraged him to see me as a steadying influence: not his own guilt so much as the guilt he felt all three of us shared. “See what she says.”

On this occasion what she said was:

“Look, if you bring on one of my turns, bloody Lucas Fisher will regret it. What business is it of his how I feel, anyway?”

I was used to her, so I said carefully, “It was just that you wouldn’t talk to him. He was worried that something was happening. Is there something wrong, Ann?” She didn’t answer, but I had hardly expected her to. “If you don’t want to see me,” I suggested, “couldn’t you tell me now?”

I thought she was going to hang up, but in the end there was only a kind of paroxysm of silence. I was phoning her from a call box in the middle of Huddersfield. The shopping precinct outside was full of pale bright sunshine, but windy and cold; sleet was forecast for later in the day. Two or three teenagers went past, talking and laughing. I heard one of them say, “What acid rain’s got to do with my career, I don’t know. But that’s what they asked me: ‘What do you know about acid rain?’” When they had gone, I could hear Ann breathing raggedly.

“Hello?” I said.

Suddenly she shouted, “Are you mad? I’m not talking on the phone. Before you know it, the whole thing’s public property!”

Sometimes she was more dependent on medication than usual; you knew when, because she tended to use that phrase over and over again. One of the first things I ever heard her say was, “It looks so easy, doesn’t it? But before you know it, the bloody thing’s just slipped straight out of your hands,” as she bent down nervously to pick up the bits of a broken glass. How old were we then? Twenty? Lucas believed she was reflecting in language some experience either of the drugs or the disease itself, but I’m not sure he was right. Another thing she often said was, “I mean, you have to be careful, don’t you?” drawing out in a wondering, childlike way both care and don’t, so that you saw immediately it was a mannerism learned in adolescence.

“You must be mad if you think I’m talking on the phone!”

I said quickly, “Okay, then, Ann. I’ll come over this evening.”

“You might as well come now and get it over with. I don’t feel well.”

Epilepsy since