Richard Davis - Tandem Horror 3

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Richard Davis (ed) - Tandem Horror 3: Haunting Tales Of Unseen Terrors (Tandem, 1969)

The raw material of horror is everyday life. Who would admit to being frightened by the age-old clanking of the fettered ghost - but what made the window curtains shiver on a windless night?
And the face in the mirror; you see it several times a day, and it smiles when you smile, and frowns when you frown - but if one day it remained expressionless, whose reflection would it be?
Here is a collection of spine-creeping tales to make you look warily over your shoulder.

Introduction - Richard Davis

Dennis Piper - The Snowman
John Burke - The Tourists
Rosemary Timperley - What Happened To Sally?
Richard Davis - The Sick Room
Ramsey Campbell - Cyril
Julia Birley - Sawdust Caeser
David Campton - Alderman Stratton’s Fancy
Audrey Johnson - Takeover Bid
Elizabeth M. Fancett - Museum Piece

John Burke - The Tourists: Nasty smell from your place last night, Doctor. Burning some of your failures?

There are several things you should never say to a stranger in a pub and up there with the worst of them is: "Supposing the existence of a superior race, I see no reason why human beings should not make a contribution to its store of essential scientific knowledge." That's Dr. Spexhall, an enthusiastic vivisectionist who believes in taking his work home with him. The regulars at The Red Lion despise him - old Charlie even pisses off to the Crown rather than spend another second in his company - but tonight Spexhall has company. The cultured, impeccably turned out couple are curious to know if he'd be prepared to endure the treatment he so readily dishes out to laboratory animals provided it were to the benefit of ultra-intelligent aliens?

J. Ramsey Campbell - Cyril: Flora is bent on seducing the painfully shy mummy's boy Lance and lures him to her home. He's bought her a present - a doll she immediately decides is a Cyril "because that's the name I'd call a child I wanted to dominate. You know, Lance, if I had a child - which thank God science has helped me to prevent - I think it would only be so I could beat him. One must channel one's aggression." Flora works it that Lance misses the last bus and has to stay overnight, but she can't bring herself to drag him upstairs and he beds down on the couch. Then, after midnight - yes! - that must be him creeping furtively up the stairs and into her room ....

Dennis Piper - The Snowman: The narrator is driven to a nervous breakdown by what he at first takes to be a collapsed New Year's reveller sprawled out in his garden but which turns out to be a pile of slush in a freakish approximation of a toppled snowman. Henceforth every winter it reappears in exactly the same spot and the 'snowman' preys on his mind. When his daughter and son-in-law play a cruel and silly prank on him after their wedding party ("Will they expect us to have a lot of those groovie, hippie records - and can we play them on our thing anyway?" wonders his wife), he completely loses it with predictably fatal results.

Julia Birley - Sawdust Caeser: August Herriot, randy physician recently disgraced, has at last found the woman he wishes to settle down with. Unfortunately, Heloise is married to the gargantuan slob monster M. Pompier. Pompier bullies everybody but he takes a special delight in tormenting Heloise's cousin, Claudine, a plain, defeated woman who he employs as a servant. Augustus wonders how neither have been driven to kill the fat bastard, but M. Pompier has thought of that and had his finances structured accordingly. Each year, on March 1st, he draws a lump sum from his fortune for them to live on. If he's not around on that date, his wife and Claudine are in penury. Clearly a cunning plan is imperative if August is to land his woman and Pompier's money ...

David Campton - Alderman Stratton’s Fancy: Her first impression was of an enormous slug, or a naked vegetable marrow. Or ... whatever it reminded her of, the thing was obscene.

Hard line Magistrate Miss Irene Stratton is the scourge of the minor transgressor, feared as much by the police and Town Hall staff as she is anyone foolish enough to break the law. Her philosophy undergoes a dramatic transformation when, one morning the embittered old battle-axe awakes to find a thing abandoned on her doorstep. A flutter of it's eyelids, Mrs. Stratton comes over all maternal for the first time in her fifty-something years and, entirely against her principles, decides to keep it. "Sometimes she tried to imagine what it would be like when it grew up - would it become merely a larger, balder, pink sausage?" When it spits out its porridge she realises that, unlike herself, it's a carnivore. Her fatal mistake is to feed it ....

To be continued ...

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Richard Davis - The Sick Room: When her husband Albert is invalided out of the army, the embittered Elsie Hayter reluctantly opens a seaside guest house which she decorates after her own appalling taste. Right from the start there's a big problem with 'the Victorian Room'. First the painter slips and breaks his back, dying in hospital shortly afterward when complications set in. Then a young couple come to spend their first ever dirty weekend - and he winds up butchering her. The room acquires a dreadful reputation which, as Albert predicts, appeals to ghouls such as the recently divorced Mrs. Walsingham who rents it for herself and her cutesy little Pekinese. It rips her throat out. Can the medium Mrs. Forrester rid the place of it's demonic presence?

"Better than I remember it" is becoming my bloody mantra these days but The Sick Room is ..... Better than I remember it.

Same goes for:

Rosemary Timperley - What Happened To Sally?: Sally Forrest, a young typist, is usurped by her reflection in the mirror and trapped behind the glass. The doppelganger is a far more confident, competent version of herself with a malicious streak. This one is like a companion piece to her House Of Mirrors in Fontana Horror #15

Audrey Johnson - Takeover Bid: Magdalene House no longer advertises itself as an Asylum and has began taking in convalescents and the elderly along with the disturbed. Rose Newcombe is one of the new admissions and Magdalene will be her temporary accommodation while the council prepare her new flat. For the first time in her life she actually makes a friend, Bella, who takes her under her wing and deals with one old bag who bullies her. Unfortunately, Bella isn't one for letting go of her mates ....

Elizabeth M. Fancett - Museum Piece: From the old board: "There was one in there which had a Planet of the Apes moment, pretty sure it's Museum Piece which concerns a bunch of schoolkids on an outing - it really annoyed me for some reason!"

Yep, it was Museum Piece all right. I like several of Elizabeth's stories but not this one I'm afraid ....

[oatcakeredux]

"A larger, balder pink sausage" spitting out porridge?...

You don't suppose that there might be a subtext to that story, do you?...