Ramsey Campbell - Dark Feasts (Robinson, 1987)
Introduction - Ramsey Campbell
The Room in the Castle
Cold Print
The Scar
The Interloper
The Guy
The End of a Summer’s Day
The Whining
The Words That Count
The Man in the Underpass
Horror House of Blood
The Companion
Call First
In the Bag
The Chimney
The Brood
The Voice of the Beach
Out of Copyright
Above the World
Mackintosh Willy
The Ferries
Midnight Hobo
The Depths
The Fit
Hearing Is Believing
The Hands
Again
Just Waiting
Seeing the World
Apples
Boiled Alive Just Waiting:Ian returns to the woods where, in his youth, he first encountered the wishing well on the fatal day when his overbearing father (another teacher) and downtrodden mother had their last argument before the car accident in which two bodies, too burnt to be identified, were found close by. Now he wants to find out once and for all exactly what he wished for at the time.
The Depths: Crime writer Miles pays a visit to the house in a West Derby village where a bank manager sadistically slaughtered his boutique-owning wife before doing away with himself in an equally gory, spectacular fashion. Miles overcomes his writers block, but at what cost?
The Words That Count: The liberating powers of Black Magic. The repressed 23-year-old daughter of a Religious fanatic receives a pamphlet though the post (sent by her more worldly boyfriend?) on which the words to the Lord's Prayer are printed singly on each page, the whole in reverse order. Her father's predictable reaction and the seed of rebellion the pamphlet plants in her suggests that she will soon break free of her claustrophobic excuse for an existence. Or something. I must admit, I struggled with this one.
The Scar: Brichester. Jack Rossitor's brother-in-law, the hapless Lindsay Rice, meets Jack's doppelgänger, similar in every respect to the original save for a nasty scar down his face. When Jack is attacked by his double and has his face slashed with a rusty tin can they are identical - even his wife, Harriet, can't tell them apart. Lindsay begins to suspect the awful truth behind 'Jack's recent irrational behaviour including the savage beatings he inflicts on his kids. His worst fears are confirmed when he discovers a body in a derelict building.
The Fit: The narrator's parents pack him off to his aunt Naomi's house in Keswick during the school holidays. On a trek through the woods he discovers a path which leads to a tiny cottage obscured by gorse and herbs. He later learns from his aunt that this is residence of Fanny Cave, a half-crazed crone whom the locals are terrified of - and with good reason. Naomi is the only person who will stand up to her.
A year later he returns to learn that, after her last confrontation with his aunt, Fanny Cave lost her footing on the way home and perished in the stagnant water of the pond. She now persecutes Naomi from beyond the grave and entices her to sleepwalk to the pond. The narrator arrives just as the hag rises from the filth, luring Naomi to her doom. He saves her, but at a terrible price to himself.
Midnight Hobo: What is it that the old man is always looking at beneath the railway bridge that should concern him enough to chase children away from there? The question begins to obsess Roy, a radio presenter, who is thereabouts when something tears apart a cat. When he asks the stranger what he knows the old guy is reticent but mumbles darkly, hinting at things which board empty trains in the night and concluding obscurely: "maybe it ran out of forms."
Roy suffers nightmares featuring a shapeless monstrosity and his problems at work, namely his unbearably smug co-presenter Derrick, worsen. But when he becomes aware that the creature has invaded the radio station, he is only too pleased to meet Derrick coming out of the lift and they leave the building together. But as they walk along the street in silence, Roy makes an awful discovery ...
Above The World:Keswick. Knox returns to the Swan Hotel where he'd honeymooned and where his once wife did likewise when she married for a second time before she and her new husband, Tooley, met their deaths by exposure when they were lost in the mist on one of the hills. Knox is reunited with the pair when he to is stranded on a mist shrouded peak. Eerie conclusion, with the slate replicas of his former wife and Tooley closing in on the terrified Knox.
Boiled Alive: Mee is the recipient of weird telephone messages, one of which consists of just the words "Boiled Alive", over and over until the caller hangs up. He learns that this is the title of a video nasty. Renting it from
Blockbusters, he takes it around his work colleagues house, where he sits down to watch it with the friend and friend's aged mother ...
Call First: Ned grows obsessed with an old man's habit of always telephoning before he leaves the library, merely to let somebody know "I'm coming home now". He also fixates about the ring the guy wears on his wedding finger, which seems to have a human finger-nail embedded where the stone should be. He decides to break into the man's home, where he encounters a highly sophisticated - and original - burglar alarm. Every black magician should have one.
Cold Print: An unlikely Christmas tale, set in snowbound Brichester. Sam Strutt, a school-teacher and rabid collector of corporal punishment literature, inexplicably encounters a Cthulhu-style monstrosity.
The Hands: A book salesman winds up at a station in the middle of nowhere a la
Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors. The Pub is shut, so he wanders into the church where he encounters a "munching nun". A lapsed Catholic, he thinks back on his youth and how he'd never have dared enter a church with a bagful of dust-jackets like those he's carrying. When he leaves the building, he's waylaid by a census-taker and allows himself to be led into a building he takes to be a Religious bookshop. Actually, it's a whole lot worse.
Out Of Copyright: Seriously great! Unscrupulous book dealer and horror anthologist Tharne reckons he's got it made when he tricks a widow into parting with Damon Damien's impossibly rare macabre masterpiece
Tales Beyond Life including his semi-mythical
The Dunning Of Diavolo for pennies. This story - of a dissected black magician whose limbs reanimate and "crawl down the throats of [the men who betrayed him] to drag out the twins of those organs of which the corpse had been robbed", will provide the perfect finishing touch to Tharne's latest selection
Justice From Beyond The Grave ....
Horror House Of Blood: David Lloyd is producing his first horror film built around the fail-safe flimsy premise of the put-upon wife who goes insane and butchers her husband. The budget is sub-meagre and Lloyd approaches Frank and Marilyn Taylor with a view to shooting the gory stabbing scene at the top of their creaky staircase as that ominous door is just so right!
The Taylors cheerfully agree but Marilyn is soon onto her husband about how she can't stand the way Lloyd bullies his timid co-starlet who is also his wife. She's none too happy that he's commandeered her knife for a walk on part as the 'murder' weapon either - it's the one mum gave her: she uses it for chopping vegetables.
The small crew pack up and leave with their prize footage but for the Taylors the real horror is about to begin ...
The Brood: "Her face peered out of the frame of her grey scarf, as though from a web. As she circled she was muttering incessantly. Her tongue worked as though her mouth were too small for it. Her eyes were fixed as the heads of grey nails impaling her skull."
The vet, Blackband, watches from his window the old girl known locally as 'the lady of the lamp' who is forever luring stray pets into her slum. Once, even a fellow derelict in a long faded coat followed in their footsteps and, just like the animals, Blackband hasn't seen her since. And why is the 'lady ....' always to be found flitting moth-like beneath a street light? Ridiculous as it sounds, Blackband sometimes amuses himself with the notion that she's some kind of vampire! Come the day when he determines to investigate the property ...
Excellent. There really is no other word in my lousy vocabulary to do it justice.