This Is Midnight: Stories

  THIS IS MIDNIGHT

  stories by

  BERNARD TAYLOR

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  This Is Midnight by Bernard Taylor

  Originally published in hardcover by Centipede Press in July 2017

  First Valancourt Books edition 2019

  Copyright © 2017 by Bernard Taylor

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  This is Midnight

  Let no star delude us

  Dawn is very far. . .

  Rudyard Kipling

  INTRODUCTION

  How pleased I am to have my handful of short stories brought together – for better or worse.

  As for the writing of them, I can’t speak for other writers, of course, but my own embarking on a short story was never a planned exercise. The story, or the germ of it, would usually come springing from something observed, or something heard or read about – sometimes the most trivial happening, at other times something a little more momentous.

  The few short tales that I have written, and which are here in these pages, mostly came from the period before I turned my attention to writing full-length works. And, as it so happened, in several cases a particular short story would lead in time to a full length novel.

  On my return from the USA in the late sixties I was for the most part working as an actor, while during those periods when I was ‘resting’ – as out-of-work actors have it – I was glad to spend the odd day, week or month as a supply/substitute teacher, at schools in the East End of London.

  It was about this time that I became friends with a professional writer who had published several novels as well as a number of short stories – horror stories, all of them. And why don’t you, he said to me one day, try writing a horror story? Well, I said, I would if I had an idea for one.

  And then it happened. A few days later, in the classroom at the school where I was currently spending a few days as a teacher, one of my pupils, sitting at her desk, gave a wide yawn. And I could see at once that she was also chewing. But it was not this prohibited act that got my sharp attention; it was the appearance of the gum in her open mouth. A pale, greenish colour, for a brief moment I could see it stretched across the inside of her gaping mouth like some unbelievably grotesque living creature.

  And so I went home that night and wrote a story, to be published later as ‘Our Last Nanny.’

  I mention this little incident simply as an example of how the most fleeting, banal and trivial occurrence can sometimes lead to the germ of an idea – in this particular case leading to the first of my stories to be published.

  But the second of my tales sprang from something altogether much deeper, darker – an incident that stayed with me, and remains with me today. And perhaps it will be of interest to my readers now to have this extra little short story to add to those that are to come.

  Paula Hawkins’ novel The Girl on the Train, is of course, and deservedly so, a best-seller – concerning a young woman who observes an interesting ongoing situation from her train window on her daily commute. And something with a similar shadowy tone once happened to me. But while my tale would not include the observance of any crime, crime was certainly embedded in my view, and in my case the ghost of real, actual crime.

  It happened one dark night in the late nineteen-sixties as I made my way home through the streets of the Ladbroke Grove area of west London. It had been raining all evening, but now the rain had stopped. There was no sign of a moon, and in the dank, gloomy streets the pale yellow lamplight reflected dully in the wet pavements. To my irritation, I found I was lost. I had been visiting friends for dinner nearby and now, trying to make my way by means of a short cut to the Tube station, I had somehow taken a wrong turning, with the result that there came the sudden realisation that I didn’t know where I was.

  I was not at all familiar with the area; all about me was strange. I walked on, searching for some landmark or other familiar sight, heading in what I thought must be somewhere in the right direction. And then, turning a corner, I found myself at the entrance to a dark little cul-de-sac. In the gloom, I could just make out the name of the place, and saw that I was standing at the entrance to Ruston Close.

  At once in my head the name rang some tenebrous little bell. And in a second it came to me that this half-hidden, little dead-end street had not so long before boasted the home of John Reginald Christie, one of England’s most notorious serial killers, hanged in 1953 for his crimes. The original name of the cul-de-sac was in fact Rillington Place, with Christie and his sad, doomed wife living at number 10. 10 Rillington Place. Just the sound of those words brought its own frisson, as it does still today.

  Not surprisingly, following Christie’s execution the name of the street had been changed in an attempt to dissociate it from the catalogue of dreadful horrors that had taken place there, horrors with which it would for ever be associated.

  Much has since been written about Christie’s evil doings, and by coincidence, even as I write these words the BBC is preparing to broadcast yet another dramatization of the events that took place under the bloody hands of this most infamous man.

  Anyway, there I was, some fifty or so years ago, standing in the wet darkness, lit only by a pale streetlamp, at the entrance to one of London’s most notorious scenes of criminality.

  And then I suddenly realised that the whole of the little street was dead, quite dead. Not only was there no sign of any living soul about, but there were no lights burning in any of the windows. I stood there. I couldn’t turn about and go on my way, I couldn’t pass it by, and after a minute I ventured in. My footfalls hollow on the wet cement I walked up the little dead-end street (and was there ever a more apt description of this particular cul-de-sac?), walking between the two rows of Victorian terrace houses to the one at the very end, number 10, Christie’s erstwhile home, the house where the murders had been committed. And on reaching it I saw that it was in the process of being demolished. But of course. This, I realised, accounted for the dead, lifeless windows, the dark solitude of the place. For it was not only number 10 that was to go. That was merely to be the first. The whole two rows of houses, I realised, were about to be destroyed. The powers that be had clearly come to the realisation that a new name would never be enough to dispatch the horror from the spot, could never ever make this humble little street habitable again.

  With Christie’s house the last one in the row, I saw that its external left side abutted a high wall that stretched right across the street, and as I stood there I heard, dispelling the quiet, the sound of an approaching Tube train. Moments later it was rattling past on the other side of the barrier wall.

  I stayed after the sound of the train had faded in the distance, standing looking up at the disfigured face of number 10. The demolition, I saw, was well under way. Some of the upper front wall had already been torn down, and in the gloom I could just make out the dingy interiors of the upper rooms.

  After standing there staring at the wretched scene for a few moments longer, I turned and found my way back to the station, and then home.

  The next morning I was called on to teach, and on my way to the school where I was to spend the next few days, I found – of all the coincidences – that my train would run on the track that lay on the
other side of the wall that abutted Ruston Close and the wretched remains of number 10. And minutes later, and now in the bright sunlight, as the train rumbled past, I could see again, so close, the ruined house, with its broken walls, and I could see clearly too the flower-patterned wall­paper on the walls, wallpaper that Christie himself had no doubt hung – he being a handy man-about-the-house – and which would have helped to hide for years his dark secrets.

  The frisson of my encounter with that house of death stayed with me, and on my little portable typewriter that evening I began to tap out, two-fingered, my story ‘Forget-me-not.’

  So much for one rather dark ‘inspiration’.

  Over the next two or three years I wrote most of the other tales here in this collection. Then at the suggestion of my literary agent I gathered them together and he sent them off to the publisher Souvenir Press where they were read by the company’s director, the dynamic Ernest Hecht. At his encouraging suggestion I took a newly-completed story – one not yet submitted for publication – and developed it into a full-length novel. And so was published my first book, The Godsend.

  And other stories led in time to more novels. ‘Travelling Light’ led to my book The Moorstone Sickness, while a one-act play I wrote for television (but sadly was never produced) gave me the idea for One of the Family, and from there to my novel Sweetheart, Sweetheart.

  One of the last of my stories, ‘Mama’s Boy,’ came from an incident when, in my work as an actor, and on location in Italy, I watched through my shuttered hotel window a little domestic drama unfold.

  And so here they are, together at last, my short stories – and, I have to say, not offering much in the way of creeping ghouls or witches on broomsticks; not much in the way of foul wizardry or the supernatural. I think I would have to leave the production of such truly terror-inducing tales to masters such as the great M.R. James, who, I have to confess, shameless as I am, provided me with the theme of one of my novels. But that’s another story.

  Bernard Taylor

  London, November 2016

  ‘Out of Sorts’ originally published in The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror, edited by Charles L. Grant (Dodd, Mead, August 1983).

  ‘Mama’s Boy’ is original to this collection.

  ‘Forget-Me-Not’ originally published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III edited by Richard Davis (DAW Books, July 1975).

  ‘Our Last Nanny’ originally published in The 8th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, edited by Mary Danby (Fontana, September 1973).

  ‘Cera’ originally published in Frighteners, edited by Mary Danby (Fontana, 1974).

  ‘One of the Family’ originally published in The Screaming Book of Horror (Screaming Dreams, October 2012).

  ‘Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake’ originally published in Frighteners 2, edited by Mary Danby (Fontana, 1976).

  ‘My Very Good Friend’ originally published in Frighteners, edited by Mary Danby (Fontana, 1974).

  ‘Samhain’ originally published in Final Shadows, edited by Charles L. Grant (Doubleday, September 1991).

  ‘Peace Offering’ is original to this collection.

  ‘Travelling Light’ originally published in 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, edited by Mary Danby (Octopus Books, 1979).

  ‘Mommy’s Programme’ is original to this collection.

  ‘Green Fingers’ originally published March 18, 1975 as ‘In the Garden of Evil’ in the London Evening News.

  OUT OF SORTS

  ‘Oh, not the twenty-first!’ Paul Gunn said. ‘Whatever made you choose that date?’

  ‘I didn’t choose it. That’s the day the meeting falls – third Friday in the month.’ Sylvia shook her head. ‘I told you – there was nothing I could do about it.’

  ‘You could have arranged to hold the bloody thing somewhere else, couldn’t you? Does it have to be here?’

  ‘It’s my turn,’ Sylvia said with a sigh. ‘Besides, I’m president. And apart from that I just wasn’t thinking, I suppose. I can’t be expected to remember everything.’

  ‘No, but I do expect you to remember the important things.’ He made a sound of exasperation. ‘Can’t you change it? It’s bad enough at the best of times, but when the bloody house is filled with people – ’

  ‘It’s only three days away,’ Sylvia said reasonably. ‘Look, Paul, we planned it weeks ago and it’s too late to alter it now.’ She looked at him entreatingly. ‘Oh, please don’t be angry. You’ll be all right. No one will bother you.’

  He refused to be entreated or pacified, though, and she watched as he angrily snatched up his newspaper, opened it unnecessarily roughly and submerged himself in its contents. End of conversation, as always.

  His large, tanned hands looked very dark against the white of the paper. It was the hair on them. Thick and black, it made his hands look larger than they were. It was probably a turn-on for some women, she thought. Not to herself, though; not now – if it had ever been . . . It was to Norma Russell, though, she was quite certain. Norma, with her model’s 35 x 25 x 36 figure, her high cheek bones and sleek blonde hair. Paul’s hirsute body would be just the thing to appeal to her.

  If it came to looks, she reflected, it was quite obvious that she herself couldn’t compete with anyone like Norma. Oh, once she’d been pretty in a vague, mousey kind of way, but not for years now. Well, she hadn’t made any effort, had she? And why should she try, now, when there was no point?

  And there was no point anymore. More than that, in her eyes it would have seemed the height of stupidity to go to the bother of dressing up, when practically the only man who ever looked at you was your husband – and even when he did he didn’t even see you. Yes, pointless, to say the least.

  Paul, on the other hand, seemed to have grown sleeker and better-looking in an overfed kind of way over the years. Success showed clearly on him; in his clothes and his body – and his women. Yes, he did look better. That, she supposed, was what contentment and complacency did. She shot him a look of hatred as he lounged, protected by the shield of his paper. Then she turned and went upstairs.

  This place, too, was a sign of his success. Set apart in this tiny Yorkshire village of Tallowford, the house was huge and rambling, exquisitely furnished; further testimony to the years of effort he’d put into his engineering company, now one of the most profitable small businesses in nearby Bradford.

  In her study Sylvia sat down at her elegant desk, Louis XIV, genuine. Opening her diary she looked again at the date of the meeting. The 21st. No mistake. Then she checked over the Women’s Circle committee list. There would be six of them. On the past three occasions there’d been only five of them – Pamela Horley, Jill Marks, Janet True, and Mary Hanley. This time, though, there’d be six again. A replacement had been found for Lilly Sloane who had moved away – a replacement proposed by her and voted in unanimously by the others: Norma Russell.

  Norma, of course, had so eagerly accepted the offered place on the committee. ‘Well, if you really want me and you think I can be of help,’ she’d said. But she hadn’t fooled Sylvia for one minute. Sylvia knew quite well that Norma’s eagerness stemmed from the fact that as every third meeting was held at the Gunns’ house it could only lead to more encounters between herself and Paul. . .

  Methodically Sylvia went through the list, telephoning the members to check that each was okay for the 21st. All except Norma. Her number was engaged. Not that Sylvia needed to worry; if there was one member she knew she could count on, that one was Norma.

  Pushing her papers away from her she turned in her chair and looked around her. No expense had been spared in this room. The rest of the furniture was as elegant as the desk on which her elbow rested, as elegant as that in the bedroom next door – the bedroom in which she slept alone – except on those nights when Paul would come to her and use her for the release of frustrations . . .

  That
’s how it had gone on. That’s how it would go on – unless something was done to stop it. Oh, she was safe enough, she knew; secure enough in the continuing of her material comforts. As much as Paul would like to see the back of her he’d never divorce her – or even leave her. He knew which side his bread was buttered, all right. Hence the comfort in which he kept her. And that, surely, was partly the reason for his resentment of her – the fact that he knew that they were irrevocably tied – in sickness and in health, for as long as they both should live – by his dependence upon her.

  And why, she sometimes asked herself, didn’t she leave him? But what would she do if she did? Paul wouldn’t support her, and she’d been trained for no particular occupation. For the past twenty-five years she’d known only this life – marriage to a man whose gratitude for her understanding had in no time worn threadbare.

  But for all of that, she thought, she could have put up with it – had it not been for his affairs. One after the other they had punctuated the years of their married life. And for that she was resentful – not just because of his infidelity and his rejection of her, but because he gave to those other women what he never gave, never had given, to her – not after the first few months of their courtship, anyway. Those other women – they were allowed to see only the best side of him – the cheerfulness, the gentlemanliness, the solicitousness. She, through her near-total acceptance of the real person, the person they never saw, was doomed to live with it, warts and all.

  She got up from the desk and stood there in the silent room. It couldn’t go on, though. And it wouldn’t. No, after the 21st it wouldn’t be the same. Come the 21st there’d be some changes made. Norma Russell would be the last, she’d make sure of that. After Norma there wouldn’t be any more affairs.

  When she got downstairs she found Paul on the phone. He started slightly when she suddenly appeared before him, and said shakily into the receiver, voice thick with guile and not a little guilt: