Dead Water and Other Weird Tales by David A. Sutton (2015).
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Zulu's War
A soldier has returned home, haunted by memories of desert war atrocities in which he was a participant. The flashbacks center on a small trophy he took, and which something wants back.
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The Fetch
An excellent story about an unbelieving college student who runs afoul of a classmate claiming uncanny powers.
....Finch munched down the hamburger voraciously. He realised that he hadn't eaten since lunch time. He slurped the hot coffee into his mouth, withdrawing the cup from his lips hastily as they burned. Several youths were playing the pin tables with a kind of dedicated fervour, the sound of the balls rolling and pinging against the buffers, the colours and glow of the lights, giving him a sense of assurance. An old juke box with a domed plastic top began to issue music. It was 'Strawberry Fields'. Jesus, Finch thought, how many years has that been in there? He got up and went to look at the selection of titles. The little, badly typed cards were yellowed with grease and age. He made out something he fancied. 'Mr Pleasant' by the Kinks drove away the fantasy world of the Beatles suddenly, and he felt alone. The song cut him with its allusions, its satire he used to love now grating on his nerves. It sacrificed people in song. It tore down solid thought-of walls. He hated those walls, those establishment niceties, but he didn't want them taken away.
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Return to the Runes
The grown son of John Harrington meets a relative of Karswell named Adryan Marlowe, who fills him in on his father's death.
Philip Harrington visits Lufford with Marlowe. Then:
....The next aspect of the story did not occur until some weeks later, it being of no import to relate the intervening period in the life of Philip Harrington, except to say that he returned to London in a cheerful enough frame of mind, with extra knowledge of the slaying of his father and, of course, with the complimentary copy of Karswell's book.
He did not read History of Witchcraft immediately. Indeed, his business took up much of his time in the day, and a social life which consumed the theatre and the opera in the metropolis, his evenings.
It was one such evening, after witnessing a particularly enjoyable performance of the final act of Wagner's The Ring, The Twilight of the Gods, that Philip returned home blissfully to his apartment in Olerenshaw Mews. He was glad to be out of his evening suit and able to remove his collar, which was new and had rubbed a small rash on his neck. He sat, kicking off his shoes while pouring out a large whiskey from a half-full decanter. As he sat, his eyes happened upon the book which Marlowe had given to him, which had lain in his bureau along with various papers on which he was working. He decided he would retire to bed with the book. It was about time he read it and wrote to Marlowe thanking him for the weekend he had spent in Warwick. Something, laziness perhaps, had held him back from writing. Perhaps the disquiet he had felt persuaded him to desist for the time being. Either way, if he read the book now, he would have no excuse but to respond by thanking his host at Fairholm.
Philip had lapsed into sleep not long after he began to read. In fact, only four pages had been turned when the volume slipped from his hand on to the bed and fell shut. The next day he would not even be able to remember one word of those four short pages. Despite being very tired, Philip did not sleep peacefully all night. At three a.m. he woke to the foggy bells of nearby St James's. Outside his bedroom window was a stuffy, smog-cloaked night and the heat of it penetrated his room to such an extent that he found himself wet with perspiration. His pyjamas clung to him, leaving him with a distinctly un-comfortable feeling, so he decided to rise and change into a fresh pair. As he did so, the darkness about him and the cloying nature of the atmosphere wrought themselves upon his con-sciousness. For no sound reason apparently, he was aware of something in the room. Nothing moved to suggest that a presence lurked in shadow, but his instincts rose like bile within him.
He shook off the sensation, moving towards the window where a glimmer of faint, sickly yellow light filtered up from the gas lamp outside. The cupboard was next to the window, its door opening against the frame so that the feeble light was all but smothered and, as he put his hand into the black pit of the cupboard to obtain his fresh night-clothes, his hand entered, as it were, a moist, fleshy mouth. He felt spiny, cold teeth begin to close on his wrist before pulling back with a frightened gasp. The cupboard door was slammed shut with a clatter and Philip, choking a cry, fought back for his bed and escape from the terrifying hallucination which he had experienced....
Sutton does a very good job with making this tale more than a pastiche. It may not attain to the level of Reggie Oliver's "Between Four Yews," but it is a brief and satisfying blade of nemesis.
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Night Soil Man
A tale told in dialect about a chimbley sweep and excrement engineer sharing a special relationship with Saucy Jack.
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Dead Water
A superb tale about old birding friends on vacation to the salt marshes in the south of France. Ghastly, ghoulish, and perfect.
....Earlier in the week, when the four of them had been touring the ancient fortress town of Aigues-Mortes, he had learned about the 'tower of the salted Bourguignons' and a horrific episode during the Hundred Years' War. Planting the bodies of the defeated Burgundians in the shallow, foetid swamp in the thirteenth century was not an option if the rest of the population wanted to remain in good health, so the Armagnacs stuffed the corpses in the tower and preserved them with layers of salt. But Brian never found out what happened to them later on. It was never explained, but at some point those bodies would have had to be removed from the tower and be disposed of. What if they were secretly deposited in the salt marsh? To be feasted upon by fish and birds and muskrats and flies... Getting rid of your enemies in the marshes seemed somehow the more sensible option to Brian. He could imagine that, down the centuries, enemies, robbers, vagabonds, murdered waifs and the politically assassinated might become the disappeared of their time. Rotting, stinking, maggot-bloated corpses, floating to release the multitude of flies, then sinking and decomposing, eventually providing nutrients for the swamp's flora. And so with that grisly image, Brian's day wound leisurely towards its end...
Thankfully the magnificent sunset had diverted his thoughts....
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Waking
The protagonist slips lives between the life in the everyday, as a sniper-shot G.I. in Vietnam, and a fate something worse.
....The cold air began to liven him up, even at six o'clock. Any moment now and the radio alarm would burst into life and the animated a.m. deejay would enact his rituals after the news broadcast. A minute or two passed in this way when he began to think that perhaps his alarm wasn't going to sing out after all. Notably, he thought, this usually happens after a Good Session. In a drunken high it was easy to scorn the radio's infallibility to wake him up. Easy to dismiss the inexorable onslaught of the next day, so why not put paid to the alarm and yank the plug from its socket? He'd done that often enough after a binge, and not quite remembered the next day.
The silence finally ate at his thoughts, told him to be sensible; he couldn't afford to be late for work. He had a responsible career ahead of him. Just open one eye and take a peek at the clock. If it was earlier than six, fine, have another forty, fifty or sixty winks. If, on the other hand, it was around the half dozen since midnight, he'd just have to sigh and take it like a man; and get up!
Finally he opened both eyes.
And screamed.
Shrieked!
His sky was purple and there was no shadowed ceiling over his head. But he knew that he was encased in something. Perspex, a clear something through which no sound issued. In the intervening space between Richard and the puce sky several things paced. He wanted to describe those horrors to himself, those blubbering, drooling reptilian lips and sharp green eyes, narrow slits of hate. And hands that had evolved for millennia more than human hands, more dextrous in their capabilities to saw, slit and dissect what they held in them. The barbed hooks on their chests from which hung their prey whilst the vivisection went calmly ahead. The silent, screaming human faces above the red meat that hung below. Most of all he wanted to go back to another dream, back to the torment in the Vietnamese forest if needs must....
❖
Jay
26 May 2020
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