By Charlie Hughes
This is not an introduction. It is training, preparation.
Introductions are supposed to go like this: “Dear reader, you have made a wise purchase and you will enjoy what follows for reason x, y or z.”
I should drone on for a few pages, recounting some droll anecdote about the first time I met the author of this book at a horror/fantasy convention in the 1990s, how I was charmed by their engaging personality and dry humour, all the while intimating that I too am a damn fine sort. You know how it goes. The glib lack of self-awareness, the insider references, the glowing praise for all that follows.
On and on it would go, inevitably turning to the favourite subject of all established writers of horror and the uncanny: their unjust exclusion from the literary canon. How dare they, the critics, look down on us? Our horrors are as poetic and elegant as anything venerated by the snobs and coffee house bores. Blah, blah, blah.
I know what you expect me to write. But something different is required.
Let’s start with the basics. I’ve never met the author and have only a vague idea who they are. I was commissioned to write this introduction by a publisher who probably doesn’t exist, via an agent who is already dead. I will not reveal my own name, not because I wish to be mysterious, but to avoid distracting you from more pressing matters. I only agreed to write it because I did something the other old-time writers rarely do when asked to pen an introduction – I read the entire book, cover to cover before starting work. Once I was finished, it was already too late. The die was cast.
Here are some things I doknow. This is the final edition of this book. There will be no more reprints and certainly no sequel. Then again, how could there be?
What else? You did not buy this book in a shop or from any online retailer, obscure or otherwise. Neither are you following these words on an electronic device.
In fact, I’ll wager, right now, you are struggling to recall how the book came into your possession in the first place. Did you borrow it from a friend? Find it on a shelf while clearing the detritus from a dead parent’s home? Or were there copies handed out at last week’s book club meeting. There are many possibilities, but none of them stick in the mind. That’s the difference with The Collection. It is slippery.
The stories you’ll find within will, at times, feel familiar. You have spent a lifetime reading books of this type: anthologies and collections filled with nightmares, monsters and ghouls. Story after story over-flowing with imagined darkness. They mix and meld, don’t they? Ideas and tropes and plot twists bleeding into each other. But The Collection uses this familiarity to draw you into an altogether more disturbing world. It will impart some uncomfortable truths about life, the universe and your own place within it.
This occurs slowly, both within each tale and cumulatively. When you set down the book between readings, go to prepare dinner or switch off the bedside light and rest your head on the pillow, you will be left with a peculiar sense of wrongness. This is the same troubling discomfort that accompanies the childhood memory you would never share, not even with your most intimate confidant. You know the one, the brow-furrowing recollection which cannot be explained without stepping beyond the bounds of rational understanding. The one you try to avoid.
In my own case, it is the time I stood at the top of the steep second floor stairs as a toddler, musing what would happen if I leapt all the way from the top to the landing below. Small children are capable of lethal bouts of curiosity. This was mine.
I jumped. What happened next constitutes, I suppose, a happy ending and yet the clear memory of it has always troubled me. I did not plunge to the floor below, breaking my limbs or cracking open my head. I floated down, entirely in control, like a ballet dancer winched into centre stage. For just a few seconds, I was in flight, then my sockless toes touched down onto the wooden floor with the gentleness of a mother’s kiss.
I have often wished that I’d been hurt, instead of having to deal with the inexplicable. It was a hint of the otherness inside me, a quality I did not wish to nurture. The early stories in The Collection nudge you towards this empty feeling, leaving gaps in the narrative which the reader is forced to fill.
What will it be for you? Ghostly visitations, miraculous occurrences, words heard which cannot be forgotten? Or the time you got lost in the supermarket and it took three full hours to be ‘reunited’ with two people who said they were your parents? No two readers experience the same book, it is true, but The Collection will make you look upon your memories of wrongness anew.
This ‘softening’ process will make you uncomfortable. By the time you reach the fourth story, you will want to stop reading entirely. But The Collection will not be cast aside with pious promises to return. Once you’ve begun, it must be finished. Several readers have attempted to destroy their copies and forget the whole sorry experience. It never ends well for them, and neither would it for you. Be good and begin reading the fourth story.
As you will see from the contents, the title of this tale is called ‘The Cleansing Soil’. Its primary themes are death, decomposition and the innate ability of human beings to commit acts of unspeakable evil without even the flimsiest of justification. It is told from the first-person point of view of a character who may or may not be the author of The Collection. You will not enjoy this story. It is a marker, a promise of what is to come in the remainder of the book.
At this point, you will start to get questions from those closest to you. Your children may ask why the evening meal has not been placed on the table. Your partner will want to know why you are eschewing physical contact, everything from sex to minor acts of physical affection. Story five (‘Anorak’) is the point at which most people stop going to work. You will hide this development from your family for a while, sitting all day in the car or on the bus, avoiding the routine which is so desperate to swallow you up. But no matter how hard you try, eventually someone notices. Your boss calls or maybe it’s the money no longer appearing in the bank account.
For you, the world is now divided into two groups. Those who have read (or are reading) The Collection and those who have not. The chasm between them is unbridgeable and it is better to accept this without struggle.
Take your time. Nod and smile when they make their pleas. Keep the book itself out of sight. Hide it in the same place you keep your other secrets. That drawer beneath your wardrobe with the old-fashioned lock or tucked behind the box of rusty garden tools you keep in the basement.
The pace of your reading will increase. Instead of consuming one story at a time, you will swallow them down in bigger chunks. The next three tales see the emergence of a recurring character. It is best not to share their name here, but let you reach it at the appropriate place. Conventional interpretation would designate this character an ‘anti-hero’, but that does not capture the full extent of it. She does things which transgress your understanding of what humans are capable of. Your world is expanding. Your received morality is collapsing inside you. Previously unquestioned judgements of right and wrong no longer apply. The character in stories six to eight can no longer be designated hero/villain/anti-hero because those labels no longer have meaning.
Reading the stories will become painful. Physically. Your head will pulse with a migraine-like ache. Your neck will prickle with a white heat reminiscent of the terrible fever you experienced as a child. It is not lack of sleep causing this, but the new ideas the book is introducing. We are not built to retain such information and it will take time to adapt.
Your loved ones and family will stage interventions, calling in medical professionals, your nearest and dearest begging you to come out of the stasis which they believe has infected you. They will ask why you are disintegrating in front of their eyes, why you appear to lack the motivation to roll out of bed in the morning. It is important that you do not tell them about The Collection. If they remove your copy you will not be able to finish the stories, and that would be catastrophic for everyone concerned. Hide it away.
The final stories in The Collection have a more experimental theme and format. One, titled ‘The Story’ could be described as meta-horror. No matter how turgid you have found this self-indulgent sub-genre in the past, you will persist with it and then move on to the next.
The final stories are less disturbing, less obviously horrific than what came before. The subtext is more subtle. The violence and gore, omnipresent in the earlier tales, is replaced by a quieter aesthetic. Each one is set in the same small rural town, a nowhere place in a nondescript county in the middle of England. The town is never named but the description and noted position of landmarks mean it is child’s play to find on a map.
The last story is set in the near future and relates the details of a prophesy, and a mission for the town’s inhabitants. The date of the final, climactic event is never mentioned, but in reading the story you will become aware of a date and a time in the not-too-distant future. You will see what will come to pass, even though this is never fully described.
At this point, your family will breathe a sigh of relief. With the book finished, you will come out of your stupor, finally washing yourself, eating, and agreeing to see the doctor. Slowly, but surely you will return to the rhythms of routine you practiced prior to reading The Collection. But this is just a distraction, an act. You are changed, transformed entirely from the person you were before, and nobody will suspect a thing.
Your mind is already a caterpillar in its chrysalis.
You know the town. And you know the date. Most importantly of all, you know what will happen in only a few years’ time.
You will say nothing. You will smile and work and play games with your children. You will fuck your partner and get fucked by your employer. Proceed with the whole meaningless charade for one reason and one reason only: to exist in the world on the date in question.
When it comes, you will exit your life and go to the town. You will be in precisely the correct place at precisely the right time.
Meanwhile, there is only one more task to complete.
You do not need to keep The Collection. Every single word, dot and comma is carved into your psyche. It will not be forgotten. You must not be selfish. It needs a new friend.
Use your imagination. Go to a library in a town hundreds of miles from your home and place it on a shelf. Post it to a random address. Leave it on the bus. Don’t worry, The Collection will not come to any harm. It cannot be destroyed.
You have your instructions. Fate has chosen you for this task. Read on. Take care. I will see you when the time is right.
* * *
Charlie Hughes writes dark suspense and horror stories. He lives in London with his wife and two children. His work has been published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, NoSleep Podcast and Flame Tree Press. His story ‘The Collection’ (a different story to the one printed here with a similar name) was recently reprinted in the Ellen Datlow edited ‘Best Horror of the Year, Vol 15’. His story ‘The Motley’ will appear in volume 16 of the same series later this year. Outside of writing, Charlie enjoys following his beloved Liverpool Football Club and nursing an obsession with indie bands from the ’90s Britpop era.