A gentle snore rose as the bedclothes sank. Instinctively she extended an elbow towards her husband’s back – then resisted the temptation. What good would it serve? It wouldn’t alter the simple, irrational fact: a smell of loam hung in the room, close, stifling, infecting the air…

And what if Bernard couldn’t smell it? Angry with herself for such neurotic imaginings, she turned out the light and, with difficulty, finally went back to sleep.

Immediately the nightmare was upon her again.

The setting was indistinct but it felt familiar. A bird calling, song soaring up through shimmering blue skies, up into the sun. Flowers, plump with scents, humming with bees and colour, open to the sun, grass new-mown breathing the sun. She bathed in sensations of relief, of release after pain. Elation.

Then, true to a fatal inevitability, the darkness crept in like a black plague and contaminated: the dream turned sour. Always things followed the same depressing direction. Always things decayed.

The bird song sharpened into stridency, a shrill of fear. A gust of stinging wind and stillness; the sun expanding, white. Then the first of the moans, low, insisting through the bending corn; and a dull pounding along the arteries of the earth promising panic and pain. Pain and panic pounding closer. The air heavy now with sobbing wails, the approach of some unnameable grief. Howls breaking deafeningly about her. A glimpse of stunted trees reaching black arms into a sky heaving with horrors she feared but could not understand. A face – dear heaven, the travesty of a face – lurched into hers, twisted and bubbled into sores and shapelessness. A weight of blistered misery, rotting into meaninglessness. Earth falling. At her feet earth, on her face earth, and between her fingers, writhing, the first of the worms. And everywhere that smell, unbearably familiar, suffocating. Struggling, she opened her mouth to protest, to scream. Why couldn’t she scream? Her lungs. Her mouth. Something was clogging her tongue…

And abruptly the bedroom walls reassembled themselves around her. There was Bernard bending over her, looking anxious.

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‘I’m looking for gin,’ confessed Myers. He reached out a hand.

‘Don’t touch me,’ said the girl. ‘Men!’ Her feathers nodded savagely. ‘One thing: that’s all you’re after.’

‘Gin, actually,’ said Myers. He introduced the tonic bottle into her line of vision and waved it about. She screamed. Myers retreated to a corner and wondered where Ronnie and Angela hid their bottle opener.

He watched the party.

It was loud and in high spirits; so was Felicity Farr. He pressed himself flat against the wall. But she found him. ‘It’s Myers!’ she said.

‘So it is,’ said Myers. ‘Still.’

‘You’re hiding again.’

‘Yes,’ said Myers.

People looked up curiously.

‘Everyone’s having fun,’ giggled Felicity.

‘Or having someone else.’

‘Especially those two by the foliage. No-one likes to ask who they are – but what a floor show! It’s all happening. Ronnie and Angela and Geoff are battling it out as usual in the kitchen. Come out and play.’ Felicity tugged at his arm and saw his face in the light for the first time. ‘Are you all right?’ she exclaimed. ‘My dear, you look positively grey. It’s so unfashionable. Has something happened?’

‘No,’ he said. But he felt the warmth of human contact and saw concern in her look. He realized he was still trembling. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, yes and no. Actually, it’s the car.’

‘Big end or tiny tappets, darling?’ said Felicity. ‘Sit down. Move that hand; she’s not using it. Have a sip of this. That dreadful girl with the feathers – she looks like something predatory that just escaped from a zoo – is hoarding the gin. Now, tell Felicity all about it.’ She beamed comfortingly and wove curls of his hair around her forefinger.

Myers sat back and began to unwind. ‘It’s a new car,’ he said. ‘I picked it up only tonight.’

‘New-old or new-new?’

‘Daimler; nineteen-sixty,’ said Myers.

‘Nearly vintage,’ said Felicity, delight emerging in a squeal. ‘How gorgeous! Bags of atmosphere.’

Myers shuddered. ‘That’s the problem,’ he whispered. He felt himself back in the car, felt a dark shadow moving in the blackness behind him. He sensed those eyes. ‘Bags of atmosphere,’ he said. And relaxing in the attentive warmth of Felicity’s caresses, he confessed to her, blundering through words in his attempts to convey experiences at once so intangible and so distressing, what he had felt earlier in the car.

‘A tall dark stranger in your back seat. You should be so lucky,’ she interpolated. But by the end of the story she was hugging her knees, rapt with attention.

‘And when you stopped there was really no one there?’ Felicity was enthralled.

‘No one,’ said Myers. ‘Nothing.’

‘My dear Myers,’ said Felicity Farr, her voice tremulous with excitement, ‘how simply awful!’ Her dramatic whisper penetrated the farthest reaches of the room. ‘Your car’s haunted! Something Very Nasty’s happened in that back seat. What a pity Lucy isn’t here.’

‘Haunted,’ said Myers gloomily. He drained the glass with a gulp. ‘A ghost in my machine!’

‘Something very sinister.’ Felicity’s eyes gleamed. ‘We’ll put ads in the paper,’ she said. ‘Won’t it be fun finding out!’

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Wake up, sleeping reader, and welcome to the Gothic basement. Equipped with every ancient inconvenience, every ingenious instrument guaranteed to enhance man’s inhumanity to man. Here may you die a thousand lingering deaths, each more exquisite and picturesque than the last. Throw off your slumberdown and leer! Stiffen up your sinews on the creaking rack and hear them snap and crackle, one by one, simple as cereal. Thrill with the lusty Iron Virgin – unrepeatable offer – dishonour before death! Double, double, toil and trouble; see the witches burn and bubble… O, ghoulish reader, here’s something unsavoury for every trembling palate: monsters of every denomination, unliving and undead; vampires, werewolves, goblins, tulpas; monsters no sooner named than born, doomed to haunt the world, sweeping on spectral wings to fulfil the latest charnel fashion, from the drizzling crags of Transylvania to the forbidden peaks and mysteries of Tibet.

Tibet. Tulpa. The thought-ghost. The word made – flesh? No! Away! I dare not think of that. The ancient fear, I see, still nags at my imagination. Hence, horrible shadow! Let us not break up the party. The tale is still untold, is yet unmade. Snuggle closer, dear reader. Throw a careless arm around my shoulder, if you will; I wish you would – for we are now (why do I lower my voice?) Within The Vault…

The man moved forward: three tentative steps, three swift, sure echoes. His eyes strained at the shadows, dancing grotesque harmonies to the candle’s feverish flame. The giant vats and cylinders, the suppurating crucibles and hissing wires of the previous month’s disastrous experiment loomed about him, silent ghosts of a life’s misguided dream. He reached up an arm, trembling anew with fresh-remembered horrors, to ignite a flambeau set in the cavern walls and

For the chamber is conceived, you will appreciate, in the low, pseudo-scientific style, after the not-so-blithe spirit of Shelley, Mary… Bear with me, reader. I parry phantoms. Can we not laugh before we shudder? No: I merely procrastinate. Must I go on?

gasped.

‘Bats,’ I hear you murmur, gentle, companionable reader, setting down your empty mug beside the digital radio-alarm. ‘Vaults have bats. Bats are compulsory,’ you add, in kindly admonishment, as you attempt to hug your knees and prop open your book in one deftly synchronous movement. Which usually fails. In my experience.

He brushed a cobweb from his ear,

There! Bat thou never wert!

and lit the torch. What scenes of devastation and trampled hope lay before him in all that shattered glass, those dripping tubes. He who had thought to bring salvation to the world. He who had sought to make life pulse in veins where none had pulsed before. He who had presumed to fuse the strengths of beast and man in one unholy union. Passions contended in his heavy heart: remorse with rage, grief with disenchantment,

Delete whichever you deem inapplicable.

but fear supplanted all. Trembling, head bowed, he followed the trail of blood and foetid slime to the centre of this subterranean womb. He fell to his knees, staring at the ring of the rocky slab as if attempting to perceive what still lay there in the darkness below, to determine whether the aborted Thing had survived the horrendous struggle to chain and fling it into the pit,

The pit again. Reader, are you here? Stay close. I’ve brought us to the edge.

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‘But my dear,’ purred the friend, whose devoted amity was in fact focussed more on Mr Forsyth than his wife, ‘who needs Stonehenge for a party? What about those quaint old stone rings and temple things they’re just digging up in the wilds of wherever it is? It was on the holonews the other day. All jungles and mountains. South America? Mexico, maybe? Somewhere quite unpronounceable and deliciously barbaric. My dear, how exotic: it would be the party to end all parties. And one in the eye for that Wyndsor woman.’

Zazine’s eyes glittered behind the calm elegance she habitually wore. She nodded with casual complacence, smiled a dismissal, and went off to consult and instruct her husband in his capacity as Chairman of Laser Technocrafts, World Division. The screen located him on a consultation visit in Zanzibar and called him across the room with a discreetly triumphant bleep.

‘Darling,’ she said, her voice low, thrilling, and suspect. ‘I want to help you.’

His features rearranged themselves several times as he contrived to remain simultaneously aloof and wary. He was more accustomed these days to receiving statements of fate accomplished than offers of assistance.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said.

Despite himself, he inched closer to the beamscreen, and cleared his throat.

‘It’s a promotion idea,’ she said.

He paused.

‘Another party?’ he asked.

She hesitated.

‘Another party,’ he said.

She was piqued at his predictability and prescience. ‘It’s that new laserscan thing,’ she said, overplaying the role of the big tycoon’s little wife which so ill became her and always put her husbands back on their guard. ‘What did your advertising people call it? The History Machine? You brought the prototype home, remember, and we put a pebble in it.’

‘The Resurrection Machine,’ he said glumly. ‘We cancelled the project. A no-go market situation, they said.’

Her eyebrows arched. ‘But we were there! Back in those prehistoric swamps. All in our own holoview chamber. With those ghosts and memories alive all round us.’ Passion and persuasion raised her voice a seductive semitone. ‘We even heard

those strange beasts howling.’

‘You were frightened,’ he said.

She smiled faintly, repressing a reminiscent shudder. ‘It was so’ – words eluded her – ‘so appallingly primitive, darling.’

George Forsyth glanced at the time, sent a secretary scurrying. ‘Marketing were quite definite,’ he said. ‘They had the figures.’ He recalled the director’s smiling incredulity. ‘A device for decoding the oscillations imprinted in natural materials and recreating them in holovisual playback! Try creating a demand for that, sir!’

‘The project was shelved, dear,’ he told the screen. ‘Definitely. Indefinitely.’

Zazine Forsyth was undeterred. She always got her way. She knew it. All her husbands knew it – eventually. ‘We’ll make plans over supper, dear,’ she said. ‘And this time we won’t use pebbles for playback.’

Her husband sighed. He knew his stars. ‘At least you’ve given up this Stonehenge party nonsense,’ he said.

‘Of course, darling.’ Her smile was saccharine. ‘Mexico is always so much more – evocative. Especially with next month’s solar eclipse.’

The Forsyth face froze abruptly. ‘Mexico?’

‘Quantahatapotec,’ said his wife, ‘actually.’

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