Kzine Issue 10 Read online

  KZINE MAGAZINE

  Issue 10

  Edited by Graeme Hurry

  Kzine Issue 10 © September 2014 by Kimota Publishing

  cover © Dave Windett, 2014

  Editorial © Mark Morris, 2014

  Krampus © Paul Finch, 2014

  Cockroaches © Ryan Priest, 2014

  Learning To Fight © Dawn Lloyd, 2014

  Bad Habits © Colin Heintze, 2014

  Dumpside © D.L. Young, 2014

  Renewal © Tim McDaniel, 2014

  On The Windy Plains © Philip Roberts, 2014

  The Last Frame © Jon Arthur Kitson, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holder. For editorial content this is Graeme Hurry, for stories it is the individual author, for artwork it is the artist.

  CONTENTS

  Guest Editorial by Mark Morris

  KRAMPUS by Paul Finch (16)

  COCKROACHES by Ryan Priest (6)

  LEARNING TO FIGHT by Dawn Lloyd (12)

  BAD HABITS by Colin Heintze (20)

  DUMPSIDE by D.L. Young (10)

  RENEWAL by Tim McDaniel (2)

  ON THE WINDY PLAINS by Philip Roberts (9)

  THE LAST FRAME by Jon Arthur Kitson (6)

  Contributor Notes

  The number in brackets indicates the approximate printed page length of the story.

  GUEST EDITORIAL

  by Mark Morris

  Once more I have managed to persuade a professional author to provide an editorial as I have run out of ideas. Mark Morris is an author of many superb horror novels, genre novelisations and is now an editor in his own right.

  Graeme Hurry

  As this is an editorial, let’s talk about editing.

  I developed my abiding, life-long love for horror fiction through reading anthologies. I’d been drawn to the dark stuff before that – as a kid growing up in Hong Kong I remember coveting copies of comics and magazines like Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery and Famous Monsters of Filmland, which I would see on the magazine rack in our little local supermarket. And I loved Doctor Who – always have, always will. Back then it was almost exclusively the monsters that attracted me – though, having said that, the emotions I most closely associate with my earliest ‘monster’ encounters (the Yeti, Cybermen and Autons in Doctor Who; stills from The Tingler, The Wolfman and Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera and London After Midnight in Famous Monsters; an accidental glimpse of a TV showing of zombie gangsters going on the rampage at the climax of Creature with the Atom Brain) are of being simultaneously fascinated and terrified almost to the point of trauma. But despite my terror, I kept going back; I couldn’t help it. Each time I got my fingers burnt I would retreat for a while to nurse my wounds, and then eventually, inevitably, I would emerge with an almost overwhelming desire to stick my hand in the flame once again.

  We came back to England from Hong Kong in 1972, when I was nine, and I’m pretty sure it was at my cousin’s house where I set eyes on my first proper horror anthology, The 7th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, with its (at the time) evocative bubble-lettered logo and its photo-cover of a rat slinking between test tubes on a laboratory bench. This may have been the first horror anthology I read, having begged my cousin for a borrow, but my most intense horror-reading experience (as I’ve recounted elsewhere on several occasions, so apologies if you’ve heard this before) took place on New Year’s Eve 1975, when, staying at a friend’s house on a camp bed in a ground floor box room, I scared myself to such an extent reading The Eleventh Pan Book of Horror Stories that I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the stories per se that terrified me, but the way they worked on my imagination when I turned out the light. In the darkness I imagined I could hear the rustling of unknown things creeping towards my bed; imagined that unfamiliar shapes – a pile of boxes, a coat hanging on the back of a wardrobe door – were crouching or looming figures.

  Although I worked myself into a state of hysteria that night, and drifted into an exhausted sleep only when pearly dawn light started to seep in through the curtains, that experience helped cement a burgeoning love affair with horror fiction – and more particularly, short horror fiction.

  Over the next few years, as I moved from adolescence into my teens, I devoured all the Pan and Fontana Horror and Ghost story anthologies, the Armada Ghost, Monster and SF books, and numerous other anthologies besides, many of which were edited by the likes of Peter Haining and Richard Davis. By the time I discovered horror fiction in novel form – a glorious double-whammy of Stephen King and James Herbert – I had read literally hundreds of short stories, and had a solid, though haphazard, grounding in the works of many classic genre writers such as M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, L.P. Hartley, Ambrose Bierce, Elizabeth Bowen, and dozens more.

  I’ve said it before, but it’s always worth saying again – for me, short horror fiction is both the backbone and the lifeblood of the horror genre. I adore a good horror novel, but there’s something incredibly evocative, even magical, about those mass-market horror anthologies from the 60s and 70s. They were cheaply-made and their often photographic covers were invariably unimaginative and shabbily thrown together, but there were such wonders and terrors to be found within their pages that – for me – they were often elevated way beyond their lowly status, to become things of rare and cherishable beauty.

  It’s perhaps not surprising, therefore, that ever since becoming a professional writer myself in 1988, I have harboured an ambition to resurrect those halcyon days of my youth and to edit my own non-themed annual anthology of horror and/or ghost stories. Now, over quarter of a century later, that ambition has finally been realized. Late last year I sent out a mass email to around sixty writers inviting submissions to The Spectral Book of Horror Stories. As I write we’re about five weeks away from our launch date at the British Fantasy Convention in York and I couldn’t be happier with the line-up of writers I’ve managed to attract to the project and with the fantastic stories they’ve produced. My ambition is for The Spectral Book of Horror Stories to have a long life, and for it to become an annual showcase for genre excellence. However, what would please me more than anything else would be for the anthology – not just this volume, but future volumes too – to terrify and inspire the next generation of horror writers in the same way that the anthologies of the 60s and 70s terrified and inspired me.

  KRAMPUS

  by Paul Finch

  Grandpa Ludwig didn’t usually participate on Christmas Day when we all gathered around the fire after dinner and urged the adults to tell ghost stories. Part of the time it was because he was asleep, but also, I think, it was because he didn’t enjoy such things. We all knew he’d had a difficult time as a child. It’s not everyone who can boast that his father was condemned in absentia to die by the guillotine, even if he did live to tell the tale, but Grandpa Ludwig was of such an age by this time – seventy-five at least – that he surely had no real memories of those dark and deadly days. In addition, his father had been a great storyteller, an author of children’s fiction as famous in Germany at one time as Enid Blyton was in England, so it hardly seemed possible that Grandpa Ludwig had not inherited at least a smidgen of that talent.

  As such, one year, when it was plain that Grandpa Ludwig was wide awake after dinner, laughing uproariously with the other adults, mince pie in hand, paper crown perched at a jaunty angle on his balding pa
te, we urged him to start off the annual ghost story game by telling us one of his own. Grandpa was very thoughtful for a moment or two. He took a sip of port wine, before nodding gravely and saying that, yes, it was time he told us all his ghost story.

  His choice of phrase quite surprised me. The notion that, all along, he’d possessed a ghost story that was exclusively his own, and that for so many years he’d been withholding it – who knew for what reason? – was an eerie and mysterious concept.

  I remember how we youngsters huddled together on the carpet in front of the fire, legs crossed, and how my mum turned the lights down, as she always did on this occasion, leaving only the faint glow of the candles on the Christmas cake and the orange embers in the hearth to reflect our rapt attention. Grandpa Ludwig took off his spectacles, polished them with his handkerchief, and then pinched the bridge of his nose, a sure sign I would later learn, that the event he was about to recount came from memory, not imagination.

  Most of you will know that my father and his brother, Klaus, were not identical twins, but that they were twins and as children they were so alike that many people could not tell them apart. Of course, in terms of temperament and personality, they could not have been more different.

  My own recollections of Uncle Klaus are that he was more physically imposing than my father; he was tall and athletically built, with shining blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. A more idealised Aryan male there could not have been, though I didn’t understand that philosophy at the time. Nor did I really notice how relations between my father and his brother, while not exactly hostile, were never better than cool. At least, that was always the case during my lifetime. Of course I knew nothing about father’s refusal to join the Hitler Youth in 1927, which had meant that my family – Uncle Klaus’s family, more to the point – was regarded with suspicion for a brief time.

  The one thing about Uncle Klaus I didn’t like was the scar on his left cheek. It was not a particularly awful one – little more than a horizontal white line, but even to my childhood eyes, it gave him a colder, crueler aspect. Apparently it had been caused when he’d run into a barbed wire fence while playing outdoors as a toddler, but he was always rather proud of it, or so my father would later say, telling anyone who asked that it was a dueling scar, as if he was the scion of a Prussian aristocrat rather than the son of a small-town Bavarian solicitor.

  The last time I ever saw Uncle Klaus was in 1939, and though I was still very young, I had some vague notion that Germany was on the eve of war. He was wearing a uniform when he came to see us. Many times in the past he’d been in uniform – uniforms were quite commonplace in those days – but this one was jet black and it sported the SS Sig Runes on its collar and the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head, as they could call it here in England, on its armband. I don’t think Uncle Klaus had come with the express intention of warning my father that he was in imminent danger, but I was sent to my room while the adults discussed matters, and so fierce was the resulting argument that I heard it through the floorboards. Snatches of that dispute still remain in my memory.

  “Will you continue writing fairy stories while the world burns, Eric?” my uncle demanded to know.

  “What does it matter if I do?” my father replied.

  “It matters if they call you ‘traitor’ for it.”

  “Never once have I written or spoken a word of treason.”

  “Nor have you written against it. Is it not the case that, several times now, you have been invited to supply poems, ballads and books in honour of our cause, and have always refused? We stand on the brink of a great destiny, and yet you – a man of widespread influence – seem determined to disapprove of it.”

  “Klaus, I am not a political writer.”

  “Eric, not everyone agrees with that …”

  Before Uncle Klaus finally left, I came to the top of the stairs in tears. I might have been a child, but I was not a fool; I knew the sound of irreparable damage when I heard it. He glanced up as he pulled his hat down over his brow and climbed into his long leather coat; his expression was one of deep regret, but also bitter anger and betrayal. He spoke to me, but I was in too anguished a state at the time to make sense of his words.

  We left our home the very next day, not just our house, but Germany itself. I have almost no memory of that rushed dawn departure as I apparently slept through most of it.

  Grandpa Ludwig sipped his port.

  The mood had turned rapidly and unexpectedly sombre. His family’s narrow escape from Nazi Germany had never been the easiest topic of conversation. His writer father, though he’d adopted England as his new abode, had been haunted to the end of his days by his inability to reconcile himself with a homeland whose history and culture he had loved but which had been subverted to such a ghastly degree that he no longer knew it. Grandpa Ludwig, of course, had barely experienced Germany. He now had only the faintest discernible accent, and though his early days were undoubtedly difficult – a boy named Weidmann living in postwar Britain! – he soon adapted to his new home and in time became as English as Winston Churchill.

  Perhaps this was why, after another contemplative sip or two, he was able to continue with his narrative. Though his mood was no lighter. Far from it.

  We must move forward now, to the Christmas Eve of 1948.

  To an eleven-year-old those pre-war days already seemed a receding memory, but the good times had not yet returned. Britain was a land of food rationing, bombed cities and bereaved families. Ironically, though my family were immigrants, our position was better than some. My father had learned to speak English, but never to a standard where he might write in that tongue, at least not with the same eloquence he’d shown when writing in German. However, he was able to teach, so we had regular money and a reasonably comfortable home in the suburbs. My two best friends at the time were Billy Flynn and Peter Osgood, boys from the same road in which I lived and fellow pupils at the Catholic school I attended. Both their fathers had fought in the war, and survived – one had even been present at the relief of Belsen – so to them any German who’d annoyed the Nazis to the point where they’d driven him into exile was someone to be admired. Hence, they never treated me like an outsider.

  Hard though youngsters may find it to believe now, on the Christmas Eve in question we were required to attend school as if it were any normal day. We had a two-week holiday, but it only commenced the following morning on Christmas Day. For all that, our teachers were kind enough to release us at lunchtime, so Billy, Peter and I took the opportunity to divert through the town centre on our way home. There was a raw, wintry feel that afternoon. The snow that had fallen the previous week had thawed a little, but had later frozen again, and great, dirty mounds of it were now piled at the end of each pavement. The gutters and bus shelters sparkled with icicles; white frost covered every branch and blade of grass. We were well wrapped in our coats and scarves; we had our balaclavas and our woolen mittens. Even so, there is only so much one can do to fend off that depth of cold, but we were determined to endure it because a great treat awaited us.

  The English version of our German Saint Nikolaus is of course Father Christmas. They share much in common. Both are fat, jolly men with white curls and white beards. They wear warm winter robes and dispense presents to good children. There are some differences. In Germany, Saint Nikolaus would visit homes on the eve of December 6th, whereas in England, Father Christmas would visit on Christmas Eve itself. While Saint Nikolaus bore ecclesial accoutrements – for instance, he wore a mitre and carried a crozier – the English Father Christmas had a druidic air; there was something in his makeup of the old spirit of winter, which, looking on it as an adult, seems almost pagan to me. But even so, in England, as in Germany, children were taught that this benign figure was a saint, beloved of Christ, so his magical gifts were to be welcomed and adored. As a small side-matter … in Germany, St. Nikolaus had a shadowy other-self, little known and an entirely dissimilar personality. But more about him later. />
  The purpose of our diversion into the centre of town that Christmas Eve was concerned neither with Saint Nikolaus nor Father Christmas, but in fact with Santa Claus, their American counterpart, newly introduced to the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the war. Santa Claus, though in many ways indistinguishable from his European brethren, had one very unique attribute: he could actually be spoken to; he would sit children on his knee and they could request their presents face-to-face. I’m talking of course about the famous department store Santa Claus, who had been a fixture in American cities since the turn of the previous century, and now at last had come to Britain.

  The department store in question was Halley & Meredith’s, whose palatial residence was in the very centre of our town, in a space, if I recall correctly, which is now occupied by a wine bar, a Poundstretcher and a kebab shop. At the time we referred to Halley & Meredith’s as ‘posh’, though in truth it would probably have seemed fairly second rate compared to Harrods in London or Kendals in Manchester. But it occupied a great baroque building, and its frontal canopy was hung with international flags. It even had its own taxi rank outside, the implication being that the sort of people who shopped at Halley & Meredith’s could easily afford to take cabs. One entered the premises through revolving doors, assuming that the concierge on duty – a dapper chap with a military air, wearing a shell grey overcoat with gold braid at his shoulders – would permit you access. Under normal circumstances it seemed highly possible that three schoolboys lacking the governance of their parents would be refused, but this was Christmas Eve and everyone was excited and in a good mood, and in any case, Santa Claus was waiting inside. Or was it Father Christmas or Saint Nikolaus? Or someone else?

  Halley & Meredith’s seemed vast and crowded that day; we trekked past Scarves, Gloves And Hats, past Cosmetics, past Haberdashery, past Men’s Tailoring, past Ladies’ Shoes, all locations which, when I’d been present with my mother, had signified hours of tedium. But now, to see them decked with tinsel and boughs of evergreen was almost too much for an eleven-year-old to take – our sense of thrill rose inexorably, and of course we still had the ‘Christmas Grotto’ at the end of it all. We finally found this hallowed place down at the basement level, a venue normally reserved for tools and gardening equipment, though now it had become a magical kingdom.