No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories: The Best Macabre Stories of Brian Lumley Copyright © 2012 by Brian Lumley. All rights reserved.
Dust jacket and interior illustrations Copyright © 2012 by Bob Eggleton.
All rights reserved.
Print version interior design Copyright © 2012 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-658-8
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
www.subterraneanpress.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Introduction” © Brian Lumley March 2011, and new to this collection. “Fruiting Bodies”, Weird Tales No. 291, Summer 1988, Terminus Publishing Co. “The Sun, the Sea, and the Silent Scream”, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Feb 1988, Mercury Press. “The Picnickers”, Final Shadows, Ed. Charles L. Grant, 1991, Doubleday. “The Viaduct”, Superhorror, Ed. Ramsey Campbell, 1976, W. H. Allen. “The Luststone”, Weird Tales, Fall 1991, Terminus Publishing Co. “The Whisperer”, Frights, Ed. Kirby McCauley, 1976, St. Martin’s Press. “No Sharks in the Med”, Weird Tales No. 295, Winter 1989/90, Terminus Publishing Co. “The Pit-Yakker”, Weird Tales No. 294, Fall 1989, Terminus Publishing Co. “The Place of Waiting”, The Ghost Quartet, Ed. Marvin Kaye, 2008, TOR Books. “The Man who Killed Kew Gardens”, Dark Homage, 2004. “My Thing Friday”, Dark Delicacies, Eds. Howison and Gelb, 2005, Carroll and Graf. “The Disapproval of Jeremy Cleave”, Weird Tales No. 295, Winter 1989/90, Terminus Publishing Co.
— “For Barbara Ann” —
Contents
Introduction
Fruiting Bodies
The Sun, the Sea, and the Silent Scream
The Picnickers
The Viaduct
The Luststone
The Whisperer
No Sharks in the Med
The Pit-Yakker
The Place of Waiting
The Man Who Killed Kew Gardens
My Thing Friday
The Disapproval of Jeremy Cleave
Introduction
In 2007 Subterranean Press honoured me by publishing The Taint and Other Stories in a deluxe hardcover edition signed by both Bob Eggleton—who painted the fabulous wraparound jacket and also did the interior illustrations—and myself. That volume was followed a year later by a companion volume, Haggopian and Other Stories, in a format that duplicated the superb production values of The Taint. Both books contained tales considered (if only by myself, and I’m not the best judge of my own work) the best of my Cthulhu Mythos tales, chosen from my more than forty years of writing. The first book contained the novellas, and the second a great many shorter stories. This current volume has no Mythos stories; it simply does what it says on the jacket, collecting the best of my macabre tales, five of which saw their first outings in the “Unique Magazine,” Weird Tales, while others found homes in many fine award-winning books and magazines.
Now I have to prevail upon Bill Schafer to present this new collection in a format uniform with the others—including the marvellous artwork of Mr. Eggleton, together with his and my own signatures—so that all three volumes will form a trilogy of my best work where they sit side by side on whichever bookshelves they may get to occupy.
I shall mention in passing just two of these stories:
“My Thing Friday” is quite obviously Science Fiction with a touch of Nasty; I include it here if only to illustrate a bit of versatility. And the final story, “The Disapproval of Jeremy Cleave,” is more than a tad sick/humorous, which mainly demonstrates the fact that I don’t take any genre too seriously. (If we can’t have a laugh now and then—even a slightly shuddery sort of laugh—then what’s the point?)
I’ll say no more about this collection of stories, except to tell you that the greatest favour you could do me would be to enjoy them…
Brian Lumley
Devon, England, March 2011
Fruiting Bodies
My great-grandparents, and my grandparents after them, had been Easingham people; in all likelihood my parents would have been, too, but the old village had been falling into the sea for three hundred years and hadn’t much looked like stopping, and so I was born in Durham City instead. My grandparents, both sets, had been among the last of the village people to move out, buying new homes out of a government-funded disaster grant. Since then, as a kid, I had been back to Easingham only once.
My father had taken me there one spring when the tides were high. I remember how there was still some black, crusty snow lying in odd corners of the fields, colored by soot and smoke, as all things were in those days in the Northeast. We’d gone to Easingham because the unusually high tides had been at it again, chewing away at the shale cliffs, reducing shoreline and derelict village both as the North Sea’s breakers crashed again and again on the shuddering land.
And of course we had hoped (as had the two hundred or so other sightseers gathered there that day) to see a house or two go down in smoking ruin, into the sea and the foaming spray. We witnessed no such spectacle; after an hour, cold and wet from the salt moisture in the air, we piled back into the family car and returned to Durham. Easingham’s main street, or what had once been the main street, was teetering on the brink as we left. But by nightfall that street was no more. We’d missed it: a further twenty feet of coastline, a bite one street deep and a few yards more than one street long, had been undermined, toppled, and gobbled up by the sea.
That had been that. Bit by bit, in the quarter century between then and now, the rest of Easingham had also succumbed. Now only a house or two remained—no more than a handful in all—and all falling into decay, while the closest lived-in buildings were those of a farm all of a mile inland from the cliffs. Oh, and of course there was one other inhabitant: old Garth Bentham, who’d been demolishing the old houses by hand and selling bricks and timbers from the village for years. But I’ll get to him shortly.
So there I was last summer, back in the Northeast again, and when my business was done of course I dropped in and stayed overnight with the Old Folks at their Durham cottage. Once a year at least I made a point of seeing them, but last year in particular I noticed how time was creeping up on them. The “Old Folks”; well, now I saw that they really were old, and I determined that I must start to see a lot more of them.
Later, starting in on my long drive back down to London, I remembered that time when the Old Man had taken me to Easingham to see the houses tottering on the cliffs. And probably because the place was on my mind, I inadvertently turned off my route and in a little while found myself heading for the coast. I could have turned round right there and then—indeed, I intended to do so—but I’d got to wondering about Easingham and how little would be left of it now, and before I knew it…
Once I’d made up my mind, Middlesborough was soon behind me, then Guisborough, and in no time at all I was on the old road to the village. There had only ever been one way in and out, and this was it: a narrow road, its surface starting to crack now, with tall hedgerows broken here and there, letting you look through to where fields rolled down to the cliffs. A beautiful day, with sea gulls wheeling overhead, a salt tang coming in through the wound-down windows, and a blue sky coming down to merge with…with the blue-grey of the North Sea itself! For cresting a rise, suddenly I was there.