Born in Harden, Durham on December 2, 1937, Brian Lumley began selling short fiction in the late 1960s, and throughout the 1970s he was chiefly known for a series of books based on the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft: The Caller of the Black, The Burrowers Beneath, Beneath the Moors, The Transition of Titus Crow, and others. While Lumley still likes to muck about with the Cthulhu Mythos, during the 1980s he concentrated on massive novels of contemporary horror, most notably his Psychomech and Necroscope sagas. Lumley's latest novels include The House of Doors and Necroscope IV: Deadspeak. He has just completed the fifth and final Necroscope novel, Deadspawn, and is now putting together two collections of his short stories, "to be titled Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi, and (some other silly title)." Tor Books will be bringing out Psychomech I and II as a single volume, to be followed by Psychamok.
Retired from the army after twenty-two years, Brian Lumley now lives with his wife, Dorothy, in Devon. Like "Fruiting Bodies" in last year's Year's Best Horror, "The Pit-Yakker" makes strong and effective use of the sort of English locales that won't be included in your tour package.
When I was sixteen, my father used to say to me: "Watch what you're doing with the girls; you're an idiot to smoke, for it's expensive and unhealthy; stay away from Raymond Maddison!" My mother had died two years earlier, so he'd taken over her share of the nagging, too.
The girls? Watch what I was doing? At sixteen I barely knew what I was doing! I knew what I wanted to do, but the how of it was a different matter entirely. Cigarettes? I enjoyed them; at the five-a-day stage, they still gave me that occasionally sweet taste and made my head spin. Raymond Maddison? I had gone to school with him, and because he lived so close to us we'd used to walk home together. But his mother was a little weak-minded, his older brother had been put away for molesting or something, and Raymond himself was thick as two short planks, hulking and unlovely, and a very shadowy character in general. Or at least he gave that impression.
Girls didn't like him: he smelled of bread and dripping and didn't clean his teeth too well, and for two years now he'd been wearing the same jacket and trousers, which had grown pretty tight on him. His short hair and little piggy eyes made him look bristly, and there was that looseness about his lips, which you find in certain idiots. If you were told that ladies' underwear was disappearing from the washing-lines, you'd perhaps think of Raymond. If someone was jumping out on small girls at dusk and shouting boo! he was the one who'd spring to mind. If the little-boy-up-the-road's kitten got strangled…
Not that that sort of thing happened a lot in Harden, for it didn't. Up there on the northeast coast in those days, the Bobbies on the beat were still Bobbies, unhampered by modern «ethics» and other humane restrictions. Catch a kid drawing red, hairy, diamond-shaped designs on the school wall, and wallop! he'd get a clout round the earhole, dragged off home to his parents, and doubtless another wallop. Also, in the schools, the cane was still in force. Young people were still being "brought up," were made or at least encouraged to grow up straight and strong, and not allowed to bolt and run wild. Most of them, anyway. But it wasn't easy, not in that environment.
Harden lay well outside the fringes of «Geordie-land» — Newcastle and environs — but real outsiders termed us all Geordies anyway. It was the way we spoke; our near-Geordie accents leaped between soft and harsh as readily as the Welsh tongue soars up and down the scales; a dialect which at once identified us as "pit-yakkers," grimy-black shambling colliers, coal-miners. The fact that my father was a Harden greengrocer made no difference: I came from the colliery and so was a pit-yakker. I was an apprentice woodcutting machinist in Hartlepool? — so what? My collar was grimy, wasn't it? With coal dust? And no matter how much I tried to disguise it I had that accent, didn't I? Pit-yakker!
But at sixteen I was escaping from the image. One must, or sex remains forever a mystery. The girls — the better girls, anyway — in the big towns, even in Harden, Easingham, Blackhill and the other colliery villages, weren't much impressed by or interested in pit-yakkers. Which must have left Raymond Maddison in an entirely hopeless position. Everything about him literally shrieked of his origin, made worse by the fact that his father, a miner, was already grooming Raymond for the mine, too. You think I have a down on them, the colliers? No, for they were the salt of the earth. They still are. I merely give you the background.
As for my own opinion of Raymond: I thought I knew him and didn't for a moment consider him a bad sort. He loved John Wayne like I did, and liked to think of himself as a tough egg, as I did. But Nature and the world in general hadn't been so kind to him, and being a bit of a dunce didn't help much either. He was like a big scruffy dog who sits at the corner of the street grinning at everyone going by and wagging his tail, whom nobody ever pats for fear of fleas or mange or whatever, and who you're sure pees on the front wheel of your car every time you park it there. He probably doesn't, but somebody has to take the blame. That was how I saw Raymond.
So I was sixteen and some months, and Raymond Maddison about the same, and it was a Saturday in July. Normally when we met we'd pass the time of day. Just a few words: what was on at the cinema (in Harden there were two of them, the Ritz and the Empress — for this was before Bingo closed most of them down), when was the next dance at the Old Victoria Hall, how many pints we'd downed last Friday at the British Legion. Dancing, drinking, smoking, and girls: it was a time of experimentation. Life had many flavors other than those that wafted out from the pit and the coke-ovens. On this Saturday, however, he was the last person I wanted to see, and the very last I wanted to be seen with.
I was waiting for Moira, sitting on the recreation ground wall where the stumps of the old iron railings showed through, which they'd taken away thirteen years earlier for the war effort and never replaced. I had been a baby then but it was one of the memories I had: of the men in the helmets with the glass faceplates cutting down all the iron things to melt for the war. It had left only the low wall, which was ideal to sit on. In the summer the flat-capped miners would sit there to watch the kids flying kites in the recreation ground or playing on the swings, or just to sit and talk. There was a group of old-timers there that Saturday, too, all looking out across the dark, fuming colliery toward the sea; so when I saw Raymond hunching my way with his hands in his pockets, I turned and looked in the same direction, hoping he wouldn't notice me. But he already had.
"Hi, Joshua!" he said in his mumbling fashion, touching my arm. I don't know why I was christened Joshua: I wasn't Jewish or a Catholic or anything. I do know why; my father told me his father had been called Joshua, so that was it. Usually they called me Josh, which I liked because it sounded like a wild-western name. I could imagine John Wayne being called Josh. But Raymond occasionally forgot and called me Joshua.
"Hello, Raymond!" I said. I usually called him Ray, but if he noticed the difference he didn't say anything.
"Game of snooker?" It was an invitation.
"No," I shook my head. "I'm, er, waiting for someone."
"Who?"
"Mind your own business."
"Girl?" he said. "Moira? Saw you with her at the Ritz. Back row."
"Look, Ray, I —»
"It's OK," he said, sitting down beside me on the wall. "We're jus' talking. I can go any time."
I groaned inside. He was bound to follow us. He did stupid things like that. I decided to make the best of it, glanced at him. "So, what are you doing? Have you found a job yet?"
He pulled a face. "Naw."
"Are you going to?"
"Pit. Next spring. My dad says."