The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones [Jones, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762445974
Amazon: 0762445971
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2012-10-23T06:00:00+00:00

ROBERT SILVERBERG

Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar

ROBERT SILVERBERG IS A multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004.

He began submitting stories to science fiction magazines in his early teens, and his first published novel, a children’s book entitled Revolt on Alpha C, appeared in 1955. He won his first Hugo Award the following year.

Always a prolific writer – for the first four years of his career he reputedly wrote a million words a year – his numerous books include such novels as To Open the Sky, To Live Again, Dying Inside, Nightwings and Lord Valentine’s Castle. The latter became the basis for his popular “Majipoor” series, set on the eponymous alien planet. His most recent book is the seventh volume in his Collected Short Stories from Subterranean Press.

“I am not, of course, noted for writing ghost stories,” Silverberg admits, “but I have had a life-long interest in them, going back to my discovery of the classic Wise & Fraser Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural when I was ten.

“My unsurprising favourites have been, all these years, Machen, Blackwood, and M. R. James, whom I have read and re-read many times.

“Another favourite of mine since childhood has been Kipling; and so, when Nick Gevers and Jack Dann invited me to contribute to an anthology of modern ghost stories paying homage to the British masters, I fell immediately on the idea of doing a Kiplingesque ghost story for them.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO Smithers out there in the Great Indian Desert may seem a trifle hard to believe, but much that happens in Her Imperial Majesty’s subcontinent is a trifle hard to believe, and yet one disbelieves it at one’s peril. Unfortunately, there is nobody to tell the tale but me, for it all happened many years ago, and Yule has retired from the Service and is living, so I hear, in Palermo, hard at work on his translation of Marco Polo, and Brewster, the only witness to the tragic events in the desert, is too far gone in senility now to be of any use to anyone, and Smithers – ah, poor Smithers—

But let me begin. We start in Calcutta and the year is 1858, with the memory of the dread and terrible Mutiny still overhanging our dreams, distant though those bloody events were from our administrative capital here. That great engineer and brilliant scholar Henry Yule – Lieutenant-Colonel Yule, as he was then, later to be Sir Henry – having lately returned from Allahabad, where he was in charge of strengthening and augmenting our defences against the rebels, has now been made Secretary of the Public Works Department, with particular responsibility for designing what one day will be the vast railroad system that will link every part of India. I hold the title of Deputy Consulting Engineer for Railways. Our young friend Brewster is my right-hand man, a splendid draughtsman and planner.

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