The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780337159
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

CHARLES L. GRANT

Whose Ghosts These Are

CHARLES L. GRANT WAS NAMED GRAND MASTER at the 2002 World Horror Convention in Chicago. It was a well-deserved accolade for a writer and editor with more than 100 books to his credit and a mantelpiece filled with awards, including the World Fantasy, British Fantasy and Nebula. His pseudonyms include ‘Geoffrey Marsh’ (pulp adventure), ‘Lionel Fenn’ (funny fantasy), ‘Simon Lake’ (Young Adult horror) and ‘Felicia Andrews’ and ‘Deborah Lewis’ (both romantic fantasies).

His 1986 novel The Pet has been optioned by the movies, the story ‘Crowd of Shadows’ was optioned by NBC as a TV film, while ‘Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street’ was adapted for the syndicated series Tales from the Darkside. His short fiction has been collected in Tales from the Nightside, A Glow of Candles, Nightmare Seasons, The Orchard, Dialing the Wind, The Black Carousel and A Quiet Way to Scream, and recent books include When the Cold Wind Blows, the fifth volume in the Black Oak series, and Redmoor: Strange Fruit, a major historical horror novel from Tor, which takes place between 1786 and the 1890s.

‘When I was asked to contribute to another themed anthology, I decided to try another serial-killer piece,’ explains Grant, ‘except this time I made him a cop. The editor made a big deal about using the museum, so I did; as it turned out, though, hardly anyone else did. Go figure.’

THE STREET DOES NOT CHANGE, morning to night. Shops open, shops close; pedestrians walk the crooked sidewalks, with or without burden, peering in the store windows, wishing, coveting, moving on; vans and trucks make their deliveries and leave, while automobiles avoid it because it curves so sharply, so often. To walk from one end to the other is like following the dry bed of a long-dead stream that snakes from no place to nowhere.

None of the buildings here are more than four storeys high, though they seem much taller because the street itself is so narrow. They are old, these buildings, but they are not frail. They are well-kept, mostly, almost equally divided between brick and granite facades with occasional wood trim of various colors. Nothing special about them; nothing to draw a camera lens or a sketch pad, a commemorative plaque, a footnote in a tourist guide. Stores, a few offices, at ground level on both ends, apartments and offices above; in the middle, apartment buildings with stone stairs and stoops, aged white medallions of mythical creatures over each lintel. Gateless iron-spear fences, small plots of grass, flower boxes, trees at the curb.

Nothing changes, and Hank Cabot liked it that way.

He walked this tree-lined block and the surrounding neighborhood for close to fifteen years, his uniform so familiar that in his civilian clothes people he saw every day sometimes had to look at him twice just to be sure he was who they thought he was. An almost comical look as well, as if he had shaved off a mustache and they weren’t quite able to make out what was different about him.

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