The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror Read Online Free Page B

could at least distinguish between the real and the illusory. Which is about all any of us can claim, at best.
    For I had seen something during those last few seconds in the museum that frightened me more than anything else I experienced that night.
    I have said that the apparition of a giant executioner gripping his axe had appeared in the medieval gallery. Well, the axe was mounted on the wall just above another quaint relic of those earlier days when our savagery was less subtle: the rough-hewn wooden headsman’s block.
    And as the figure of the executioner coalesced around his axe, so another figure—supine, hands bound, neck wedged in the gruesomely functional V-shaped depression—materialized around the block.
    The face was turned toward me, and I recognized from photos the florid, mutton-chopped visage of Frederick Ehlers, long-dead founder of the museum, staring in terror—still caught in his endless chain of nightmares, still a prisoner (but now a part) of those “tangible emanations” from the past which he had painstakingly assembled and which he had finally and forever, inescapably joined.

THE PREVIOUS TENANT by Ramsey Campbell
     
    HE CLOSED THE CUPBOARD door and crossed to the window. The pane exhibited ghostly strokes of soap, like the paint sketched on the sheet of paper he’d crumpled up last week. In the next room his wife moved a table, which screamed. He stared out. The roofs were a jagged frieze against the colours spilled to mix on the horizon; below, the red streetlamps tasted of raspberry, tinting the trees like attenuated pine-cones separated by the ruler of the pavement. A car passed, hushed as the evening, casting ahead on the road what seemed already a splash of yellow paint. It wasn’t enough for him to express on canvas. He turned back to the flat room, the wallpaper’s pastel leaves whose meaning had been lost through countless prints, the bed he must never touch without having bathed. He had remembered what he’d seen as the cupboard door had closed.
    The imprisoned books rebuked him; already, on the Renoir, a coil of dust curled and fidgeted like a centipede. What he’d seen was crushed beneath Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec; he hoisted them and slid it out. It was a photograph of the girl who had owned the flat: one leg high on a wall, her skirt taut, her hand arched on her knee, her eyes beneath an arch of lustrous hair smiling at whoever held the camera; how could she have become a scream above the city, a broken figurine beneath the window? His wife coughed. At once he thrust the photograph into his pocket. At the door he turned to check the cupboard. It was closed.
    His wife was cross-legged on the carpet, surrounded by the glasses from the cabinet, considering the space available. ‘I’ve done the best I can,’ he said.
    She dabbed a bead of lacquer from her forehead. ‘It’s not your books I object to, you know that,’ she told him… it’s just that there’s not enough space, that’s all.’
    ‘I don’t remember you complaining when we looked it over.’
    ‘Who’d complain at a flatful of furniture?’ Above her stood the antique chairs, the glass-topped tables, the mirrors with which the girl had surrounded herself. ‘But there’s such a thing as being over-generous, you know.’
    He was silent; he didn’t want to say ‘we should be grateful.’
    ‘If we get rid of a few of these things you could have your painting on the wall.’
    ‘There’s no point.’ Not in one painting and a hundred crumpled scraps of drawing-paper.
    ‘It might brighten the place up a little.’
    ‘That’s a profound analysis,’ He watched her stretch her legs, hemmed in by the glasses; it seemed a perfect symbol—he would have transferred it to canvas if he had been able to paint her.
    ‘I know I don’t have your intellect.’ She picked up a glass; in a club she wouldn’t long have held it empty.
    ‘I’ve never said so, have I? What you don’t have is sensitivity to this