Twice Cursed, page 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Introduction
BY MARIE O’REGAN & PAUL KANE
The Bell
JOANNE HARRIS
Snow, Glass, Apples
NEIL GAIMAN
The Tissot Family Circus
ANGELA SLATTER
Mr Thirteen
M. R. CAREY
The Confessor’s Tale
SARAH PINBOROUGH
The Old Stories Hide Secrets Deep Inside Them
MARK CHADBOURN
Awake
LAURA PURCELL
Pretty Maids All In A Row
CHRISTINA HENRY
The Viral Voyage of Bird Man
KATHERINE ARDEN
The Angels of London
ADAM L. G. NEVILL
A Curse is a Curse
HELEN GRANT
Dark Carousel
JOE HILL
Shoes as Red as Blood
A. C. WISE
Just Your Standard Haunted Doll Drama
KELLEY ARMSTRONG
St Diabolo’s Travelling Music Hall
A. K. BENEDICT
The Music Box
L. L. MCKINNEY
About the Authors
About the Editors
Acknowledgements
TWICE
CURSED
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Wastelands: The New Apocalypse
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TWICE CURSED
Paperback edition ISBN: 9781803361215
Electronic edition ISBN: 9781803361222
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: April 2023
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
Introduction © Marie O’Regan & Paul Kane 2023.
The Bell © Frogspawn Ltd 2023.
Snow, Glass, Apples © Neil Gaiman 1994. Originally released by
Dreamhaven Press as a benefit book for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
The Tissot Family Circus © Angela Slatter 2023.
Mr Thirteen © M. R. Carey 2023.
The Confessor’s Tale © Sarah Pinborough 2009. Originally published in
Hellbound Hearts, edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Regan (Pocket Books, 2009).
Reprinted by permission of the author. Clive Barker is the owner of the copyright of the
Hellbound Heart and Cenobite mythology, and Sarah Pinborough gratefully acknowledges
Mr Barker’s permission to draw on this mythology for “The Confessor’s Tale”.
The Old Stories Hide Secrets Deep Inside Them © Mark Chadbourn 2023.
Awake © Laura Purcell 2023.
Pretty Maids All In A Row © Tina Raffaele 2023.
The Viral Voyage Of Bird Man © Katherine Arden 2023.
The Angels Of London © Adam L. G. Nevill 2013. Originally published in
Terror Tales of London, edited by Paul Finch (P&C Finch Ltd, 2013).
Reprinted by permission of the author.
A Curse Is A Curse © Helen Grant 2023.
Dark Carousel © Joe Hill 2018. Originally published as a vinyl original
(HarperAudio 2018). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Shoes As Red As Blood © A. C. Wise 2023.
Just Your Standard Haunted Doll Drama © Kelley Armstrong 2023.
St Diablo’s Travelling Music Hall © A. K. Benedict 2023.
The Music Box © L. L. McKinney 2023.
The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
TWICE
CURSED
INTRODUCTION
BY MARIE O’REGAN & PAUL KANE
Cursed…
We were certainly beginning to think things were, when our first anthology with that name came out. In fact, the signing for that book at Forbidden Planet in London, back in March 2020, was the last live event we attended for more than two years because of the pandemic. Very shortly after that, the UK went into its first lockdown. The huge convention we’d been working on for three years by that point had to be postponed with only a few weeks to go (StokerConUKTM, which subsequently became the highly successful ChillerCon UK), we were all in lockdown and the world suddenly seemed a very strange, often frightening place. At the time of writing it still does to some extent. It’s definitely a different world to the one we knew when we penned our introduction to the original Cursed.
Nevertheless, here we are again with Twice Cursed. Some might say we’re tempting fate, especially given other recent events globally. However, as we all found during these unprecedented and trying times, fiction – films, TV and books especially – proved a welcome distraction from real life. It’s kept us going ourselves, honestly – has kept most people going, as indeed it did in other challenging periods of history. Fiction in whatever form serves an important function, and reading about curses, of one sort or another, is definitely preferable to being traumatised in your everyday life. Cursed, but in a good way – there’s safety in keeping these curses contained within a book’s pages. The reader, at least, can get out.
Therefore, we’re proud to present another batch of excellent fables from a group of superb writers at the top of their game. Each one of them with a different variation on what curses are, and what they mean to us as individuals or as a collective.
Joanne Harris reminds us of the true nature of curses, while Neil Gaiman and Laura Purcell tackle Snow White from very different perspectives. A. C. Wise introduces us to some cursed footwear, Mark Chadbourn is in archaeological territory and Sarah Pinborough’s Hellish Faustian Pact shows us the power of keeping secrets. And while Kelley Armstrong gives us her own unique twist on the old favourite of cursed dolls, Christina Henry takes a look at the subject from the opposite perspective, and Katherine Arden uses a well-known bad luck legend as her inspiration. Angela Slatter, Joe Hill, and A. K. Benedict all deal with curses connected to entertainment – at a circus, on a pier and in music hall – and Adam L. G. Nevill’s tale is also rooted in a sense of place, this time a strange lodging house. M. R. Carey focuses on the people you should turn to if you need support when you have a curse, L. L. McKinney presents us with a very unique music box, and Helen Grant’s story is a cautionary piece that resonates in our present day.
All very different, all excellent. All a thoroughly enjoyable break from the realities around us. So settle back, with a glass or mug of your favourite tipple, and enter a world of magic. Of trickery and despair.
Curses again… Twice Cursed, but in a good way.
MARIE O’REGAN & PAUL KANE
Derbyshire, July 2022
THE BELL
BY JOANNE HARRIS
In a village by the edge of a forest, there lived a woodcutter’s family. They were poor; they lived from the land, and the land was far from generous. They ate black bread, and roots, and seeds, and small fish from the river. But they were free, and happy – except perhaps for the woodcutter’s son, who longed for something different.
In all his life, the woodcutter’s son had never drunk wine, or eaten bread that was not black and unleavened. In all his life he had never worn clothes that had not been first worn by someone else. And he was always listening to tales of ancient Kings and Queens – their wealth, their adventures, their glamour – and longing for the old days, when things were very different.
He often asked his father where those ancient Kings and Queens had gone, and how their kingdoms had fallen.
But his father would always tell him: “That was long before my time. No-one remembers the old days now.”
The boy was disappointed, but he did not forget the tales of knights and ladies, Kings and Queens. He would often roam the forest alone, searching for signs of the old days.
Sometimes he even found them – pieces of masonry sunk in the ground, scattered fragments of coloured glass. A gilded comb, a strand of hair still caught between its ivory teeth.
Then one day, in the heart of the woods, he came across a city, ruined and abandoned in the scrambling undergrowth. Great pillars of marble and arches of stone were draped in morning glories. And under an intricate vaulted dome, through which a curtain of ivy fell, he found a great gathering of stone, a feasting-hall of statues.
The boy walked through the hall of stone. On either side, lords and ladies, some holding goblets to their lips, some laughing, some dancing; some hiding their smiles behind their painted ivory fans. On the tables between them, platters of fruit and cakes were spread out, all in stone, and perfect, even to the water-droplets on the bunches of grapes. Above them, a minstrels’ gallery, its music silenced, except for the drip of water from the ceiling. At either side of the room, stone guards in their helmets and armour. And at the head of the great hall, the King and Queen of the city sat on thrones of polished marble; and to the boy they looked both wise, and very, very beautiful.
“What happened here?” he said aloud.
A voice spoke up behind him. It was that of a ragged old crone, hiding among the statues.
“I remember all this,” she said. “I was a servant in this place. Oh, it was beautiful in its time, a place of joy and music. But it fell under a spell – a curse – and its people were all turned into stone.”
The boy’s eyes widened. He could already imagine himself a member of that gilded throng. He saw himself dancing with beautiful girls, and eating all kinds of sweetmeats. His father would wear furs, he thought: his sisters, gowns of silken brocade.
“If only the curse could be broken,” he said.
“Oh, but it can,” the old crone replied, her dark eyes gleaming like gemstones. “All it needs is for one brave boy to ring that big old bell up there.”
And she pointed to a great brass bell, hanging from the ceiling in a mass of vines and spiders’ webs.
“And that will bring them back?” said the boy.
The old crone nodded. “A single note would be enough to awaken them.”
The boy looked up, and started to climb. It was a difficult, dangerous task. But finally, he reached the bell, and pulled its clapper free, and it rang. The brass note shimmered in the air like a cloud of fireflies.
And slowly, below him, the courtiers of stone began to awaken; began to move. The beautiful ladies shifted and yawned; the guards stood to attention. Laughter rang once more through the hall that had been silent for hundreds of years.
But somehow, the joyful scene was not quite the way the boy had imagined it. There was something about the laughter that came from the throats of the courtiers: a cruel and acquisitive look in the eyes of the ladies.
The boy clambered down from the ceiling and waited for someone to notice him.
Surely, my reward will come, he thought, looking at the magnificent feast, and imagining all the things he would buy with the gold they would give him.
But instead of showing their gratitude, the beautiful King and Queen just spread their wings and watched the boy with hungry eyes. The courtiers and their ladies, too, crowded round the frightened boy, licking their lips and smiling. The music from the gallery began to play – an evil tune, that made his head spin and sent his pulses racing.
The boy grew pale and turned to run. But there was nowhere to run to. And the Queen put her thin white hand on his neck and drew him closer, smiling.
When they had finished with the boy, the King and Queen and their courtiers and guards took wing and flew over the land like locusts. They enslaved the people, slaughtered their flocks, burnt down their homes and their settlements. For centuries, the enchantment had kept them tame and helpless. Now, at last, they were awake, and they had no mercy.
Back in the deserted hall, the old crone shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “Before you ring the bell,” she said, “be sure to know what tune it plays.”
And at that she turned and went into the woods, leaving the stone hall empty.
SNOW, GLASS, APPLES
BY NEIL GAIMAN
I do not know what manner of thing she is. None of us do. She killed her mother in the birthing, but that’s never enough to account for it.
They call me wise, but I am far from wise, for all that I foresaw fragments of it, frozen moments caught in pools of water or in the cold glass of my mirror. If I were wise I would not have tried to change what I saw. If I were wise I would have killed myself before ever I encountered her, before ever I caught him.
Wise, and a witch, or so they said, and I’d seen his face in my dreams and in reflections for all my life: sixteen years of dreaming of him before he reined his horse by the bridge that morning and asked my name. He helped me onto his high horse and we rode together to my little cottage, my face buried in the gold of his hair. He asked for the best of what I had; a king’s right, it was.
His beard was red-bronze in the morning light, and I knew him, not as a king, for I knew nothing of kings then, but as my love. He took all he wanted from me, the right of kings, but he returned to me on the following day and on the night after that: his beard so red, his hair so gold, his eyes the blue of a summer sky, his skin tanned the gentle brown of ripe wheat.
His daughter was only a child: no more than five years of age when I came to the palace. A portrait of her dead mother hung in the princess’s tower room: a tall woman, hair the color of dark wood, eyes nut-brown. She was of a different blood to her pale daughter.
The girl would not eat with us.
I do not know where in the palace she ate.
I had my own chambers. My husband the king, he had his own rooms also. When he wanted me he would send for me, and I would go to him, and pleasure him, and take my pleasure with him.
One night, several months after I was brought to the palace, she came to my rooms. She was six. I was embroidering by lamplight, squinting my eyes against the lamp’s smoke and fitful illumination. When I looked up, she was there.
“Princess?”
She said nothing. Her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair; her lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.
“What are you doing away from your room?”
“I’m hungry,” she said, like any child.
It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight; but I had strings of whole apples, cored and dried, hanging from the beams of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.
“Here.”
Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples, of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the goose fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn’s apples; then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to feast upon the crackling.
She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp yellow teeth.
“Is it good?”
She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at that moment I warmed to her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked her cheek. She looked at me and smiled – she smiled but rarely – then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of Venus, and she drew blood.
I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise, but she looked at me and I fell silent.
The little princess fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and sucked and drank. When she was finished, she left my chamber. Beneath my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab, and to heal. The next day it was an old scar: I might have cut my hand with a pocketknife in my childhood.
