Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories by Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Tremblay, Mercedes M. Yardley, Richard Thomas, Damien Angelica Walters, Kevin Lucia Read Free Book Online

humor, the obituarists have run a photograph of Peter Burrell-Gunn as he was in the early 1950s, and not at all as he was the last time the professor had seen him, at a Literary Monthly Christmas party several years before, all gouty and beaky and trembling, and reminding her of nothing so much as a caricature of an owl. In the photograph, he is very beautiful. He looks wild, and noble.
    She had spent an evening once kissing him in a summer house: she remembers that very clearly, although she cannot remember for the life of her in which garden the summer house had belonged.
    It was, she decides, Charles and Nadia Reid’s house in the country. Which meant that it was before Nadia ran away with that Scottish artist, and Charles took the professor with him to Spain, although she was certainly not a professor then. This was many years before people commonly went to Spain for their holidays; it was an exotic and dangerous place in those days. He asked her to marry him, too, and she is no longer certain why she said no, or even if she had entirely said no. He was a pleasant-enough young man, and he took what was left of her virginity on a blanket on a Spanish beach, on a warm spring night. She was twenty years old, and had thought herself so old . . .
    The doorbell chimes, and she puts down the paper, and makes her way to the front door, and opens it.
    Her first thought is how young the girl looks.
    Her first thought is how old the woman looks. “Professor Hastings?” she says. “I’m Greta Campion. I’m doing the profile on you. For the Literary Chronicle .”
    The older woman stares at her for a moment, vulnerable and ancient, then she smiles. It’s a friendly smile, and Greta warms to her.
    “Come in, dear,” says the professor. “We’ll be in the sitting room.”
    “I brought you this,” says Greta. “I baked it myself.” She takes the cake tin from her bag, hoping its contents hadn’t disintegrated en route. “It’s a chocolate cake. I read on-line that you liked them.”
    The old woman nods and blinks. “I do,” she says. “How kind. This way.”
    Greta follows her into a comfortable room, is shown to her armchair, and told, firmly, not to move. The professor bustles off and returns with a tray, on which are teacups and saucers, a teapot, a plate of chocolate biscuits, and Greta’s chocolate cake.
    Tea is poured, and Greta exclaims over the professor’s brooch, and then she pulls out her notebook and pen, and a copy of the professor’s last book, A Quest for Meanings in Children’s Fiction , the copy bristling with Post-it notes and scraps of paper. They talk about the early chapters, in which the hypothesis is set forth that there was originally no distinct branch of fiction that was only intended for children, until the Victorian notions of the purity and sanctity of childhood demanded that fiction for children be made . . .
    “Well, pure,” says the professor.
    “And sanctified?” asks Greta, with a smile.
    “And sanctimonious,” corrects the old woman. “It is difficult to read The Water Babies without wincing.”
    And then she talks about ways that artists used to draw children—as adults, only smaller, without considering the child’s proportions—and how the Grimms’ stories were collected for adults and, when the Grimms realized the books were being read in the nursery, were bowdlerized to make them more appropriate. She talks of Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” and of its original coda in which the Prince’s cannibal ogre mother attempts to frame the Sleeping Beauty for having eaten her own children, and all the while Greta nods and takes notes, and nervously tries to contribute enough to the conversation that the professor will feel that it is a conversation or at least an interview, not a lecture.
    “Where,” asks Greta, “do you feel your interest in children’s fiction came from?”
    The professor shakes her head. “Where do any of our interests come from?