The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror by Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, David A. Riley Read Free Book Online Page A

shook his head. This couldn’t go on; he’d have to pack up his tackle and leave. From now on he’d be strictly a day fisherman.
    He reached down for his basket. The sooner he could leave this eerie place the better.
    And then he stopped. Suddenly he could sense the mist. It was still completely dark, yet somehow, he knew it was there. The mist rising off the water, through the blackness, sifting through the reeds and creeping along and up the bank and among the trees. Albert could feel it on his hands and on his face, cold and fearful, and completely invisible in the pitch-darkness. Layers of it, rising slowly into him and over him like depths of icy water.
    Suddenly the sharp pain returned, lancing through his body like a blade. He tried to reach his rod, but something prevented him from moving. Paralyzed, his eyes staring, he watched the luminous tip of his float disappear as, below the dark surface, a fish took the bait.
    Panic churned in Albert’s stomach as he squirmed at the sudden agony in his chest. It churned then rose, tearing up through his body, and then he let out one long, wild, terrified scream.
    Once again the oozing stickiness was all over him, sucking, sucking, sucking at his innards. Cold and slimy it was now.
    The pain in his chest was the hook on the end of a fishing-line, pushing its barb through him. The damp sliminess was the mouth of a fish closing over him; the rising layers and swirls of invisible mist were the depths of water in which he wriggled and twisted, trying to escape.
    He leapt to his feet, but be was bent double with the pain of the hook through his body. The invisible slimy mouth sucked at him and the heaving mist rolled over him in moist, icy waves. He screamed and screamed, squirming and wriggling, the hook burning through him, the huge cold fish-mouth sucking and sucking at his insides.
    He half-ran, half-tumbled forward, screaming, falling with a heavy splash into the black waters of the lake…
     
    Albert Jordan’s absence was noticed two days later. The angling equipment found abandoned at a local lakeside was identified as being his and the lake was therefore subsequently drained.
    The body of the drowned man found on the bottom was positively identified as Albert Jordan. He was only just recognisable. It seemed as if his flesh was merely a bag containing the loose bones of his skeleton. His innards, strangely, were missing, as though they had been… sucked out.
     

SUGAR AND SPICE AND ALL THINGS NICE by David A. Sutton
     
    AT THIS TIME in the morning, the sun showers a blinding swirl of motes through the branches of a nearby tree which, spilling through the window, scatter about the room. It is one of those superb, warm mornings in late spring when not a breath of wind stirs outside and one sits, cosy and contented with the tingle of summer in one’s nostrils. Outside, the occasional car shunts past, disturbing the air, caught hard and bright in the sun’s perpetual gaze. Passersby appear infrequently, devoid of coats and ready for the heat of the afternoon. There is a kind of hazy, half-life to the scene, as though people and their attendant technology had become immured indoors waiting; this early dazzle of summer perhaps merely an hallucination, not to be trusted.
    I used to sit by the window sometimes and gaze across the street watching life pass by in its lazy fashion. Watching the still, sombre houses on the opposite side of the road face the challenge of harsh daylight, their red bricks soiled with grime, windows dark, half-lidded with mesh curtains. Doors would be brown or green, gloss paint peeling here and there in an orgy of ultra-violet acceptance; gaining no suntan, but curling under an invisible wave of burning insistence.
    My room was on the first floor, a flat, a hideaway, cool. Solid walls of books, a small gas fire, a tropical bamboo screen leading to the bedroom and beyond, the small kitchen. From my window I had a minor vista of the street below,