Dreamthorp Read online

  DREAMTHORP

  by Chet Williamson

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2011 by Chet Williamson

  Cover Design by David Dodd

  Cover Image by Bob Eggleton

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY CHET WILLIAMSON:

  NOVELS:

  Ash Wednesday

  Soulstorm

  Lowland Rider

  Second Chance

  Reign

  Defenders of the Faith

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  As author & Narrator:

  Ash Wednesday

  Soulstorm

  Lowland Rider

  Second Chance

  As Narrator:

  Blood: A Southern Fantasy – by Michael Moorcock

  Fabulous Harbours – by Michael Moorcock

  War Amongst the Angels – by Michael Moorcock

  Nightjack – by Tom Piccirilli

  Blood Lust: Preternaturals Book I – by Zoe Winters

  Save My Soul: Preternaturals Book II – by Zoe Winters

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  For my son, Colin McCandless Williamson, with love, and with the hope that he will find his Dreamthorp.

  The author wishes to thank Jack Bitner, chronicler and historian of Mount Gretna, another Pennsylvania Chautauqua community even more beautiful—and far safer—than Dreamthorp.

  Love!—does it yet walk the world, or is it imprisoned in songs and romance?

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  Introduction to Dreamthorp

  Dreamthorp was written at the height of the paperback horror craze, just before the glut of original horror novels, good and bad, grew so great as to take nearly every writer in the genre along with it on its precipitous slide downward, out of the mass market and into the relative obscurity of the small press. Revisiting it now, twenty-two years later, it seems a lifetime ago, a time when horror could do no wrong, when even the most minor writers were as gods among mortals, and when the world of popular fiction was ours for the taking.

  Until we got took.

  It wasn’t altogether our fault. While some writers got into horror because it was the hot genre, most of us took the genre seriously, had grown up reading Poe and Lovecraft, were familiar with the genre’s roots and respected them, and tried to create our own work with self-respect and respect for our readers. In other words, we wrote horror because we loved horror, but it also seemed possible, thanks to King and Koontz and a handful of others, that we might actually be successful, build a readership, and even, who knew, get our books on bestseller lists.

  Dreamthorp seemed to be my chance. I’d gotten good reviews on my previous four novels, and my agent placed the new book with Avon, which offered a far higher advance than Tor Books, my previous publisher. What was most inviting, however, was that Avon planned to make the book a “Lead A” mass market title. This meant, they explained , that the book would be heavily promoted, right behind their Super Lead title, or whatever they called it, to a mainstream audience rather than a genre audience.

  Right ho and ooja cum spiff, thought young Wooster (a/k/a moi). I loved horror readers, but there just weren’t enough of them. That highly desired mainstream audience, the ones who read only King and Koontz and none of us little guys, was what I was after, and this was a chance to get them. The book would, I was told, be marketed as mainstream rather than genre, with a subtle, more classy cover than most of the current horror titles. And it would get much wider distribution too. A hardcover deal was struck for a limited edition with Dark Harvest, and when that edition came out I was delighted by Bob Eggleton’s moody and evocative cover and interior illustrations, and found myself wishing that Bob’s cover had been used for the paperback as well. No such luck.

  Before proceeding, let me make something clear: I like Jim Warren’s art. Warren did the cover for my first book, Soulstorm, and it was creepy as hell. I still have a large print of it hanging in my office, framed along with the actual cover. Even though an unnamed source at Tor told me that it was thought in the offices that the cover actually hurt sales of the book since it was so hideous, I wouldn’t have changed it.

  But then came the day when I saw Warren’s cover art for Dreamthorp.

  The Zebra artists at the time could have done no better. What I had expected to be subtle and classy was a gigantic tree man with its legs turning into a trunk against the earth. It had a face like a wooden Rondo Hatton, and its brown hand, which 3-D perspective had made larger than its torso, reached out toward the prospective buyer as if to clutch him or her by the throat. It was posed against a garish backdrop of a green sky edged with yellow and orange flames. It was, in short, a traditional paperback horror cover, and it should also be noted that the figure is purely symbolic, since there is no such creature in the novel itself. The cover, I felt, would appeal only to hardcore horror fans, and not the mainstream audience I’d hoped to reach.

  I felt the ground shift under my feet, and I knew then and there that this would end badly. And it did. Though well reviewed, the book sold, not like a prestigious “Lead A” title, but like a typical genre horror novel. It sold many more copies than any of my previous books, but that wasn’t enough. When the editor at Avon read my next novel, Reign, he turned it down, even though both my agent and I felt it to be a far better book. (And the years proved us right – reviews were excellent, and Reign was nominated for a Stoker, while Dreamthorp was not.) But the book was rejected, I have no doubt, because sales of Dreamthorp had not reached expectations.

  Reign was later published by Dark Harvest as a limited edition hardcover, but, with the bottom falling out of the horror market in the early 90’s, was never published in paperback. It has, however, come back to life as an ebook from Crossroad Press.

  And now, so has Dreamthorp, with, shall I say, the author’s preferred cover. It’s certainly the most violent of all my books, so hold on to your hats.

  At the time of the book’s release, I wrote a brief piece about it for Mystery Scene, which covered horror at the time, and I’ve included it at the back of the book, since it has a few spoilers. Anyone who’s interested in how the book came to be written might enjoy reading it…but only after you’ve visited (and safely returned from) Dreamthorp…

  Chet Williamson, June 1st, 2011

  Beginnings and Awakenings

  It matters not to relate how or when I became a denizen of Dreamthorp; it will be sufficient to say that I am not a born native, but that I came to reside in it a good while ago now. The several towns and villages in which, in my time, I have pitched a tent did not please, for one obscure reason or another: this one was too large, t'other too small; but when, on a summer evening about the hour of eight, I first beheld Dreamthorp. . . I felt instinctively that my knapsack might be taken off my shoulders, that my tired feet might wander no more, that at last, on the planet, I had found a home. From that evening I have dwelt here, and the only journey I am like now to make, is the very inconsiderable one, so far at least as distance is concerned, from the house in w
hich I live to the graveyard. . . .

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  Soon, in the great theatre, the lights will be put out, and the empty stage will be left to ghosts.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  It happened at the beginning of the second act. The intermission was a long one, since The Pirates of Penzance was in two acts, and everyone had time to fill up with instant coffee or Coke in Styrofoam cups, munch on party mix from plastic bags, and have a cigarette out in the cool night air.

  The Dreamthorp Playhouse was ideal for such casual treats. Its circumference was bound by canvas walls suspended by cords, while its roof was a giant, squatting cone whose edges came down to less than five feet from the ground, with intermittent breaks for entrances and exits. This cone was supported by forty-eight stout pillars of chestnut, their bases set in concrete. Since the storm of 1920, in which heavy snows had driven the pillars partially into the ground, causing the addition of the concrete the following spring, the Dreamthorp Playhouse had never suffered from any structural deficiency. On this particular Sunday evening, it stood just as solidly as when it had been built in 1899.

  The lights dimmed, then brightened again, signaling the end of the intermission. Charlie Lewis tossed his cigarette down onto the gray asphalt, stamped it out, exchanged a few more words with Sam Coffey about the comparative merits of Duke Ellington and Art Tatum, then wandered back into the playhouse and sat on the spot on the padded benches where he had left his program. Dorothy Newhouse was sitting next to him, slurping a Diet Coke through a straw. He noticed the nearly full bag of party mix in her lap, and ran a hand through his short, gray hair, praying silently that she wouldn't crunch through most of the second act.

  "What do you think?" he asked her.

  She looked at him dully. Was that, Charlie wondered, still a third chin she was working on? "About what?"

  "Take your choice—the show or the current world hunger situation."

  "Oh. Oh yes, the show." Dorothy came to every show, always without her husband. Her husband liked baseball, and after teaching high school biology for thirty-eight years, felt that retirement should be spent watching what he wanted to watch. He did not want to watch Gilbert and Sullivan. "It's fine," Dorothy said, her chubby fingers burrowing into the party mix bag so that some of the Wheat Chex bubbled out the top onto her wide lap. "I think it's very good."

  "Well," Charlie replied, "I suppose everyone is entitled to their own opinion."

  Dorothy eyed him shrewdly. "You don't like it?"

  "Let me put it this way, if the Dreamthorp Gilbert and Sullivan Society's annual show was not part and parcel of the season ticket for the professional company, which I await with bated breath, I would not be here now. Nor, I daresay, would Gilbert and Sullivan."

  "Well," said Dorothy through a mouthful of party mix and Diet Coke, "I guess the professional actors are a little better. . . ."

  "That, my dear lady, is why they call them professionals."

  Whatever reply Dorothy might have made was prevented by the extinguishing of the house lights and the raising of the lights on stage, revealing cardboard gothic ruins, which were immediately invaded by a young fat man with an obviously false moustache and an assortment of middle-aged women in gowns who were supposed to be his daughters. Charlie sat back, eased his bony posterior forward until he was sitting on the base of his spine, and wondered whether the off-key singing from the stage or the rhythmic crunching at his side made the less mellifluous noise.

  By the end of Mabel's solo about happy daylight being dead, Charlie began to look around in boredom. The playhouse was only half filled now, and Charlie could have sworn there had been more people there at the start of the first act. Cowards, he thought, and turned his gaze directly upward to the apex of the roof.

  The joists soared up from the edges as if in some primitive cathedral or high-tech tepee, meeting at the center tip of the cone, and Charlie marveled at it anew, as he did every time he attended a show or concert there. The design was sound and simple, but unique. In Charlie's thirty-five years as a structural engineer for Bentson Industries, he had never seen its like, neither in older nor contemporary building designs. He always wished there would have been some way he could have reproduced it in one of his own projects, but there had never been an opportunity, and now, since he was retired, there never would be.

  So he dozed and dreamed in seat number H-9, at the exact center of the auditorium, the seat he always chose for the season, as the dialogue droned on from the stage and the munching droned on beside him, until the company began singing about what happens "When the foeman bares his steel," and the first choral "Tarantara!" awoke Charlie with a start that jostled Dorothy's party mix arm, earning him a sharp, reprimanding glare. He pushed himself erect, reminding himself to bring a pillow to the next performance, took a deep breath, and wished they had a smoking section in the playhouse. After all, there was no real danger of fire—everyone could just push the canvas walls down and hi themselves to the great outdoors.

  And it was just as Charlie Lewis was thinking how safe the playhouse was, and as the chorus was singing, "Go, ye heroes, go and die!" while marching about the stage in a sundry array of penny loafers and perforated oxfords disguised as riding boots, that the roof fell down.

  Although Charlie didn't see it happen, he had the unmistakable sense that all the pillars had broken at once, as though a giant hand had grasped the cone and twisted, like a jock tearing a beer can in two. With the pillars gone, the roof fell straight down.

  The people on the perimeter were crushed, and those between the edge and the center were hit by the falling debris of wood, cables, and lighting instruments. Charlie Lewis and most of the people sitting around him in the direct center of the structure were unharmed but greatly surprised. Only Dorothy Newhouse died. A wooden shaft three feet long and an inch wide had been driven into her lap, perforating her abdomen. In the gleam of a fallen Fresnel, Charlie could see her staring at it. She dropped her party mix and Diet Coke and clutched the dark and dusty wood with both hands, looking, Charlie thought, like a flag bearer in the Dreamthorp Memorial Day parade. Then she coughed blood and slumped onto Charlie's shoulder. He held her, and when, after a moment, he realized she was dead, he also realized that he might be in shock. He swallowed hard, pushed Dorothy away, thinking how hard it was going to be to tell her husband about this, and looked around.

  The playhouse was an asylum. People were screaming, the fallen lighting instruments were sending up sparks that threatened to ignite the dry and ancient wood, the crash of toppling benches was deafening as the still mobile survivors tried to make their way toward the edges, where Charlie could see the dull glow of open spaces where the roof had split and broken, leaving escape routes.

  Yet it was a claustrophobic and terrifying escape, as Charlie found when he started to move toward the nearest aperture. At the center, the roof was three feet above his head, and that distance shrank the closer he drew to the edge. By the time he was halfway there, he found himself crawling over the dead and the dying, with the sharp and broken framework of the ceiling tearing and cutting him, almost, he thought, as if the splinters and boards had a will of their own.

  Over the screaming and the rending of wood, he could hear sirens now and knew that help was on the way. He turned and looked behind him and saw sparks and stage lights still shining, but no flames; and he thought that maybe if he just lay there and waited, they would get him out eventually, move all these people in his way—these people who weren't moving anymore or who were moving feebly, just a little, as if there was something very wrong with them, and there was something wrong with them, Charlie could see that from the way their faces were so pale even in the gleam of those lights that were blue and pink and yellow. He could see it from the way they waggled their jaws and from the way the blood was oozing from their mouths and ears and noses, from the way their heads were turned so that they were looking behind them, and their arms and legs w
ere twisted in ways that weren't, goddamit, normal. And if he just lay there, if there wasn't any fire, maybe then they'd come and move these damned people so he could crawl the hell out and go home and listen to Miles Davis; and God, he wished he could hear Miles now, but all he could hear were these moans and the siren and the sparks chattering away, and he wondered why the hell somebody didn't cut the goddam power.

  And somebody did.

  It was as dark as a tomb, and as soon as the lights went out Charlie wished they'd go back on again, sparks or not, and he panicked and tried to crawl over the people who were in his way, but stopped when his hand went into something warm and wet and slippery. He pulled back his hand and wiped it on his shirt. It was then that he began to cry, very softly, and decided to wait, to just wait for someone to come and help.

  They came. Charlie heard voices, strong and commanding, and saw lights, from the outside now It wasn't very long before the person who was lying in his way, wedged between the concrete floor and the splintered ceiling, slid away from him, and then someone's hand gripped his, and a ripping sound took part of the ceiling away from above him, and a light shone in his face.

  "Jesus, Charlie," he heard a voice say.

  "Hello, Tom," he said huskily, and made himself smile as Tom Brewer's burly arms pulled him out of the rubble and set him shakily on his feet. "Damned if they didn't bring down the house tonight." He laughed, and felt it grow suddenly dark again.

  Five centuries effect a great change on manners.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp