Where The Nightmare Ends

By Robin Wood and Ramsey Campbell

Robin Wood was and remains one of the greatest writers about film. He had an abiding interest in horror as an expression of radicalism. In 1979 he and his partner Richard Lippe curated a programme of sixty horror films at the Toronto International Film Festival, and they provided an accompanying monograph, American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. In his novel Where the Nightmare Ends Wood made his own contribution to the genre. "Normality is threatened by the monster" was his famous formulation for the field. It's designed to raise questions, and so is this novel, where an assorted group of folk as flawed as us are trapped on an island where a search for perfection has created something monstrous. How do we define normality and the monstrous? Wood suggests many answers as he leads us through psychological unease to suspense and dread and ultimately outright horror, not soon forgotten. No admirer of his work, and no horror aficionado, should miss his novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: May 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781786369772

Book preview

Prologue

Twenty-One Years Ago

When the Nightmare Began

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Northern Ontario. A placid lake beneath a blue summer sky. In the middle—too far from shore for its details to be made out, or for intruding eyes to spy on anyone who might choose it for a refuge—an island, densely wooded, rising to a peak of bare rock. Puttering across the lake, a little speedboat, its wake the only disturbance in a perfect natural serenity that might have seemed, according to taste and philosophy, either to be awaiting humanity to confer meaning upon it or to have achieved its meaning already, a harmony which people could only destroy.

The boat drew up at a little landing-stage, newly painted: its whiteness shone in the sun. A middle-aged man leapt ashore, nimbly for his age, but with a touch of self-consciousness and not-quite-concealed effort. He tied up, then held out his hand to the woman. She took it, and looked up at him: hitherto she had gazed down at the floor of the deck, perhaps lost in thought, perhaps like a child that keeps its eyes closed until the very last minute so that the expected surprise shall be all the greater. Her look, as she glanced up, had something of a child’s expectancy and also the child’s fear of disappointment; for expected surprises are always disappointing. But she rose from her seat, climbed out on to the landing-stage, and looked about her.

If you had been watching this as a scene from a film, you would have assumed it was a period piece, though you might have had difficulty in naming the period. She stepped ashore on this uninhabited and nameless island like visiting royalty: there should have been crowds to kneel for her. At the same time she seemed frightened—as indeed a queen might feel, for who is she but a mere human being? As they walked up the path from the landing-stage, a squirrel paused to look, then ran on. There were no dangerous animals, no poisonous snakes: ten men had searched the island for three days, inch by inch. Some deer had been brought out from the mainland, in the hope that they would settle and raise families.

The couple walked up the path in silence, her hand on his arm: she in her long white dress and broad hat, he in his navy-blue yachtsman’s blazer and white trousers. She had not cut her hair for fifteen years, and it flowed, auburn, down to her waist; in his rare playful moments, he called her Rapunzel. The path turned, the house appeared in front of them among the trees, but still she didn’t speak, though occasionally her lips moved as if to form words, and her face fixed itself in an expression of pleasure, almost rapture. They paused at the bottom of the steps, and at last she spoke.

‘It’s perfect, Stephen. It’s...it’s the Garden of Eden.’

The house was perfectly white, and perfectly untouched. Before it, little neat flower-beds had been planted with petunias and African marigolds. He walked ahead up the steps to the little wooden porch with the chintz-covered swing-seat. She hesitated.

‘I almost feel you should carry me over the threshold: it’s like being newly-weds all over again.’

They smiled at each other, and she walked up, taking his proffered hand.

For the simple two-storey wooden structure the hall was surprisingly spacious and lofty; the white-bannistered staircase rose to the upstairs landing, and two bedroom doors.

‘Do you want to see the kitchen?’ he asked.

They walked straight ahead, to the door under the stair-well. Inside, there was a clean, bare, plain wood kitchen table, big enough to eat off; a large bare dresser; a door to left and a door to right.

‘I’ve left it to you to choose cutlery and crockery from the mail-order catalogues,’ he said. ‘Though we have things for tonight. There’s a big store-room for you’ (he pointed left), and a large cool cellar, where we can hang meat and stock up on home-made wine.’

She glanced around with the same fixed smile signifying approval, then wandered back out into the wide dim hall. Sunlight was striking obliquely in through the big window, below which was a heavy oak chest for logs. Everything else was white, immaculate; the smell of fresh paint lingered faintly, not displeasing.

‘Wait there,’ he said, passing behind her.

She stood at the foot of the stairs, as if posed for a fashion plate in a long-outmoded Vogue, and watched him walk across and enter the room at the front. Through the open door she glimpsed a sofa covered in flowered chintz, and more white walls. In the silence, she could make out the sound of a handle being turned and then—perhaps because her ears were already expecting it—the faint hiss of a steel needle in the groove of a 78 rpm record.

She guessed immediately what was coming, but as the song started her face arranged itself in an expression of pleased surprise:

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‘There’s a little brown road winding over the hill

To a little white cot by the sea,

And a little green gate

At whose trellis I’ll wait,

While two eyes of blue

Come smiling through

At me.’

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He was standing in the doorway, his hand behind his back on the doorknob, looking at her expectantly. ‘Your favorite.’

She crossed to him, and kissed him chastely, almost virginally, on the lips. But the motor ran down and the tenor’s voice slid down the register and groaned to silence.

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They were sitting together on the sofa looking out at the dusk gathering among the thick woods through which the water was still dimly visible. They sat for a long time in silence, at opposite ends of the sofa, arms extended, holding hands, making no movement to disturb the stillness. Shadows thickened around them.

At last she said in her soft, precise voice: ‘It’s so perfect. To get away from the noise, the smog, the crowds. That terrible music. The filth—the moral filth.’

He squeezed her hand. His eyes were fixed on her face, with a look that was at once worship and pride of possession. ‘Won’t you miss London?’ he said quietly. ‘The concerts—our friends?’ She turned to him and shook her head, smiling; after a moment she continued: ‘It needs only one thing.’

He smiled slightly, and looked down. ‘Our child.’

She corrected him. ‘Our son. It will be a boy.’

He looked up again, almost shy, almost playful. ‘Shall we retire?’

She rose immediately, and went out into the hall. But at the foot of the stairs she turned.

‘Before we go up—do you mind if we pray together?’

He paused. ‘Here?’

‘Do you think I’m a silly old woman?’

He smiled, and laid his hands on her shoulders. ‘Neither old nor silly.’

She returned his smile, tentatively. ‘I don’t think anyone would call me young and sensible.’

Abruptly she knelt, there in the darkening hallway, looking up at him.  ‘After all, there’s no one here to see us. Except the Lord.’

He knelt beside her, and held out his hand to take hers. They looked down, and closed their eyes. Outside, the last light disappeared, and the woods crowded in around the house.

Chapter One

‘The island? No one lives there any more.’ 

Mr. Grover, caught by Paul’s question in mid-action, turned back to the shelves and surveyed his range of canned meats.

‘Around here, they call it the Island of Love. Very romantic story. Corned beef?’

‘They asked for ham.’

Karen, over the far side of the store, was poking desultorily at the rack of jeans.

‘Ham.’ He climbed down a rung of the ladder and pulled out a couple of cans.

Paul had settled on one of the high stools. He leaned his elbows on the counter and propped his head in his hands. ‘Tell me.’ His deep-set grey eyes, that had been wandering dreamily around the store not seeming to focus on anything, concentrated.

‘About the island? A couple bought it, twenty-twenty-one years ago. They were already middle-aged. Wanted to get away from everything, sort of back-to-nature idea. Very religious. Work and pray, all of that. Just lived there the two of them, never did have no visitors that anyone heard of. Scarcely ever saw him but once or twice, in the early days. She used to come over, mostly, for supplies, in their little boat. Beautiful woman she was: very...gracious. Our sheriff, now, he developed quite a crush on her, though he can’t’ve seen her a half-dozen times. Called her Princess. What next?’

Paul consulted the shopping list. ‘Washing up liquid...Didn’t they have kids?’

‘I’ve got the washing up liquid,’ Karen called across. ‘I’m looking for the soap powder.’

‘Over there, beyond the pots and pans...There was a baby.’ He drew up his high chair behind the counter, pulled out a cigarette packet. ‘’Bout a year after they settled. That was when he used to come for supplies. Talked proudly about how she was pregnant—almost seemed kind of surprised. Well—’(he lit his cigarette), ‘They wouldn’t hear of no hospitals nor doctors. God would do it all, God and nature: trust in the Lord. Well, this time the Almighty didn’t come across. The baby was born all right, but it was born dead. Her husband brought it over in the boat, for Frank—he’s our main doctor in these parts—to examine it and write the death certificate. Perfect little thing, he told us, but dead: strangled in the womb.’

Karen, her arms full of groceries, pulled a face, plonked cans and packets noisily on the counter. ‘Paul, we should get going.’

He looked round at her. ‘So what’s the rush?’

She shrugged. ‘OK. But remember, late with the lunch spells another dose of hell. It’s not my business, you ain’t my family, kid.’ She suddenly felt a desire to rumple his hair with her fingers, as if he were a little boy instead of a young man of twenty. ‘Here, give me the list.’ She walked off brusquely, checking the items.

Mr. Grover glanced at her back reproachfully and shook his head, then turned back to Paul. ‘Buried it over in the cemetery, just the father and the sheriff. She was too sick and upset to come over, poor old gal. I always think of her as old: always was too old to bear kids. Well, they lived on there for...maybe eighteen-nineteen years, just the old woman coming ashore ’bout once a month or two. They were set on being self-supporting; grow their own stuff, breed meat even. But I guess it all gradually went to pieces. Leastways, they began to lay in more and more supplies, cans of meat, the like. I used to tease her: Better watch that girlish figure, Princess. But she never got fatter. Slender as an aspen-tree, and pretty near as graceful, till the day she died...’

‘Paul, I can’t find your father’s brand of tobacco, will this do?’

He turned. She was holding up a yellow tin. ‘Whatever we get, it’ll be wrong,’ he said.

‘Thanks for the encouragement, schmuck. OK, I’ll get two different brands and double our chances.’

‘Of being wrong?’

She waved her hand at him, dismissing him.

‘Do you two always go on at each other like this?’ asked Mr. Grover placidly.

‘All the time. You just wouldn’t believe the trouble she gives me...How did she die?’

‘Drowned in the lake. Leastways, that’s what is generally supposed. The body was never recovered, which is odd in a lake this size. Some say she just wandered off, but where? Last time I saw her,’ he tapped the packet, extracted another cigarette, lit it from the stub...‘last time I saw her was when she brought the old man’s body over. He died of a stroke—no doubt about that. She was strong, that little wisp of a woman. Dragged or carried that body down to the boat on her own. Strong emotionally, too. No tears, no complaints. I helped her myself get the body off the boat—a little crowd gathered around to look, most of ’em never saw him alive. We laid him in my back room, among the stores. She just turned and walked away, without a backward glance. Just told me she wouldn’t be wanting no more supplies for a long time. That was...oh, maybe two years ago: must’ve been, ’cause fall was coming then too. Seemed kind of right...’Bout a week later someone found the boat, washed up at the other end of the lake. Harry—he’s our sheriff, Harry Links—he went over, looked around: no trace of her. Like I said, Harry had this thing about her. Not sex stuff—she seemed kind of above and beyond all that, especially as she got older. He sort of idealized her. Said he didn’t like to disturb anything, it all seemed kind of sacred. All that love. Just the two of ’em, living alone all those years—them and God, I suppose she’d