Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Hitchhiker
The Sound of Murder
Burned
Flight 715
Howard’s End
The Elevator
The Phone Goes Dead
Twist Cottage
The Shortest Horror Story Ever Written
About the Author
Also by Anthony Horowitz
THE ALEX RIDER ADVENTURES:Stormbreaker
Point Blank
Skeleton Key
Eagle Strike
Scorpia
Ark Angel
Stormbreaker: The Graphic Novel
THE DIAMOND BROTHERS MYSTERIES:The Falcon’s Malteser
Public Enemy Number Two
Three of Diamonds
South by Southeast
The Devil and His Boy
PHILOMEL BOOKS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.
Published by The Penguin Group.
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.). Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England. Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.). Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd). Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India. Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd). Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.
First published in Great Britain by Orchard Books Ltd, 2000.
Copyright © 2000 by Anthony Horowitz.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horowitz, Anthony, 1955- More Horowitz horror : stories you’ll wish you’d never read / Anthony Horowitz.—1st American ed. p. cm. Contents: The hitchhiker—The sound of murder—Burned—Flight—Howard’s end—The lift—The phone goes dead—Twist cottage—The shortest horror story ever written. 1. Horror tales, English. 2. Children’s stories, English. [1. Horror stories. 2. Short stories.] I. Title. PZ7.H7875 Mor 2006 [Fic]—dc22 2006045583
eISBN : 978-1-101-17740-2
http://us.penguingroup.com
The Hitchhiker
Why did my father have to stop? I told him not to. I knew it was a bad idea. Of course, he didn’t listen to me. Parents never do. But it would never have happened if only he’d driven on.
We’d been out for the day, just the three of us, and what a great, really happy day it had been. My fifteenth birthday, and they had taken me to Southwold, a small town on the Suffolk coast. We’d gotten there just in time for lunch and had spent the afternoon walking on the beach, looking in the shops, and losing money in the crummy arcade down by the pier.
A lot of people would think that Southwold was a rubbish place to go, especially on your birthday. But they’d be wrong. The truth is that it’s special. From the multicolored beach huts that have probably been there since Queen Victoria’s time, to the cannons on the cliff that have certainly been there a whole lot longer. It’s got a lighthouse and a brewery and a sloping village green that all look as if they’ve come out of an old-fashioned English novel. None of the shops seem to sell anything that anyone would actually want and there’s one, on the High Street, that has these fantastic wooden toys. A whole circus that comes to life for twenty-five cents. And the talking head of Horatio Nelson who puts his telescope up to his missing eye and sings. You get real fish and chips in Southwold. Fish that were still swimming while you were driving to the restaurant. Sticky puddings with custard. I don’t need to go on. The whole place is so old-fashioned and so English that it just makes you want to smile.
We started back at about five o’clock. There was a real Suffolk sunset that evening. The sky was pink and gray and dark blue and somehow there was almost too much of it. I sat in the back of the car and as the door slammed, I felt that strange, heavy feeling you get at the end of a really good day. I was sad that it was over. But I felt happy and tired, glad that it was over too.
It was only about an hour’s drive and as we left Southwold it began to rain. There’s nothing strange about that. The weather often changes rapidly in Suffolk. By the time we reached the highway, the rain was falling quite heavily, slanting down, gray needles in the breeze. And there, ahead of us on the road, was a man, walking quickly, his hands clenched to the sides of his jacket, pulling it around him. He didn’t turn around as we approached but he must have heard us coming. Suddenly his hand shot out. One thumb jutted out; the universal symbol of the hitchhiker. He wanted a lift.
There were about fifteen seconds until we reached him. My father was the first to speak.
“I wonder where he’s going.”
“You’re not going to stop,” my mother said.
“Why not? It’s a horrible evening. Look at the weather!”
And there you have my parents. My father is a dentist and maybe that’s why he’s always trying to be nice to people. He knows that nobody in their right mind really wants to see him. He’s tall and disheveled, the sort of man who goes to work with his hair unbrushed and with socks that don’t match. My mother works three days a week at a real estate agency. She’s much tougher than him. When I was young, she was always the one who would send me to bed. He’d let me stay up all night if she wasn’t there.
There’s one more thing I have to tell you about them. They both look quite a bit older than they actually are. There’s a reason for this. My older brother, Eddy. He died suddenly when he was twelve years old. That was nine years ago and my parents have never really recovered. I miss him too. Of course, he bullied me sometimes like all big brothers do, but his death was a terrible thing. It hurt us all and we know that the pain will never go away.
Anyway, it was typical of my dad to want to stop and offer the man a lift and just as typical of my mom to want to drive on. In the backseat, I said, “Don’t stop, Dad.” But it was already too late. Just fifteen seconds has passed since we saw the hitchhiker and already we were slowing down. I’d told him not to stop. But I’d no sooner said it than we did.
The rain was coming down harder now and it was very dark, so I couldn’t see very much of the man. He seemed quite large, towering over the car. He had long hair, hanging down over his eyes.
My father pressed the button that lowered the window. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Ipswich.”
Ipswich was about twenty miles away. My mother didn’t say anything. I could tell she was uncomfortable.
“You were heading there on foot?” my father asked.
“My car broke down.”
“Well—we’re heading that way. We can give you a lift.”
“John . . .” My mother spoke my father’s name quietly but already it was too late. The damage was done.
“Thanks,” the man said. He opened the back door.
I suppose I’d better explain.
The A12 highway is a long, dark, anonymous road that often goes through empty countryside with no buildings in sight. It was like that where we were now. There were no streetlights. Pulled in on the hard shoulder, we must have been practically invisible to the other traffic rushing past. It was the one place in the world where you’d have to be crazy to
pick up a stranger.
Because, you see, everyone knows about Fairfields. It’s a big, ugly building not far from Woodbridge, surrounded by a wall that’s fifty feet high with spikes along the top and metal gates that open electrically. The name is quite new. It used to be called the East Suffolk Maximum Security Prison for the Criminally Insane. And right now we were only about ten miles away from it.
That’s the point I’m trying to make. When you’re ten miles away from a lunatic asylum, you don’t stop in the dark to pick up someone you’ve never met. You have to say to yourself that maybe, just maybe, there could have been a breakout that night. Maybe one of the loonies has cut the throat of the guard at the gate and slipped out into the night. And so it doesn’t matter if it’s raining. It doesn’t even matter if the local nuclear power station at Sizewell has just blown up and radioactive slush is coming down in buckets. You just don’t stop.
The back door slammed shut. The man eased himself into the backseat, rainwater glistening on his jacket. The car drove forward again.
I looked at him, trying to make out his features in the half-light. He had a long face with a square chin and small, narrow eyes. His skin was pale, as if he hadn’t been outdoors in a while. His hair was somewhere between brown and gray, hanging down in clumps. His fingers were unusually long. One hand was resting on his thigh and his fingers reached all the way to his knee.
“Have you been out for the day?” he asked.
“Yes.” My father knew he had annoyed my mother and he was determined to be cheerful and chatty, to show that he wasn’t ashamed of what he’d done. “We’ve been in Southwold. It’s a beautiful place.”
“Oh yes.” He glanced at me and I saw that he had a scar running over his eye. It began on his forehead and ended on his cheek and it seemed to have pushed the eye a little to one side. It wasn’t quite level with the other one.
“Do you know Southwold?” my father asked.
“No.”
“So where are you coming from today?”
The man thought for a moment. “I broke down near Lowestoft,” he said, and somehow I knew he was lying. For a start, Lowestoft was a long way away, right up in Norfolk. If he’d broken down there, how could he have managed to get all the way to Southwold? And why bother? It would have been easier to jump on a train and go straight to Ipswich. I opened my mouth to say something but the man looked at me again, more sharply this time. Maybe I was imagining it but he could have been warning me. Don’t say anything. Don’t ask any difficult questions.
“What’s your name?” my mother asked. I don’t know why she wanted to know.
“Rellik,” he said. “Ian Rellik.” He smiled slowly. “This your son in the back?”
“Yes. That’s Jacob. He’s fifteen today.”
“His birthday?” The man uncurled his hand and held it out to me. “Happy birthday, Jacob.”
“Thank you.” I took the hand. It was like holding a dead fish. At the same time I glanced down and saw that his sleeve had pulled back, exposing his wrist. There was something glistening on his skin and it wasn’t rainwater. It was dark red, trickling down all the way to the edge of his hand, rising over the fleshy part of his thumb.
Blood!
Whose blood? His own?
He pulled his hand away, hiding it behind him. He knew I had seen it. Maybe he wanted me to.
We drove on. A cloud must have burst because it was really lashing down. You could hear the rain thumping on the car roof and the windshield wipers were having to work hard to sweep it aside. I couldn’t believe we’d been walking on the beach only a few hours before.
“Lucky we got in,” my mother said, reading my mind.
“It’s bad,” my father said.
“It’s hell,” the man muttered. Hell. It was a strange choice of word. He shifted in his seat. “What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a dentist.”
“Really? I haven’t seen a dentist . . . not for a long time.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. The tongue was pink and wet. The teeth were yellow and uneven. I guessed he hadn’t cleaned them in a while.
“You should go twice a year,” my father said.
“You’re right. I should.”
There was a rumble of thunder and at that exact moment the man turned to me and mouthed two words. He didn’t say them. He just mouthed them, making sure my parents couldn’t see.
“You’re dead.”
I stared at him, completely shaken. At first I thought I must have misunderstood him. Maybe he had said something else and the words had gotten lost in the thunderclap. But then he nodded slowly, telling me that I wasn’t wrong. That’s what he’d said. And that’s what he meant.
I felt every bone in my body turn to jelly. That thing about the asylum. When we’d stopped and picked up the hitchhiker, I hadn’t really believed that he was a madman who’d just escaped. Often you get scared by things but you can still tell yourself that it’s just your imagination, that you’re being stupid. And after all, there are lots of stories about escaped lunatics and none of them are ever true. But now I wasn’t so sure. Had I imagined it? Had he said something else? You’re dead. I thought back, picturing the movement of his lips. He’d said it all right.
We were doing about forty miles per hour, punching through the rain. I turned away, trying to ignore the man on the seat beside me. Mr. Rellik. There was something strange about that name and without really thinking I found myself writing it on the window, using the tip of my finger.
RELLIK
The letters, formed out of the condensation inside the car, hung there for a moment. Then the two ls in the middle began to run. It reminded me of blood. The name sounded Hungarian or something. It made me think of someone in Dracula.
“Where do you want us to drop you?” my mother asked.
“Anywhere,” Mr. Rellik said.
“Where do you live in Ipswich?”
There was a pause. “Blade Street,” he said.
“Blade Street? I don’t think I know it.”
“It’s near the center.”
My mother knew every street in Ipswich. She lived there for ten years before she married my father. But she had never heard of Blade Street. And why had the hitchhiker paused before he answered her question? Had he been making it up?
The thunder rolled over us a second time.
“I’m going to kill you,” Mr. Rellik said.
But he said it so quietly that only I heard and this time I knew for certain. He was mad. He had escaped from Fairfields. We had picked him up in the middle of nowhere and he was going to kill us all. I leaned forward, trying to catch my parents’ eyes. And that was when I happened to look into the rearview mirror. That was when I saw the word that I had written on the window just a few moments before.
RELLIK
But reflected in the mirror it said something else.
KILLER
What was I supposed to do? What would you do if you were in my situation? We were still doing forty miles an hour in the rain, following a long empty road with fields on one side, trees on the other, and thick darkness everywhere. We were trapped inside the car with a man who could have a knife on him or even a gun or something worse. My parents didn’t know anything but for some reason the man had made himself known to me. So what were my choices?
I could scream.
He would lash out and stop me before I had even opened my mouth. I could imagine those long fingers closing on my throat. He would strangle me in the backseat and my parents would drive on without even knowing what had happened. Until it was their turn.
I could trick him.
I could say I was feeling carsick. I could make them stop the car and then, when we got out, I could somehow persuade my parents to run for it. But that was a bad idea too. We were safer while we were still moving. At least Mr. Rellik—or whatever his real name was—couldn’t attack my father while he was driving. The car would go out of control. He couldn’t reach my mother either. Th
at would mean lunging diagonally across the car and somehow getting over the back of her seat. No, I was the only one in danger right now . . . but that would change the moment we stopped.
Could I talk to him? Reason with him? Hope against hope that I had imagined it all and that he didn’t mean us any harm?
And then I remembered.
I was sitting behind my mother for a reason. When we had set out that morning, my father had told me to sit there because there was something wrong with the door on the other side. It was an old car, a Volkswagen station wagon, and the catch on one of the passenger doors had broken. My mother had said it was dangerous and had told me to sit on the left-hand side and to be sure that I wore my seat belt. I was wearing it now. But Mr. Rellik wasn’t.
I shifted around in my seat as if trying to get more comfortable. Mr. Rellik was instantly alert. I could see that if I was going to try something, I would have to move fast. He had told me who he was. He knew that I knew. He was almost expecting me to try something.
“We’ll drop you off at the next exit,” my father said.
“That’ll be fine.” But the hitchhiker had no intention of getting out at the next roundabout. His face darkened. The eye with the scar twitched. As I watched, his hand slid into his jacket and curled around something underneath the material. I didn’t have to see it to know what it was. A knife. A moment later his hand reappeared and I caught the glint of silver. I knew exactly what was going to happen. He would attack me. My father would stop the car. What else could he do? Then it would be his turn. And then my mother’s.
I yelled out. And then everything happened in a blur.
I had already gotten myself into position, curled up in the corner with my shoulders pressed into the side of the car to give me leverage. At the same time, my legs shot out. Mr. Rellik had made a bad mistake. With his hand underneath his jacket he couldn’t defend himself. Both my feet slammed into him, one on his shoulder, one just above his waist. I had kicked him with all my strength and as my legs uncoiled he was thrown against the opposite door.