Hugh Fleetwood

THE POET GIVES HIS FRIEND WILDFLOWERS

Born in England in 1944, Hugh Fleetwood is a writer and artist whom a critic for the London Sunday Times has dubbed ‘the master of modern horror’. His second novel, The Girl Who Passed for Normal, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and his fifth, The Order of Death, was adapted for a film starring Harvey Keitel and John Lydon (Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols). Fleetwood’s Foreign Affairs (1974), a thriller about a famous concert pianist tormented by a deranged stalker, is available from Valancourt, and his weird and haunting short story ‘Something Happened’ was included in The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume One. This macabre little treat is original to this collection.

Pale blue and delicate, they smelled both sweet and faintly of death.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘they’re beautiful.’

Yet, perhaps just because they were –

or because of that unsettling scent –

although she smiled as she took them,

her eyes expressed a certain

fear.

As if she’d been reminded

she had always found him chilly,

and he liked to say that beauty, and art,

required sacrifice.

Still, monster or no,

she had loved him for many years,

and she was grateful and touched

by the gift.

So she tried to mask her disquiet,

and didn’t insist

when she asked where he had found them –

and he replied, ‘Oh, you know,’

and gave a vague, uncomfortable wave . . .

Shortly after, he left,

looking sad, but relieved she hadn’t pressed him;

that he hadn’t had to tell her

he had picked those flowers from her grave.