A Yankee who called himself Tompkins came to my house one May morning and flashed me an ID that said he worked for a veterans’ association. He was very soft-spoken and polite, but he had deep-set eyes that were almost black, and he never blinked. He asked me all about Price, seemed real interested in picking my brain of every detail. I told him the police had the story, and I couldn’t add any more to it. Then I turned the tables and asked him about Howdy Doody. He smiled in a puzzled kind of way and said he’d never heard of any chemical defoliant called that. No such thing, he said. Like I said, he was very polite.
But I know the shape of a gun tucked into a shoulder-holster. Tompkins was wearing one, under his seersucker coat. I never could find any veterans’ association that knew anything about him, either.
Maybe I should give that list of names to the police. Maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll try to find those four men myself, and try to make sense out of what’s being hidden.
I don’t think Price was evil. No. He was just scared, and who can blame a man for running from his own nightmares? I like to believe that, in the end, Price had the courage to face the Nightcrawlers, and in committing suicide he saved our lives.
The newspapers, of course, never got the real story. They called Price a ’Nam vet who’d gone crazy, killed six people in a Florida motel and then killed a state trooper in a shootout at Big Bob’s diner and gas stop.
But I know where Price is buried. They sell little American flags at the five-and-dime in Mobile. I’m alive, and I can spare the change.
And then I’ve got to find out how much courage I have.
Somebody Like You
Dennis Etchison
Even allowing for hyperbole and other factors you might cite to suggest something less than absolute accuracy, what can you do about a writer who gets this kind of praise: Whispers’ Stuart David Schiff: “The only author who has appeared in all . . . my anthologies.” Novelist Ramsey Campbell: “The finest writer of short stories now working in this field . . .” Reviewer Karl Wagner: “May well be the finest writer of psychological horror this genre has seen.” Critic Doug Winter: “Perhaps America’s premier writer of horror short stories.” Anthologist Charles L. Grant: “The best short story writer in the field today; bar none.” Your editor, scribbling in the guy’s name, one of the first five he sought for Masques?
I’ll tell you what you can do about him. You can read Dennis Etchison’s writing, short and long form, sometimes “by Jack Martin,” as often as your various emotions can take it. Because the praise is accurate.
A clue to enjoying the work of this pleasant Californian (born in Stockton, March 30, 1943) is found in my careful use of the term “various emotions,” since Etchison has a knack for arousing emotions ostensibly restricted to “mainstream” fiction. Read his handsome collection, The Dark Country. His characters become evocatively involved in situations which do more than scare, appall, caution, revulse or shock you. In common with people you know, they, or their circumstances, elicit reactions that concern, bewilder, surprise or “inevitabilitize” you. You feel their loneliness, differentness, ignorance, unpredictability or apartness, by turn—turn of some nightmarish tool the nerve-jabbing dentist never quite lets you see.
At least several of your various emotions are about to be probed in this new Dennis Etchison story, “Somebody Like You.” P. S.: You’ll reread it . . .
One morning they were lying together in his bed.
“Hi,” she said.
Then her lids closed, all but a quarter of an inch, and her eyes were rolling and her lips were twitching again.
Later, when her pupils drifted back into position, he saw that she was looking at him.
“What time is it?”
He kept looking at her.
She kept looking at him.
“I was watching you sleep,” he said.
“Mm?”
With some difficulty she turned onto her back. He saw her wince.
Finally she said, “How long?”
“A couple of hours,” he guessed.
They waited. Within and without the room there was the sound of the ocean. It was like breathing.
“Sometimes I talk in my sleep,” she said.
“I know.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
She tried to turn her face to him. He watched her long, slender fingers feel for the pillow. She made a frown.
“Hurt?” he said.
“Why won’t you tell me what I said?”
“That’s it,” he said. “You said that it hurts.”
“It does,” she said.
“What does?”
“The place where they cut us apart.”
He said, “Are you sleeping?”
“Mm,” she said.
He never knew.
* * *
She did not come back.
He tried calling her for several days running, but could not get through.
Then one afternoon she phoned to say that it would be nice if he were there.
He agreed.
When she did not answer his knock, he pried loose the screen and let himself in.
The cat was dozing on the bare boards in the living room, its jowls puffed and its eyes slitting in the heat. The bedroom door was ajar, and as he walked in he saw her curled there on the blue sheets. One of her hands was still on the telephone and the other was wrapped protectively around her body.
He sat down, but she did not see him.
More than once he climbed over her and opened and closed the door to draw air into the room. He ran water, tuned the television so that he could hear it and bunched the pillows behind him on the bed, but she did not want to wake up.
When the sun fell low, he drew the thin curtains so that it would not glare on her and leaned forward and fanned her face for a long time with the folded TV log. Her hair was pasted to the side of her head in damp whorls, and her ears contained the most delicate convolutions.
It was dark when she finally roused. Her eyes were glazed over, so that they appeared to be covered with fine, transparent membranes.
She smiled.
“How are you?” she said.
“What was it this time?” he asked. “You were breathing hard and your mouth was going a mile a minute, but I couldn’t understand anything.” He waited. “Do you remember?”
She seemed to founder, feeling for the thread that would lead her back into it before it dissolved away.
“I thought we were at his place,” she said, “and I kept trying to tell you that you had to get out of there before he came home. I couldn’t wake up.”
She lay there smiling.
“Isn’t that funny?” she said.
“Who?” he said. But already it was too late.
* * *
He spent the next morning rearranging his place.
Perhaps that would work.
He tied back the frayed blue curtains, cleaned the glass all the way to the low ceiling, spread an animal skin over the divan and moved it close to the bay window; she had liked to sit, sometimes for hours, staring out into the haze that came to settle over the water this time of year. He plumped up the cushions on the long couch and positioned it against the opposite wall, so that they would be able to be together later as they watched the glow.
He washed dishes, piled newspapers in the closet, hid his socks, and even found a small notions table and placed it next to the window so that she would not have to get up so often. Then he got out the plywood he had bought and slipped it between the mattress and box springs. She was right; it was too soft a bed in which to sleep comfortably, though he had not realized that until she mentioned it.
He found himself padding from room to room, trying to see, to feel as she would. Yes, he thought, it will be better this way, much better, and nothing will hurt.
And yet there was something that was not quite right, something somewhere that was
still off-center, vaguely out of place or missing altogether. But the morning passed and, whatever it was, he did not spot it.
The afternoon came and went, but she did not show.
He tried calling. Each time the girl at the answering service screened his ring. She had strict instructions, she admitted at last, to let only one person through, and did not even wait to take his message.
* * *
It was twilight when he got there. There were the sounds of unseen people within their separate houses, and he seemed to hear music playing nearby.
I sing this song of you, he thought.
He knocked, but there was no answer.
He shook his head, trying to remember her.
When he began to pry his way in, he discovered that it was not locked.
The living room was warm and the air stale, as though the door and windows had not been opened in a long time. He was nearly to the bedroom when he noticed her stretched out on the old pillows, almost hidden behind the front door.
He saw that her eyes were only partly closed, her corneas glistening between the lids. Her hands and arms were wrapped around herself, her head and neck this time, in the manner of a child in a disaster drill.
“Didn’t you hear me knocking?” he said to her.
Her eyes popped open and she looked up, startled, almost as if she expected to see herself. Then she sank back again.
He went to her.
He moved his hand up to her face, ran his finger along her cheek. She made a sleepy sound.
“Hm?” he asked again.
“What?” she said. “Oh, I thought the sound was coming from the other place.”
“What other place?” he said.
When she did not answer, he bent to kiss her.
I sing this song of you.
The receiver had time to warm in his hand before he tried again.
The girl at the answering service cut in.
He muffled his voice this time, trying to disguise it. “Let it ring through,” he said forcefully.
“Who’s calling, please?”
“Who do you think?” he said. “I’m sure she told you to expect my call.”
A surprised pause, a rustling of papers. “Let me see, this must be . . .”
She mentioned a name he had never heard before.
“Of course it is. Are you new there?”
She hesitated. In the background he heard buzzes, voices interrupting other calls and messages being taken and posted.
“I’m going to dial again now, and I want you to let it ring through,” he said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, of course,” the girl said quickly. “Um, wait a sec,” she added, reading from a paper. “I—I’m afraid she’s not in this afternoon. I’m sorry.”
He darkened. Then, “She did leave a reference number, didn’t she?”
“I’ll check. Yes, here it is. Well, not exactly. She said to tell you she’ll be at ‘the other place.’ She said you’ll know.”
He almost gave up. Then he said, “Right. But which one? It could be either of two. Now don’t tell me she’s going to hang me up with one of her guessing games again.”
It was hopeless, but he waited.
“Look,” he said, “this is an emergency, for God’s sake, and I really don’t have time for her to get back to me.”
“Um, I’ll see. I’m not the one who took the call. Hold, please, and I’ll see if I can locate the girl who worked that shift.” The phone went dead for a moment.
I don’t believe it, he thought. It’s working.
She came back on the line.
“It was someone on the late shift,” she announced. “I guess she’s left messages for you several times in the last week or so. It looks like it was always in the middle of the night, and since you didn’t call they’re all still on the board. The first one I have here—I’ll just read it to you. It says, ‘Tell him to meet me at the studio on Ocean Front.’ Okay? That might be the place, do you suppose?”
“All right,” he said.
“I’m sorry. We aren’t usually so confused around here. It’s just that—well, she’s left so many messages for you, and when you never called, I guess the other girl stuck them in with last week’s.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Thank you for calling. We were beginning to wonder if you’d ever—”
He hung up.
* * *
She was having a hard time waking up.
Her lips were parted very slightly, and a narrow, opaque crack of whiteness shone between her eyelids. She resisted the hand on her shoulder, her neck, her head with faint, inarticulate protest until she could stand it no longer.
Her face twisted and she tried to rise, struggling to focus her vision.
“What’s the matter?” she managed to say.
“You were asleep a long time,” he told her, his voice more gentle and tender than it had ever been before. “I’ve been waiting a couple of hours. It’s starting to get pretty late.”
He caressed the back of her head, his thumb behind her ear.
“The way your eyes were jerking around, you must have been dreaming.”
She shook her head, trying to clear it.
“It seemed like someone was outside, trying to get in,” she said.
“That was me, I’m afraid.”
“Oh. Then that part was true, after all.” Her eyes swam, then held on him. “But why would it be you? This is your place. Didn’t you have your key?”
“I—forgot it.”
“Oh.” She stretched. “Never mind. It was just so strange. So real. I thought someone else was here with me. And you know what? He looked a lot like you.”
“So where is he, in the closet?”
“Don’t worry—he wasn’t as good looking. Only he wouldn’t leave, even though he knew you were going to get here any minute. Isn’t that funny?”
“Like an open grave,” he said uneasily.
“I know,” she said, as if it really mattered.
She looked at him, unblinking, in that way she had, until he said something.
“So?”
“So that’s all, I guess. I don’t know why, but I think I’d like to remember it.” And, quite suddenly, tears sprang from her eyes. “All of it.”
“Take it easy, will you?”
He moved to her.
“He was trying to be so good to me. Except that it was you, all the time it was you.”
“I love you,” he said.
“And you know I need you, too, don’t you? So much. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I really don’t. I promise I’ll try—”
He stood and quieted her by pressing her head to his body. Her arms went around his waist and they held each other.
“I know you will,” he said. “Don’t worry about anything. I’m here with you now, and I wouldn’t want you any other way.”
* * *
He went down the stairs from the loft bedroom.
The thick blue drapes, the richest blue he had ever seen, were set off perfectly by the white walls and ceiling, and as he passed them he considered drawing the cord on the magnificent view of the Pacific he knew they would reveal.
Instead he turned and stood for a moment before the mirror that was mounted below the loft, angled to provide a view of the entire room.
In it he saw the cat arising peacefully from a nap on the deep carpeting. He smiled, his lips curling with satisfaction at the couches, the chairs, the superb appointments.
He stood transfixed, listening to the surf as it washed in around the supports of the house. He almost leaned over to activate the custom stereo system, but could not bring himself
to break the spell of the gentle rushing, breathing sound. It almost seemed to be coming from within the house, as well, and it made him remember.
The earliest parts of the dream were already beginning to fade.
Still he recalled tossing in a bed somewhere, a lonely bed to which no one ev
er came. There had been the sound of waves there, too. He had been dreaming of a girl who would need him as much as he needed her. And when he was finished she did; she needed someone; she needed to be taken care of, and that part had come out right, had been easy enough
He had forgotten, of course, that she would have dreams of her own.
Soon she needed other things, like more and more time away from the hot little house he had imagined for her. In fact she needed something even better than his own modest beach cottage. It was always the way. Except that this time he had found the street of her dreams, had driven up and down until he saw her car parked here in the shade of the port . . .
The carport of a house where someone lived. Someone even better suited to her needs.
This time it would take.
He shut his eyes as he dreamed the feel of fine knit against his legs, the designer shoes with the high-rise heels, the hand-tailored shirt of imported silk, the styled hair and the rest of it, all of it, the way she wanted it to be, the look. There would be more details. But they could be arranged, too. Of course they could. Why not? It was worth the effort.
She needed him, didn’t she?
She needs somebody, he thought.
Wavering before the mirror as he tossed and turned, he opened his eyes. He smiled.
Somebody like you.
Samhain: Full Moon and
I Have Made My Bones Secure
Ardath Mayhar
Can you identify these writers? (1) Author of 12 published novels, including one that was Number 1 on the Locus bestseller lists for three months and another which made the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults list in the same year; (2) a poet who took top regional prizes for eight years in succession and won awards from half a dozen other major competitions; (3) the writer of imaginative horror and fantasy yarns published in Weirdbook, Twilight Zone; Asimov’s SF and in such anthologies as Swords Against Darkness #4 and Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories to be Read with the Lights On; (4) theprose-writer/poet with a name that sounds straight out of “Star Wars”?
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