Masques

by J N Williamson

  “They don’t wait meals.” Harley frowned. “Didn’t do it for Amanda when she slipped in the tub and struck her head. She was absent for a goddamned day, before anybody even noticed she was missing.” Looking past his son, watching the lazy descent of fresh snow, his passion began to dissipate. “Didn’t wait breakfast for her, or lunch. And they won’t be waiting dinner for me.”

  “Please, Father!”

  “Snow’s starting up again,” Harley said, eyes round in his seamed face.

  “All the more reason to get you back to the home.”

  The old gentleman braced himself, at the back, against the house of his own youth. It was suddenly so clear, so fully reclaimed. “It snowed that night, too. I looked out the window, saw flakes floating down like weightless angels. And I imagined they’d come to take your grandfather’s soul, and escort him back to heaven. He belonged there; in heaven.”

  “I’m sure he did, Father. But—”

  “I was sitting on the floor in the living room.” He turned slightly, pointed inside with his cane. “And he sat in his chair, so large even seated that he seemed like a giant. My giant. And then he told me he was going to die.”

  “That’s ancient history, it was a long time ago.”

  “He told me he was going to die,” firmly repeated, purpose girding his tones; “and he lifted a chain with a pendant from over his own head and placed it round my neck. ‘This will protect you,’ he said. ‘From evil.’”

  The familiar boredom, despite Harley’s message, the jaded expression of Get-on-with-it-please that had characterized the son since childhood, was apparent.

  But Harley touched one finger to the pendant that was now displayed outside his shirt and the winter coat. “Because I was a boy and knew no better, I asked him, in my own childish fashion, about the evil that would be repelled. The nature of it. Do you think for a moment that I, then so much a boy, understood my destiny—even when Father showed me?” Now his son’s eyes gleamed. It could have been from what he was hearing, or from the intense cold.

  “Your grandfather,” said the old man, steadily, doggedly continuing, “stood me at the window to stare outside. It was black as midnight except for the porch light, and the drifting snow. Then he pointed silently at the snowy shapes of the topiary which lined the family walkway then, and now.”

  The younger Mann turned, expelling his warm breath, looking not at the lifelike sculptures of the topiary but to a nearly furtive grayness of untouchable clouds. He said nothing, but he seemed to hear Harley.

  Frailer, it appeared, by the second, old Harley leaned against the windowsill to appraise the way his son stood, his back stiff. He detected a telltale shrug. “I know you don’t wish to hear the rest, son. You believe I’m demented, but I fear this is nothing so lightly explained away.” He paused, realized that the lessened visibility was only in part the fault of the gathering snowfall. “Daniel, hear me, please. I’m dying, Daniel.”

  His son, wiping a coat sleeve across his mouth, blinked as he turned. “That’s quite enough!” Daniel Mann’s eyes seemed red; his face was ruddy, suffused by blood. “I won’t listen to more, Father. There is nothing wrong with you!”

  “Then you weren’t listening.”

  “Not any longer, I’m not.” Taking Harley’s arm, managing a conciliatory smile, he tried to coax the old man away from his house of memory. He succeeded for a few steps of the porch. “I should never have let you come here.”

  “You had no choice, Daniel. You’re my son, not the other way around.” He’d stopped at the bottom of the steps to lock his arm to the railing. “And now, damn you, hear me out! Let me explain the rest!”

  Daniel Mann sighed, shook his head. “What is there to explain?”

  “Much,” Harley whispered, shuddering. Then without warning, he slipped down until he was sitting in a patina of snow. “There’s much more, I fear.”

  “For God’s sake, Father, it’s snowing heavier by the minute!”

  “Y’know, I used to walk through here. Frequently.” He spoke absently, his gaze moving down the line of topiary figures, misshapen and twisted, haunted into unnatural forms by vagrant shadows. “Sometimes at night, with only the porchlight for illumination. And comfort. It frightened me, touching shoulders with a menagerie of sculptures in basic, human form; but I’d talked with Father and I needed to know them well.” Eyebrows raised as he peered up to ask: “And you, Daniel? Were there times when fear stopped you at the sidewalk, or did you dare to venture farther?”

  “They’re shrubs. That’s all they ever were to me, Father. That’s all they are now.”

  Harley’s eyes widened and he made himself say it, at least. “They are your ancestors, Daniel. And this front yard of the damned, with these perfectly manicured shrubs, is their cemetery—and their assignments in death.”

  “Father!”

  “This is where your grandfather’s grandfather came to be dead; and every son, after him; every son of a son. And this is where I have come, and where, Daniel, you must surely come one day.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “It isn’t—a matter of choice.”

  The son sucked in a lungful of cold air and, with arms crossed on his chest as if he sought to hold himself together, he glanced over the misaligned deformities which were supposed to be his personal forefathers.

  “Take this,” Harley said, slipping the talisman on its chain from his neck, and holding it out to his son. “It will protect you until the day arrives when you are ready to die.”

  Daniel, turned to Harley, shook his head.

  “You’ll be the oldest now. The last descendant.” He motioned for his son to come nearer, to claim possession of the pendant. “Now, Daniel.”

  “This is a lunatic business, Father.” Slowly, grudgingly, he put out his open hand and watched as the old man dropped the charm into his palm. It felt warm, then, presumably from Harley Mann’s pulsing throat. “Will you come back to the car now?”

  “Daniel, you must place it round your neck, then wear it.”

  “Then you will let me take you back?”

  “Please! Put it around your neck!”

  “Only if you promise to come with me now, Father, with no further foolishness.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” Harley said, his voice all but inaudible, “leave.” He buried his face in his hands, quietly shook his head. He seemed oddly ashamed. “I’m sorry, Daniel, but believe me, please. I cannot leave.”

  “Well, that is just great, isn’t it? And what the hell am I supposed to do, Father? Leave you here to freeze?” Furious, his back to his father, he felt the pendant turning cold in his palm, numbing his fingers from the fine ridglets of the strawberry shrub pattern. Briefly, Daniel focused his growing frustration on the familial talisman—then he screamed an echoing obscenity, and heaved the chained pendant into the air. It sailed above the path of the walkway, hit the Datsun’s hood, and left miniature tracks in the thin film of snow.

  Daniel saw it hit, and skid, and bury itself into a fist-sized mound of graying snow. And he spoke to the sky, incapable that moment of turning to face his father. “No more nonsense! No more about the pendant, or the shrubbery. Whether you like it or not, you’re going back to the home!” Clenching his hands, he waited out the silence, then began to turn back. “Understood?”

  And his father smiled sadly, a tear of abject, expectant loneliness sliding down the faded cheek. His eyes were grey-agate cold, grey-agate lifeless.

  And Daniel’s gaze was drawn to Harley’s left foot, tapping, noiselessly, as if his Achilles tendon had been drawn up in a sudden spasm.

  But Daniel realized as he stared that more, much more, was wrong with his father—

  And watched as Harley’s oxfords ripped along the stitching between vamp and arch, mudguard and collar. Eyelets popped; shoestrings slithered away. The leather inhaled—bulged, as if ready to explode—and exhaled, twitched and twisted until the material finally dropped away. The blood wit
hin the foot pumped full, fuller, the bulging followed riverlike trails up the calf and down to the foot at the same instant.

  Daniel Mann jumped back—gaping—

  And something rootlike erupted from the sole of his father’s foot, tasted air with grubby feelers like antennae, then burrowed into the ground.

  His father’s clothing turned to ash—

  And something branchlike, crisscrossing his father’s leg, busily, briskly—foot, ankle, calf, thigh—in the canals of his blood vessels, ripped wide great quantities of skin.

  Harley Mann’s head lolled lifelessly back on his shoulders . . .

  Daniel crept back another, sickened step, then another, before his legs gave way and he dropped to one knee. Peering over each shoulder by turn, he quivered internally before the nightmare presence of the unnatural, shrub-sculptured figures—each inquisitive statuary leaning forward, as if to whisper, and hiss, into his ear. And Daniel quickly scrambled to his feet, unwilling to hear what they might say. He looked down—

  Piled upon the porchstep, where his father had been, was a misshapen mass of thick, raw branches, just beginning to bud.

  He could not scream for the words reassuming shape in his memory: You’re the oldest now, you’re the last descendant.

  Snow laced the delicate lines as the man-now-shrub grew, formed, head thrown back as real head had died, mouth gaping in silent, perpetual scream . . . a form not unlike the others, yet grotesque in its special way, not quite as unhuman, perhaps, as one might believe at first glance . . .

  “Oh Jesus! Godalmighty!”

  Daniel spun, repulsed to his soul, horrified by shame and the terror of the semi-human face which signaled his legacy. In the same motion, with the afterimage of his father’s skeleton-of-wood a shadow at his back, Daniel sprinted for the Datsun. A thin layer of new ice coated the walkway. The pendant, get the pendant! He slid past the white picket fence, the last grotesque sculpture, and tripped forward over the hood of his car.

  At once Daniel’s left foot, toe to ground, trembled—spasmed—went out of control.

  And he knew that something inside him, in his genes, cavorting wildly in his bloodstream, must explode from the sole of his foot to fasten him to the earth. His fingers, outthrust, touched the cold metal of the pendant—

  His left shoe fell away.

  A fragmented moment of wonder at the touch of winter, and death, against his foot. Then the chain was in his fingers, he was lifting it over his head—

  And the sole of his foot felt as if it had taken root.

  The skin of his leg felt as if it were opening, splaying wide in fissures—felt as if his sap-gorged veins were turning fibrous.

  And then the gold pendant was around his neck, in place, and everything went limp as Daniel passed out.

  Conscious, Daniel Mann found himself sprawled upon the hood of his car, his jacket sleeves wet and coldly adhering to his flesh. The joints of his hands were brittle, stiff. Carefully, he lifted himself on one tender elbow, looked about for something familiar, and, in the midnight gloom, remembered the family heritage of which he had so recently learned.

  In reflex, his shaking hand went to where the chain—the talisman—still hung from his neck. The dangling weight was reassuring; but it was also, he realized, ominous. Then he turned within from fright and loss to laugh, instead, and cry out to the nearby silhouette of the being who had sired him: “I’m alive, Father! Father, I’m alive!”

  It was a scant moment later, when Daniel yearned to scramble back into the Datsun and flee from his horror, that he came to understand the delicate balance between past and present, death, and life.

  His foot, no longer flesh and cartilage and human bone, had rooted.

  The queer thing was, Daniel Mann experienced no pain. But he screamed, anyway, screamed as long as he could.

  For his limb.

  For his life.

  And his new life, forever, in grotesquerie.

  Soft

  F. Paul Wilson

  F. Paul Wilson is one of the Masques writers who enjoys greater celebrity in science fiction circles; but unlike Gene Wolfe, or the other contributors, Paul knows science as a practicing physician. Maybe that’s why he also writes spell-weaving horror; but here’s a fair question; What kind of man finds time for a varied writing career when he’s also one-fifth of a family-medicine group in Brick, New Jersey?

  Answer: The kind who plays three musical instruments (and writes music), jogs two miles daily, collects pulps, and raises two daughters. (He also tried to raise bonsai trees but his leafy patients didn’t dig his bedside manner.)

  Born May 17, 1946, the good doctor was developed by the founder of modern sf, John Campbell. Often in Analog and Asimov’s SF, he also won the first Prometheus award—7Vi ounces of gold! His fifth novel, Rakoshi, is said to resemble the “Yellow Peril novels of the 20s and 30s.”

  It was The Keep which drew Wilson to your editor’s attention. Lovers of horror who’ve only seen the movie do themselves an injustice, as reading the next yarn will establish. It arose from “two disparate scribbles in my notebook,” and Paul, who likes turning clichés around, knew his storyline meshed when a bodybuilder said ruefully that the country was going soft.

  Then it occurred to F. Paul Wilson that he “had stumbled upon one of the most horrible lingering deaths imaginable (The patient is ready, Doctor . . .)

  I was lying on the floor watching tv and exercising what was left of my legs when the newscaster’s jaw collapsed. He was right in the middle of the usual plea for anybody who thought they were immune to come to Rockefeller Center when—pflutnpf!—the bottom of his face went soft.

  I burst out laughing.

  “Daddy!” Judy said, shooting me a razorblade look from her wheelchair.

  I shut up.

  She was right. Nothing funny about a man’s tongue wiggling around in the air snake-like while his lower jaw flopped down in front of his throat like a sack of jello and his bottom teeth jutted at the screen crowns-on, rippling like a line of buoys on a bay. A year ago I would have gagged. But I’ve changed in ways other than physical since this mess began, and couldn’t help feeling good about one of those pretty-boy newsreaders going soft right in front of the camera. I almost wished I had a bigger screen so I could watch 21 color inches of the scene. He was barely visible on our five-inch black-and-white.

  The room filled with white noise as the screen went blank. Someone must have taken a look at what was going out on the airwaves and pulled the plug. Not that many people were watching anyway.

  I flipped the set off to save the batteries. Batteries were as good as gold now. Better than gold. Who wanted gold nowadays?

  I looked over at Judy and she was crying softly. Tears slid down her cheeks.

  “Hey, hon—”

  “I can’t help it, Daddy. I’m so scared!”

  “Don’t be, Jude. Don’t worry. Everything will work out, you’ll see. We’ve got this thing licked, you and me.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because it hasn’t progressed in weeks! It’s over for us—we’ve got immunity.”

  She glanced down at her legs, then quickly away. “It’s already too late for me.”

  I reached over and patted my dancer on the hand. “Never too late for you, shweetheart,” I said in my best Bogart. That got a tiny smile out of her.

  We sat there in the silence, each thinking our own thoughts. The newsreader had said the cause of the softness had been discovered: A virus, a freak mutation that disrupted the calcium matrix of bones.

  Yeah. Sure. That’s what they said last year when the first cases cropped up in Boston. A virus. But they never isolated the virus, and the softness spread all over the world. So they began searching for “a subtle and elusive environmental toxin.” They never pinned that one down either.

  Now we were back to a virus again. Who cared? It didn’t matter. Judy and I had beat it. Whether we had formed the right antibodies or the right antito
xin was just a stupid academic question. The process had been arrested in us. Sure, it had done some damage, but it wasn’t doing any more, and that was the important thing. We’d never be the same, but we were going to live!

  “But that man,” Judy said, nodding toward the tv. “He said they were looking for people in whom the disease had started and then stopped. That’s us, Dad. They said they need to examine people like us so they can find out how to fight it, maybe develop a serum against it. We should—”

  “Judy-Judy-Judy!” I said in Cary Grantese to hide my annoyance. How many times did I have to go over this? “We’ve been through all this before. I told you: It’s too late for them. Too late for everybody but us immunes.”

  I didn’t want to discuss it—Judy didn’t understand about those kind of people, how you can’t deal with them.

  “I want you to take me down there,” she said in the tone she used when she wanted to be stubborn. “If you don’t want to help, okay. But I do.”

  “No!” I said that louder than I wanted to and she flinched. More softly: “I know those people. I worked all those years in the Health Department. They’d turn us into lab specimens. They’ll suck us dry and use our immunity to try and save themselves.”

  “But I want to help somebody! I don’t want us to be the last two people on earth!”

  She began to cry again.

  Judy was frustrated. I could understand that. She was unable to leave the apartment by herself and probably saw me at times as a dictator who had her at his mercy. And she was frightened, probably more frightened than I could imagine. She was only eighteen and everyone she had ever known in her life—including her mother—was dead.

  I hoisted myself into the chair next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She was the only person in the world who mattered to me. That had been true even before the softness began.

  “We’re not alone. Take George, for example. And I’m sure there are plenty of other immunes around, hiding like us. When the weather warms up, we’ll find each other and start everything over new. But until then, we can’t allow the bloodsuckers to drain off whatever it is we’ve got that protects us.”