Voices, talking—high, eager, discursive yet indistinct—voices drifted up, from the cellar. Or, whatever had been conceived deep in the darkness exposed by the lifted trapdoor. They made her jump, microscopically, because she had intentionally avoided thinking of the cellar, because she did not yet feel quite in full command of her thoughts. She became aware then of moonlight groping at the solitary windowpane in the living room, shedding unsteady illumination upon the hole gaping from the middle of the floor. It made unmistakable the fact that there were steps, leading out of sight—a simple means of reaching the source of the soft, far-off voices.
Pamela stood and the corners of her mouth twitched as if she knew, within, that a smile might be in order. A glad smile because, now, there was an end to her apartness; to her loneliness.
No. Pamela shook her head, knowing she’d again misread things. It was not that she was lonely or, really, ever had been. It was that she’d had certain needs which had not been fulfilled, could not be fulfilled by the men constantly seeking her out, absorbing her time and attention, her real purposes. And here, it appeared, was another kind of invitation, a different seeking after her, a new wanting. That surely was the proper interpretation of the timidly raised lid, the murmuring, high voices from the blackness. They wanted her to descend the steps and join them.
Fleetingly, her gaze settled on the spotless window, searched beyond. Soon it would be the start of one more day. The man—what he was called would not come to Pamela—had given up on her, driven away, it seemed. And that was . . . acceptable. She’d known somehow, since entering this place, that the time was coming when, at last, there would be no way back. But that, she assured herself, hearing a resumption of the whispered voices below, an undercurrent of excitement turning the sounds breathless, was no reason to fear. This feeling she had, in a way, was familiar. Pamela recalled being in restaurants during that quiet cusp when day is dying, remembered the other ladies who, looking knowingly at her from beneath partly veiled lids, asked that she accompany them to the restroom. To the Ladies; to togetherness.
They’d had a secret they desired to share with her which glowed beneath the frail, veined eyelids, and they had never shared it with her, before now.
Pamela’s feet dipped into the darkness, her legs, then the entire, lower portion of her body was on the descending steps. She smelled something sweeter than sweet and wondered if it were the jellies lining the cellar shelves; and if they had spoiled.
He’d had every intention in the world of putting it to her, that was why he’d gone on seeing her; but he had never wanted it to look like rape to Pamela. Then he’d have had to see it that way. He had meant to make her want him, set out to persuade her the single way he knew; but she’d gone and gotten all bent out of shape.
What is so goddam precious about it? he asked himself for possibly the twentieth time, recognizing the big branch that had slapped him before and simultaneously dropping beneath it. It wasn’t like she was a virgin or anything, and he had waited two whole years. He knew she needed it as much as he did, he sensed how fantastic she’d be once she got control of her crazy female glands. What the hell was she saving it for now? What did she have left to save?
Barry had jogged most of the way across the clearing before it occurred to him to wonder why he hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of the house or the clearing. This had to be where she’d gone, dammit, but why she would seek refuge in a rotting, ramshackle heap like that, he couldn’t imagine. Nobody lived there.
Pounding up to the door and rushing inside without knocking, it occurred to Barry that the bitch might’ve told someone he’d tried to rape her. The possibility possessed him until he had turned into the front room of this rickety shack and knew, with no question, that no one was in residence. The place was unbearably filthy; cockroaches scuttled into corners; spiderwebs veined his forehead and upthrown arm, causing Barry to shudder.
He was on the verge of leaving when he noticed something quite strange: An intricately-designed Oriental rug spread as neatly in the center of the room as if the lady of the house had just placed it there.
At first, he nudged it with his toe instead of touching it. He’d always hated the creepy old rags, and the pattern beneath his frowning gaze depicted an uncountable assembly of perfectly gowned women laboring at some unimaginable feminine task. It was offputting, and crazily so. At the same instant he wanted to stare deeply, probingly, into it and to kick it into a corner. But the ancient sucker might be worth a few bucks, it had been left behind and that made it fair game, so he ripped it off the floor, folded it crudely, and tucked it beneath his jacket. Kinda odd, he brooded, glancing at a corner of the Oriental where it protruded from his coat. Not a single man in the whole damned picture.
Then he detected the traces of a trapdoor, in the space which the rug had covered, and fell to his knees, following the line of it with an index finger. I’d bet a ton a cellar used to be down there, Barry reflected, long before I was born. Womenfolk must have worked from dawn to dusk to stock it with good things, to satisfy their men. A different kind of women, not like modem broads who have it made, but gals who knew who was head of the family, king of all he observed. Gals who came across and knew their place.
Abruptly he longed for those days, but the trapdoor was sealed, probably had been for decades. Passed up by time, the way it was with the clearing at the front—obviously a farm field—and the little graveyard at the side, each cold, gray stone bearing a faded date from more than a hundred years ago.
He wondered, straightening, what had happened to old Pam Neurotic. Must have slipped back to the road, hysterically hitched a ride. Hell with her, she’d never actually accuse him of anything after all the commotion she kicked up two years ago.
He paused at the door. He fancied that he’d heard something, something different, foreign—then another calling sound. Someone, or something, calling to him. A bogey chill spasmed. That was all crap, like a narcotic flashback; this ruined hovel held no life. Only memories, and maybe feelings.
Returning across the long-abandoned field as the sun struggled to supplant the pale, sapped moon, he realized he hadn’t heard one woman’s voice. He’d heard two, perhaps more, if he’d heard anything. Perspiring, he started jogging toward the woods; through it and beyond, his city, a conquerable place he knew like the back of his hand, teemed with men headed for work. But here it was like a cold, airless cemetery with the eyes of the dead on the back of his neck. No; more like some awful place before the cemetery: a church, maybe, an old-fashioned parlor where they used to lay you out, an enclosed and guarded place, as locked away and far-off as a sanctuary.
Before merging with the woods, Barry stopped to look back.
It was hard to concentrate with that hot rag of a rug inside his jacket, but he felt that he was remembering what the second, the last murmuring voice had said before he rushed from the room and the deserted farmhouse. It wasn’t as high-pitched as the first, indistinguishable voice he’d imagined he heard. It might have belonged to an older woman, or it might have been the winds of dawn soughing through the branches of the naked saplings behind the house.
He knew he would remember until he could forget it the sinister, sibilant sounds of greeting: “Welcome, sister. Welcome!”
Party Time
Mort Castle
Mort Castle is that gifted writer who has a marvelous reason for not producing more fiction than he does: Castle is engaged in turning the young people of Illinois not only into readers but into potential writers. Free-lance, Crete’s mustached master of the macabre is the guy despairing Midwestern educators shout for when students display the imagination to create stories, poems, or novels and said educators haven’t the faintest notion what to do with budding Mathesons, Mayhars, and McCammons.
In March of ‘84, Mort evaluated over 1,000 papers for a writing talent contest, “each one getting a full half-page criticism.” I’ve seen some of the material he uses, most of it written by this witty
, caring teacher, and he restores the qualities of helpfulness and usefulness to the word “criticism.”
Despite his teaching load, Castle, born July 8, 1946, has found time to write some 90 stories, articles and poems for such magazines as Twilight Zone, Green’s, Cavalier, Mike Shayne’s, and Dude, in addition to the evocative chapbook Mulbray (1976) and two novels of breathtaking psychological insight: The Deadly Election (’76) and Leisure’s Among Us, The Strangers (’84). The latter utilizes a fictive premise involving a certain kind of murderous mind that is genuinely shocking.
Here, you’ll encounter an example of one of the truly difficult forms in literature, the short-short story. Done properly, such tales have a sudden, devastating impact that lingers, and disturbs. “Party Time” is done properly . . .
Mama had told him it would soon be party time. That made him excited but also a little afraid. Oh, he liked party time, he liked making people happy, and he always had fun, but it was kind of scary going upstairs.
Still, he knew it would be all right because Mama would be with him. Everything was all right with Mama and he always tried to be Mama’s good boy.
Once, though, a long time ago, he had been bad. Mama must not have put his chain on right, so he’d slipped it off his leg and went up the stairs all by himself and opened the door. Oh! Did Mama ever whip him for that. Now he knew better. He’d never, never go up without Mama.
And he liked it down in the basement, liked it a lot. There was a little bed to sleep on. There was a yellow light that never went off. He had blocks to play with. It was nice in the basement.
Best of all, Mama visited him often. She kept him company and taught him to be good.
He heard the funny sound that the door at the top of the stairs made and he knew Mama was coming down. He wondered if it was party time. He wondered if he’d get to eat the happy food.
But then he thought it might not be party time. He saw Mama’s legs, Mama’s skirt. Maybe he had done something bad and Mama was going to whip him.
He ran to the corner. The chain pulled hard at his ankle. He tried to go away, to squeeze right into the wall.
“No, Mama! I am not bad! I love my mama. Don’t whip me!”
Oh, he was being silly. Mama had food for him. She wasn’t going to whip him.
“You’re a good boy. Mama loves you, my sweet, good boy.”
The food was cold. It wasn’t the kind of food he liked best, but Mama said he always had to eat everything she brought him because if not he was a bad boy.
It was hot food he liked most. He called it the happy food. That’s the way it felt inside him.
“Is it party time yet, Mama?”
“Not yet, sweet boy. Don’t you worry, it will be soon. You like Mama to take you upstairs for parties, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mama! I like to see all the people. I like to make them happy.”
Best of all, he liked the happy food. It was so good, so hot.
He was sleepy after Mama left, but he wanted to play with his blocks before he lay down on his bed. The blocks were fun. He liked to build things with them and make up funny games.
He sat on the floor. He pushed the chain out of the way. He put one block on top of another block, then a block on top of that one. He built the blocks up real high, then made them fall. That was funny and he laughed.
Then he played party time with the blocks. He put one block over here and another over there and the big, big block was Mama.
He tried to remember some of the things people said at party time so he could make the blocks talk that way. Then he placed a block in the middle of all the other blocks. That was Mama’s good boy. It was himself.
Before he could end the party time game, he got very sleepy. His belly was full, even if it was only cold food.
He went to bed. He dreamed a party time dream of happy faces and the good food and Mama saying, “Good boy, my sweet boy.”
Then Mama was shaking him. He heard funny sounds coming from upstairs. Mama slipped the chain off his leg.
“Come, my good boy.”
“It’s party time?”
“Yes.”
Mama took his hand. He was frightened a little, the way he always was just before party time.
“It’s all right, my sweet boy.”
Mama led him up the stairs. She opened the door.
“This is party time. Everyone is so happy.”
He was not scared anymore. There was a lot of light and so many laughing people in the party room.
“Here’s the good, sweet boy, everybody!”
Then he saw it on the floor. Oh, he hoped it was for him!
“That’s yours, good boy, all for you.”
He was so happy! It had four legs and a black nose. When he walked closer to it, it made a funny sound that was something like the way he sounded when Mama whipped him.
His belly made a noise and his mouth was all wet inside.
It tried to get away from him, but he grabbed it and he squeezed it, real hard. He heard things going snap inside it.
Mama was laughing and laughing and so was everybody else. He was making them all so happy.
“You know what it is, don’t you, my sweet boy?”
He knew.
It was the happy food.
Everybody Needs a Little Love
Robert Bloch
During the 1960s, the odds were good that, if you were watching TV drama, it had been written by Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, Paddy Chayefsky, Charles Beaumont, Reginald Rose—or Robert Bloch. In winning awards from Screenwriters Guild and Writers Guild of America, his screenplays and scripts, many for Alfred Hitchcock, were beyond uncomputerized counting, and standard-setters for two media.
Yet Bloch, born April 5, 1917, in Chicago, has also found the invention and industry to write such hypnotically-named novels and stories as Out of the Mouths of Graves, Firebug, “The Scarf,” Spiderweb, The Couch, “Yours Truly Jack the Ripper” Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of, “The Old College Try”—oh, yes, and Strange Eons, Twilight Zone: The Motion Picture, Psycho, and Psycho II.
Robert A. Bloch sold his first story at 17 but earned his bread as a lecturer and ad copywriter, in Milwaukee, until the famous Psycho did for him what most writers pray their books will do, and Hollywood beckoned. He’s remained, since I960. William F. Nolan remarked, as editor of his Bantam anthology entitled The Sea of Space, that Bob has “produced more than four hundred stories and articles, some two-dozen books, plus radio and TV scripts uncounted.” But Nolan’s anthology was published in 1970!
Charles L. Grant, another anthologist, speaks of Bloch’s fiction leaving an “afterimage.” Stephen King, who admires the filmed Psycho as much as most, reminds us (in Danse Macabre) that Norman Bates’ dichotomous disposition was well-drawn in Bob’s pre-Hitchcock novel. The surprising twists of “Everybody Needs a Little Love,” your upcoming love-feast, are state-of-the-art Bloch, told, as always, in his quick-paced style. Quite often, I might add, Robert Bloch is the state of this art.
It started out as a gag.
I’m sitting at the bar minding my own business, which was drinking up a storm, when this guy got to talking with me.
Curtis his name was, David Curtis. Big, husky-looking straight-arrow type; I figured him to be around thirty, same as me. He was belting it pretty good himself, so right off we had something in common. Curtis told me he was assistant manager of a department store, and since I’m running a videogame arcade in the same shopping mall we were practically neighbors. But talk about coincidence—turns out he’d just gotten a divorce three months ago, exactly like me.
Which is why we both ended up in the bar every night after work, at Happy Hour time. Two drinks for the price of one isn’t a bad deal, not if you’re trying to cut it with what’s left after those monthly alimony payments.
“You think you got zapped?” Curtis said. “My ex-wife wiped me out. I’m not stuck for alimony, but I lost the house, the furniture and the car. Then she
hits me for the legal fees and I wind up with zero.”
“I read you,” I told him. “Gets to the point where you want out so bad you figure it’s worth anything. But like the old saying, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.”
“This is my cure,” Curtis said, finishing his scotch and ordering another round. “Trouble is, it doesn’t work.”
“So why are you here?” I asked. “You ought to try that singles bar down the street. Plenty of action there.”
“Not for me.” Curtis shook his head. “That’s where I met my ex. Last thing I need is a singles bar.”
“Me neither,” I said. “But sometimes it’s pretty lonesome just sitting around the apartment watching the Late Show. And I’m not into cooking or housework.”
“I can handle that.” Curtis rattled his rocks and the bartender poured a refill. “What gets me is going out. Ever notice what happens when you go to a restaurant by yourself? Even if the joint is empty they’ll always steer you to one of those crummy little deuce-tables in back, next to the kitchen or the men’s john. The waiter gives you a dirty look because a loner means a smaller tip. And when the crowd starts coming in you can kiss service goodbye. The waiter forgets about your order, and when it finally comes, everything’s cold. Then, after you finish, you sit around ’til hell freezes, waiting for your check.”
“Right on,” I said. “So maybe you need a change of pace.”
“Like what?”
“Like taking a run up to Vegas some weekend. There’s always ads in the paper for bargain rates on airfare and rooms.”
“And every damned one of them is for couples.” Curtis thumped his glass down on the bar. “Two-for-one on the plane tickets. Double-occupancy for the rooms.”
“Try escort service,” I told him. “Hire yourself a date, no strings—”
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