Sharp pain brought Barry from light sleep and he experienced, at once, the waking nightmare he had not described to Doctor Roberts.
He had not wished to be urged to see a different kind of doctor.
Fleetingly, he seemed to be elsewhere, peering through eyes other than his own—not hungry, but avaricious. The instant he focussed unblinkingly at a place his Barry-part did not recognize, yet salivated for nourishment, he was no longer human. He was savage; dedicated, exclusively, to self.
Then he was leaping from bed and racing downstairs to the kitchen where, in a cupboard, he found a nearly-full box of corn flakes. Barry did not care for corn flakes. Snatching a halfgallon of milk from the refrigerator, he started shoveling tablespoon-sized helpings of the breakfast food into his upturned mouth, washing it down directly from the bottle.
When he paused, gasping for breath, he saw internally bestial eyes looking back at him: flat, persistent, insatiable, unhuman.
He shoveled in more flakes as fast as he could.
Behind his splendid walnut-grained desk, Lance Roberts nursed a half-eaten sandwich and a pounding headache. The radio playing across the room didn’t help but he lacked the energy to go turn it off. His patients so far that day had been children—screamers—and Roberts loathed what he was thinking about them. Maybe I’m getting old, he reflected. Sally had told him, joking, that he probably suffered from male menopause. Sally was just hilarious.
“Speak of the devil,” he said, aloud, at the woman looking around the edge of the door. She’d knocked, opened it, and had her Important Look. “Melinda has yesterday’s X-rays.”
“Figures.” The doctor lowered the sandwich from the nearby deli into its papery bed, motioned. “Come.”
Sally rested the deep yellow envelopes on the lighted examining table and Roberts stood, balled his remnant of sandwich and scored Two in his wastebasket. Another inspired luncheon, he thought, going over to the panel and flipping on the light. He flipped past Myra Goldstein’s likely gall stones and Eddie Fletcher’s possible broken wrist, curious about Barry Locke’s—
His what?
Some damned tumor, probably. Roberts sighed, affixed the first of the boy’s X-rays. Herm Locke’s “little trooper” had been an intense kid since Roberts first saw him with that ear infection. Ulcers could sometimes—
Lance Roberts gaped at the plastic photographic plate clipped to his light panel. He braced himself by putting palms on the wall, and leaning. He had to have been wrong, that first look. He looked again, and he hadn’t been.
“Mother of God,” Roberts said, swallowing.
What he saw was palpably impossible. Sure, something was growing inside of Barry, and it was lodged in the ribboning coils of the boy’s small intestines.
It was not, however, a tumor.
“It’s the first day of spring, folks!” exulted a disc jockey. “Time t’stop hibernating and get out here with all the other animals!”
“Always liked this place,” Herman Locke declared from the sun-drenched veranda of the Seaview Inn. His son sat nearby, drinking imported beer and wolfing down a roast beef sandwich.
Barry mumbled around a large bite. “That’s why you wanted Gail and me to get married here.”
“Your little bride’s father is dead. It was the least I could do.”
Son appraised father, who did not catch subtle criticisms. Herm was a plain, companionable, well-meaning man—even when, Barry pondered, his judgment was a bit officious. The young couple had wanted a civil ceremony in Arizona, but Dad had brought them to this Victorian resort hotel on the Southern California coast for a formal wedding. Dad had to have his show, his productions, just as the twenty-first birthday hunting trip had been Herm’s personal spectacular, presumably meant to win Barry’s grateful love forever.
It was so unnecessary, thought the groom; he’d already love Dad forever.
Trying to fight against his health problems, Barry swallowed more beer and his gaze swept the veranda, drifted inside. They’d be married in the private chapel; then the reception would take place in the grand ballroom—that football field-sized hall just beyond the magnificent windows. Barry couldn’t be comfortable in an “Inn” like this: Built around century’s turn with blood-red roofs at forty-five degree angles, spirals and towers, those eighteen-foot high windows on every floor, it reminded him of all the haunted castles he’d heard of.
“I’m going to look in on Gail, freshen up. You’d better think about getting ready yourself, y’know.” Dad winked. “Unless you’re getting cold feet?”
Nodding, Barry saw his father saunter off, as outwardly unchanged as the endless Pacific streaming away from the base of the Seaview Inn—as solidly content with himself and obdurate as the cloaking cliffs rising above his Arizona hunting grounds.
Barry wasn’t getting cold feet. But alone, seeking the strength to stand, he felt the rising agony anew in his stomach and again broke out in cold sweat. Barry gritted his teeth. “Not now, please—not now!”
Roberts took his seat on the commuter plane, hating the notion of flying, hating more what must happen when they touched down.
He had to try to help Barry Locke.
And he’d spent more priceless time getting Jerry Adams to agree to fly with him to Seaview. Adams, a professor at San Diego State, was a research specialist in . . . anomalies. Things that couldn’t be, but were. Now, Roberts showed the X-ray to Adams, sitting beside him in the plane, who looked at it the best way he could: holding it up to the window and the afternoon sky. The doctor waited impatiently for a scientific remark.
“Dear God,” Adams blurted, his hands holding the X-ray collapsing into his lap. “You’re right; it’s there! It isn’t even entirely reptilian! H-How?”
Roberts was irritable. “What I need to know is how the hell do we get it out? How it got there can wait awhile. Correct?”
Professor Adams’ lantern-jawed, slack expression said he wasn’t listening. “Lance, I can’t imagine how it . . . survived. Inside the man.”
“I don’t wish to imagine it,” Roberts snapped. He had done that and it was too hideous to go over again while airborne. “I’d hoped you might be familiar with the phenomenon. I want a clue to how I can get that—that thing—out of my patient.”
Adams was wide-eyed. “I suppose you’ll have to excise it. Virtually a Caesarian procedure, I’d think.”
Doctor Roberts faced the professor squarely. “Then I want you standing beside me,” he muttered, “when it pops out—ready to strike!”
Everyone thought the wedding was romantic; that the new Gail Locke was the picture of a beautiful bride; that Barry was even more terrified and pale than the usual groom.
By early evening, the reception was still going strong, the remnant of the catered dinner had been cleared, and the band was playing. By no coincidence whatever, the bar was open. Gail, already changed into a pastel suit, took full advantage of it. Barry was acting peculiarly and had gone to change nearly forty-five minutes ago, so Gail was left to dance with her new father-in-law.
Having eaten so much that friends spoke of “the condemned man’s last meal,” Barry was sicker than he’d known possible. A torrent of pain had doubled him over on the carpeted hallway outside their suite. It was the third, and worst, of his wedding-day attacks; he’d had to crawl the fifty feet from the elevator to their fifth-floor rooms and had left the door ajar behind him.
He tugged himself somehow upon the king-sized bed, clothed but for his dinner jacket, abandoned on a chair somewhere downstairs in the ballroom. He knew then, with atrocious certainty, that his insides were being torn apart—literally. He had tried to gut it out the way Herm Locke would have wanted it; now it was killing him. On his side, Barry vapidly saw the ceiling, then that which the thing inside him saw: a darkened tunnel with a distant, barely discernible light at the end. Moaning audibly, trying not to cry even as the living entity within him stretched again, ripping at internal flesh—even as tears washed his chee
ks, unfelt—Barry’s tortuous hunger began to be exchanged for a hideous, bloated fullness, a swollen sensation which told him that his own blood was flowing everywhere, inside. He learned the dictionary meaning of intolerable pain.
His last shriek froze in his throat at the second of the internal lurch, and he stared, sightlessly, gave vision over to the parasitical thing; and then he tumbled end over end into a dark place of the spirit.
Gail flipped the switch inside the door and crossed her arms as she saw Barry sprawled on the bed. Drawn into a foetal position, his face was averted.
“So there you are!” Her words were somewhat slurred from the champagne she’d drunk. “Are you bored, sick, or simply eager?” Laughing lightly, she removed the jacket, let it drop with a theatrical gesture, and unbuttoned her blouse.
There was no response, aside from the impression of a sickeningly sweet scent in the air.
“Would you turn around, husband?” She unzipped her skirt, wriggled from it. “If I’m going to do a wedding night strip for you, the least you could do is watch!”
Still no answer but Gail, fuzzy-headed, let her blouse flutter to the floor and continued undressing until she wore only transparent lace panties. He’s playing his own little game, Gail thought. Arms wrapped round her breasts, she kneeled on the bed beside Barry.
And heard, for the first time, gurgling sounds rising from his throat.
“Barry, what’s wrong?” She shook his shoulder. “Honey?” With some difficulty, she rolled him over on his back, stared into an expressionless face. His open eyes were blank, his face ashen. Oh no, she thought, the horror newborn but growing fast, my Barry’s dead!
His head moved. It craned from the stiff neck in a single, spastic jerking motion. When his lips parted, blood poured out, a geyser of it; it spilled down his cheek, was soaked up by the pillow. It splashed her reaching hands.
Screaming, Gail was off the bed—eyes never leaving his upthrust, gaping head, revulsed yet magnetized by the way it kept twitching, how the neck muscles corded like white hemp and the mouth stretched horrendously open. She imagined she heard tiny jaw bones cracking and, edging toward the door, stumbled over a chair. Immediately she looked back up at Barry.
The thing—struggling for room against the seeping, pinkened teeth that imprisoned it—came up from Barry’s throat and surged out of his ruined mouth.
She fell to her knees, knuckles to her own lips, muttering syllables of prayer. Gail saw the entire head of the thing, then, saw the more-or-less triangular shape of it, the scaled snout and slitted, staring eyes on either side of it. She saw the thin, black forked tongue flittering, tasting the air—
Before she saw it pile forward onto the bed and then off it, moving forward on its slimy belly and partly upon miniature white appendages that could have been fingers, or merely the sundered shreds of Barry’s sausage-shaped intestines. Miles of thumpingly-thick, heavy, diamond-designed body seemed to worm out of the dead man’s mouth; and now, its blunt snout twitched, searching for and finding her. Going toward her.
Face in her arms, Gail screamed as she had never screamed before.
And Herm Locke was barreling into the suite, muscles knotted and his heart almost ceasing as he saw his new daughter-in-law, all but naked, cowering—and blindly screaming—feet away.
His eyes darted to the bed, discovering his son’s remains, knew instantly Barry was gone. He’d seen a lot of dead creatures. Nothing could live, that way.
And then Herm saw the thing.
Dripping blood, some caked on it, its head and neck were a scalded question mark growing from its terrifying, deceptive coil. Tiny pale things below the head appeared to work, to clench and to beckon. The tail trembled, switched from side to side, chittering.
Locke had seen all kinds of reptiles before. Translucent snakes shimmering almost prettily on the surface of still water. Little ones, slithering into the flower bed, frightened by his lawn mower. Docile with the coming of winter, frenzied with the passion of midsummer in Arizona.
But Herm had never known such terror at the sight of a serpent before, nor seen such a serpent before—not even on dangerous hunting trips in late July, or on the first day of spring. The thing was on a direct line to where Gail crouched, and, “Get out of here,” he hissed. The scream had become a monotonous whimper of fright. “Gail—move it!”
The thing, appearing to accept a challenge, turned from Gail and deliberately headed for Herm, at once slithering and scrabbling after him. He glanced left, right, questing for a weapon. No help, but he saw the massive windows, knew they were five stories up, formed a plan.
Stripping off his dinner jacket, he wrapped it round his left forearm and, sweating, backed toward the windows, motioning. “C’mon, come on” he told it.
Then Herm lunged, from the left, meaning to draw the thing to his protected arm while he captured it behind the pyramidal head with his right hand.
It surged above the decoy, however, curved fangs slicing into the soft flesh of the human throat. Even then, it might have worked; but Herm had not been prepared for such massive weight. Off balance, driven backward, he stumbled toward the window above the magnificent ocean view, the thing trailing from his neck.
Striving to tear the razorish teeth away, feeling the serpent’s enormous body coil suffocatingly around his own, Herm hurtled back through the window in a shower of splintering glass, the creature like a smothering, second skin.
For Doctor Roberts and Professor Adams, the Seaview Inn seemed to be one of the more well-appointed and classic structures on hell’s immeasurable estate. They entered a world of horror and it took awhile before Lance Roberts could accept the fact that they’d come too late.
The men of science watched helplessly as the final ambulance left, no siren needed. On the Seaview veranda, enveloped by humid night, Jerry Adams kept prattling about the way they’d been too late to “see that thing in the X-rays.” It had vanished, presumably borne away after, dying, it had crept to the ocean. Adams had looked everywhere for its traces.
Roberts ignored the professor, wished he hadn’t brought him. Wished they hadn’t been too late.
Wished a proud father had not passed along his own take-it-like-a-man, macho attitude, so that a nice youngster might have come sooner for help.
Roberts shut his eyes, crying, letting Adams chatter. No tears would show; years ago, the doctor had cried them out. Besides, it was quite dark except for a moon in its pregnant last quarter.
“Look.” Adams, touching his elbow. Pointing. “Down there, on the beach.”
Roberts followed the finger, wasn’t sure, at first, he saw a thing.
Then he saw the apparent, enormous tracks of a great, serpentine being leading out to the ocean’s edge where they stopped—
And its scaly skin lay crumpled: discarded, and outgrown.
Czadek
Ray Russell
You’ve written something Fine, but you’re challenged, “Do you have a track record?” Modestly, you set the record straight: “Well, there are magazine sales to Esquire, Whispers, Midatlantic Review, F&SF, Penthouse, Amazing, and Ellery Queen’s. And nearly 100 appearances in anthologies ranging from Hitchcock collections and the Arbor House horror anthology, to Playboy’s books of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Crime and Suspense, Horror and the Supernatural—plus 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.”
The man reels; you’re relentless. “I wrote Incubus, Sardonicus, The Case Against Satan—and yes, my writing has been translated. Into, I believe, eight foreign languages. Did I mention,” you ask casually, “68 Playboy pieces—or that I was Executive Editor ofPlayboy for its formative first seven years?” You and I don’t do those things.
Ray Russell can.
Russell is another transplanted Midwesterner, from Chicago, born September 4, 1924, to Beverly Hills, where his creative garden has flourished since 1961.
“Czadek” might be the story he’s known for from now on. This master of ironic humor begi
ns with a grabber horror novelists would be ecstatic to use as a prologue, then turns in a “side-door” tour de force ala James, Machen, or RLS. “Unforgettable” is one of those overworked words. It applies to “Czadek.”
“The gods are cruel” is the way Dr. North put it, and I could not disagree. The justice of the gods or God or Fates or Furies or cosmic forces that determine our lives can indeed be terrible, sometimes far too terrible for the offense; a kind of unjust justice, a punishment that outweighs the crime, not an eye for an eye but a hundred eyes for an eye. As long as I live, I’ll never be able to explain or forget what I saw this morning in that laboratory.
I had gone there to do some research for a magazine article on life before birth. Our local university’s biology lab has a good reputation, and so has its charming director, Dr. Emily North. The lab’s collection of embryos and foetuses is justly famous. I saw it this morning, accompanied by the obliging and attractive doctor. Rows of gleaming jars, each containing a human creature who was once alive, suspended forever, eerily serene, in chemical preservative.
All the stages of pre-birth were represented. In the first jar, I saw an embryo captured at the age of five weeks, with dark circles of eyes clearly visible even that early. In the next jar, I saw an example of the eight-week stage, caught in the act of graduating from embryo to foetus, with fingers, toes, and male organs sprouting. On we walked, past the jars, as veins and arteries became prominent: eleven weeks . . . eighteen weeks (sucking its thumb) . . . twenty-eight weeks, ten inches long, with fully distinguishable facial features.
It was a remarkable display, and I was about to say so when I saw a jar set apart from the others that made me suddenly stop. “My God,” I said, “what’s that?”
Masques Page 15