by Ellen Datlow
“I feel more relaxed. As if all the roughness and ugliness in me was drawn out.”
And that was how it felt the next morning, too. Lys woke, blinked, looked at the empty bed across the room. Leslie was long since gone, on his way to the city. She knew she had to talk to Hallinan again. She hadn’t got rid of it all. There was still some poison left inside her, something cold and chunky that would melt before Mr. Hallinan’s warmth.
She dressed, impatiently brewed some coffee, and left the house. Down Copperbeech Road, past the Moncrieff house where Daisy and her stuffy husband Fred were busily emptying the ashtrays of the night before, down to Melon Hill and up the gentle slope to the split-level at the top.
Mr. Hallinan came to the door in a blue checked dressing gown. He looked slightly seedy, almost overhung, Lys thought. His dark eyes had puffy lids and a light stubble sprinkled his cheeks.
“Yes, Mrs. Erwin?”
“Oh—good morning, Mr. Hallinan. I—I came to see you. I hope I didn’t disturb you—that is—”
“Quite all right, Mrs. Erwin.” Instantly she was at ease. “But I’m afraid I’m really extremely tired after last night, and I fear I shouldn’t be very good company just now.”
“But you said you’d talk to me alone today. And—oh, there’s so much more I want to tell you!”
A shadow of feeling—pain?fear? Lys wondered—crossed his face. “No,” he said hastily. “No more—not just yet. I’ll have to rest today. Would you mind coming back—well, say Wednesday?”
“Certainly, Mr. Hallinan. I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
She turned away and started down the hill, thinking: He had too much of our troubles last night. He soaked them all up like a sponge, and today he’s going to digest them—
Oh, what am I thinking?
She reached the foot of the hill, brushed a couple of tears from her eyes, and walked home rapidly, feeling the October chill whistling around her.
And so the pattern of life in New Brewster developed. For the six weeks before his death, Mr. Hallinan was a fixture at any important community gathering, always dressed impeccably, always ready with his cheerful smile, always uncannily able to draw forth whatever secret hungers and terrors lurked in his neighbors’ souls.
And invariably Mr. Hallinan would be unapproachable the day after these gatherings, would mildly but firmly turn away any callers. What he did, alone in the house on Melon Hill, no one knew. As the days passed, it occurred to all that no one knew much of anything about Mr. Hallinan. He knew them all right, knew the one night of adultery twenty years before that still racked Daisy Moncrieff, knew the acid pain that seared Dudley Heyer, the cold envy glittering in Martha Weede, the frustration and loneliness of Lys Erwin, her husband’s shy anger at his own cuckoldry—he knew these things and many more, but none of them knew more of him than his name.
Still, he warmed their lives and took from them the burden of their griefs. If he chose to keep his own life hidden, they said, that was his privilege.
He took walks every day, through still-wooded New Brewster, and would wave and smile to the children, who would wave and smile back. Occasionally he would stop, chat with a sulking child, then move on, tall, erect, walking with a jaunty stride.
He was never known to set foot in either of New Brewster’s two churches. Once Lora Harker, a mainstay of the New Brewster Presbyterian Church, took him to task for this at a dull party given by the Weedes.
But Mr. Hallinan smiled mildly and said, “Some of us feel the need. Others do not.”
And that ended the discussion.
Toward the end of November a few members of the community experienced an abrupt reversal of their feelings about Mr. Hallinan—weary, perhaps, of his constant empathy for their woes. The change in spirit was spearheaded by Dudley Heyer, Carl Weede, and several of the other men.
“I’m getting not to trust that guy,” Heyer said. He knocked dottle vehemently from his pipe. “Always hanging around soaking up gossip, pulling out dirt—and what the hell for? What does he get out of it?”
“Maybe he’s practicing to be a saint,” Carl Weede remarked quietly. “Self-abnegation. The Buddhist Eightfold Path.”
“The women all swear by him,” said Leslie Erwin. “Lys hasn’t been the same since he came here.”
"I’ll say she hasn’t,” said Aiken Muir wryly, and all of the men, even Erwin, laughed, getting the sharp thrust.
“All I know is I’m tired of having a father-confessor in our midst,” Heyer said. “I think he’s got a motive back of all his goody-goody warmness. When he’s through pumping us he’s going to write a book that’ll put New Brewster on the map for good.”
“You always suspect people of writing books,” Muir said. "Oh, that mine enemy would write a book …!"
“Well, whatever his motives I’m getting annoyed. And that’s why he hasn’t been invited to the party we’re giving on Monday night.” Heyer glared at Fred Moncrieff as if expecting some dispute. “I’ve spoken to my wife about it, and she agrees. Just this once, dear Mr. Hallinan stays home.”
It was strangely cold at the Heyers’party that Monday night. The usual people were there, all but Mr. Hallinan. The party was not a success. Some, unaware that Mr. Hallinan had not been invited, waited expectantly for the chance to talk to him, and managed to leave early when they discovered he was not to be there.
“We should have invited him,” Ruth Heyer said after the last guest had left.
Heyer shook his head. “No. I’m glad we didn’t.”
“But that poor man, all alone on the hill while the bunch of us were here, cut off from us. You don’t think he’ll get insulted, do you? I mean, and cut us from now on?”
“I don’t care,” Heyer said, scowling.
His attitude of mistrust toward Mr. Hallinan spread through the community. First the Muirs, then the Harkers, failed to invite him to gatherings of theirs. He still took his usual afternoon walks, and those who met him observed a slightly strained expression on his face, though he still smiled gently and chatted easily enough, and made no bitter comments.
And on December 3, a Wednesday, Roy Heyer, age 10, and Philip Moncrieff, age 9, set upon Lonny Dewitt, age 9, just outside the New Brewster Public School, just before Mr. Hallinan turned down the school lane on his stroll.
Lonny was a strange, silent boy, the despair of his parents and the bane of his classmates. He kept to himself, said little, nudged into corners, and stayed there. People clucked their tongues when they saw him in the street.
Roy Heyer and Philip Moncrieff made up their minds they were going to make Lonny Dewitt say something, or else.
It was or else. They pummeled him and kicked him for a few minutes; then, seeing Mr. Hallinan approaching, they ran, leaving Lonny weeping silently on the flagstone steps outside the empty school.
Lonny looked up as the tall man drew near.
“They’ve been hitting you, haven’t they? I see them running away now.”
Lonny continued to cry. He was thinking, There’s something funny about this man. But he wants to help me. He wants to be kind to me.
“You’re Lonny Dewitt, I think. Why are you crying? Come, Lonny, stop crying! They didn’t hurt you that much.”
They didn’t, Lonny said silently. I like to cry.
Mr. Hallinan was smiling cheerfully. “Tell me all about it. Something’s bothering you, isn’t it? Something big, that makes you feel all lumpy and sad inside. Tell me about it, Lonny, and maybe it’ll go away.” He took the boy’s small cold hands in his own, and squeezed them.
“Don’t want to talk,” Lonny said.
“But I’m a friend. I want to help you.”
Lonny peered close and saw suddenly that the tall man told the truth. He wanted to help Lonny. More than that: he had to help Lonny. Desperately. He was pleading. “Tell me what’s troubling you,” Mr. Hallinan said again.
OK, Lonny thought. I’ll tell you.
And he lifted the floodgates. Ni
ne years of repression and torment came rolling out in one roaring burst.
I’m alone and they hate me because I do things in my head and they never understood and they think I’m queer and they hate me I see them looking funny at me and they think funny things about me because I want to talk to them with my mind and they can only hear words and I hate them hate them hate hate hate—
Lonny stopped suddenly. He had let it all out, and now he felt better, cleansed of the poison he’d been carrying in him for years. But Mr. Hallinan looked funny. He was pale and white-faced, and he was staggering.
In alarm, Lonny extended his mind to the tall man. And got:
Too much. Much too much. Should never have gone near the boy. But the older ones wouldn’t let me.
Irony: the compulsive empath overloaded and burned out by a compulsive sender who’d been bottled up.
… like grabbing a high-voltage wire …
… he was a sender, I was a receiver, but he was too strong …
And four last bitter words: I … was … a … leech. …
“Please, Mr. Hallinan,” Lonny said out loud. “Don’t get sick. I want to tell you some more. Please, Mr. Hallinan.”
Silence.
Lonny picked up a final lingering wordlessness, and knew he had found and lost the first one like himself. Mr. Hallinan’s eyes closed and he fell forward on his face in the street. Lonny realized that it was over, that he and the people of New Brewster would never talk to Mr. Hallinan again. But just to make sure he bent and took Mr. Hallinan’s limp wrist.
He let go quickly. The wrist was like a lump of ice. Cold—burningly cold. Lonny stared at the dead man for a moment or two.
“Why, it’s dear Mr. Hallinan,” a female voice said. “Is he—”
And feeling the loneliness return, Lonny began to cry softly again.
It was January, 1957: my God, a whole lifetime ago. I was in my very early twenties, had just won a Hugo as the best new writer of the year, was producing stories with insane prolificacy, two or three a week. (My ledger entry for that month shows seventeen titles, 85,000 words, and I was just warming up for the really productive times a couple of years down the line.)
A phenomenon, I was. And one who took notice of it was Anthony Boucher, the urbane and sophisticated editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He was a collector at heart, who wanted one of everything for his magazine—including a story by this hypermanic kid from New York who seemed to be able to turn one out every hour. But he wasn’t going to relax his high standards simply for the sake of nailing me for his contents page; and so, although he told me in just about so many words that he’d be delighted to publish something of mine, he turned down the first few that I sent him, offering great regrets and hope for the future. What I had to do in order to sell one to him, I told myself, was break free of the pulp-magazine formulas that I had taken such trouble to master, and write something about and for adults. (Not so easy, when I had barely made it to voting age—twenty-one, then—myself!)
The specific genesis of “Warm Man” was a moment at the first Milford Writers’ Conference in September, 1956, where Harlan Ellison and I, the two hot young new writers of the moment, were mascots, so to speak, for a galaxy of masters of the field—Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, Lester del Rey, C. M. Kornbluth, Fritz Leiber—everyone who was anyone, all of them discussing their lives and their crafts in the most astonishingly open way. During one workshop session involving a Kornbluth story, Cyril had some sort of epiphany about his writing and suddenly cried out in a very loud voice, “Warm!” What that signified to him, I never knew; he declined to share his insight with anyone, though it was obviously a very powerful one. Somehow it set something working in me, though, which very likely had nothing at all to do with whatever passed through Cyril’s mind, and out came, a few months later, this tale of psychic vampirism. I sent it to Boucher (who I think had been present at Milford also) and by return mail across the continent came his expression of delight that I had broken the ice at last with him. He ran the story a few months later—May 1957—and put my name on the cover, a signal honor for a newcomer. Boucher was the best kind of editor—a demanding one, yes, but also the kind who is as pleased as you are that you have produced something he wants to publish. He (and a few others back then) helped to teach me the difficult lesson that quantity isn’t as effective, in the long run, as quality. Which is demonstrated by this story’s frequent reappearance in print over the span of more than three decades since it was written.
Robert Silverberg
TERATISMS
Kathe Koja
Kathe Koja has been building a solid reputation with her enigmatic science fiction and dark fantasy stories for the last few years.
“Teratisms” is a quirky and brutal piece about how even innocence can be ugly and how one family member can enslave or even suck the life out of the others. The family in this story seems cut from the same cloth as the pseudo-family in the film Near Dark.
“Beaumont.” Dreamy Alex’s voice. Sitting in the circle of the heat, curtains drawn in the living room: laddered magenta scenes of birds and dripping trees. “Delcambre. Thibodaux.” Slow-drying dribble like rusty water on the bathroom floor. “Abbeville,” car door slam, “Chinchuba,” screen door slam. Triumphant through its echo, “Baton Rouge!”
Tense hoarse holler almost childish with rage: “Will you shut the fuck up?”
From the kitchen, woman’s voice, Randle’s voice, drawl like cooling blood: “Mitch’s home.”
“You’re damn right Mitch is home.” Flat slap of his unread newspaper against the cracked laminate of the kitchen table, the whole set from the Goodwill for thirty dollars. None of the chairs matched. Randle sat in the cane-bottomed one, leg swinging back and forth, shapely metronome, making sure the ragged gape of her tank top gave Mitch a good look. Fanning herself with four slow fingers.
“Bad day, big brother?”
Too tired to sit, propping himself jackknife against the counter. “They’re all bad, Francey.”
“Mmmm, forgetful. My name’s Randle now.”
“Doesn’t matter what your name is, you’re still a bitch.”
Soft as dust, from the living room: “De Quincy. Longville.” Tenderly, “Be welcome.”
Mitch’s sigh. “Numbnuts in there still at it?”
“All day.”
Another sigh, he bent to prowl the squat refrigerator, let the door fall shut. Half-angry again, “There’s nothing in here to eat, Fran—Randle.” “So what?” “So what’d you eat?”
More than a laugh, bubbling under. “I don’t think you really want to know.” Deliberately exposing half a breast, palm lolling beneath like a sideshow, like a street-corner card trick. Presto. “Big brother.”
His third sigh, lips closed in decision. “I don’t need this,” passing close to the wall, warding the barest brush against her, her legs in the chair as deliberate, a sluttish spraddle but all of it understood: an old, unfunny family joke; like calling names; nicknames.
The door slamming, out as in, and in the settling silence of departure: “Is he gone?”
Stiff back, Randle rubbing too hard the itchy tickle of sweat. Pushing at the table to move the chair away. “You heard the car yourself, Alex. You know he’s gone.”
Pause, then plaintive, “Come sit with me.” Sweet; but there are nicknames and nicknames, jokes and jokes; a million ways to say I love you. Through the raddled arch into the living room, Randle’s back tighter still, into the smell, and Alex’s voice, bright.
“Let’s talk,” he said.
Mitch, so much later, pausing at the screenless front door, and on the porch Randle’s cigarette, drawing lines in the dark like a child with a sparkler.
“Took your time,” she said.
Defensively, “It’s not that late.”
“I know what time it is.”
He sat down, not beside her but close enough to speak softly and be heard. “You got another
cigarette?”
She took the pack from somewhere, flipped it listless to his lap. “Keep em. They’re yours anyway.”
He lit the cigarette with gold foil matches, JUDY’S DROP-IN. An impulse, shaming, to do as he used to, light a match and hold it to her fingertips to see how long it took to blister. No wonder she hated him. “Do you hate me?
“Not as much as I hate him.” He could feel her motion, half a head-shake. “Do you know what he did?” “The cities.”
“Besides the cities.” He did not see her fingers, startled twitch as he felt the pack of cigarettes leave the balance of his thigh. “He was down by the grocery store, the dumpster. Playing. It took me almost an hour just to talk him home.” A black sigh. “He’s getting worse.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true, Mitch, whether you want to think so or not. Something really bad’s going to happen if we don’t get him—”
“Get him what?” Sour. No bitter. “A doctor? A shrink? How about a one-way ticket back to Shitsburg so he—”
“Fine, that’s fine. But when the cops come knocking I’ll let you answer the door,” and her quick feet bare on the step, into the house. Tense unconscious rise of his shoulders: Don’t slam the door. Don’t wake him up.
Mitch slept, weak brittle doze in the kitchen, head pillowed on the Yellow Pages. Movement, the practiced calm of desire. Stealth, until denouement, a waking startle to Alex’s soft growls and tweaks of laughter, his giggle and spit. All over the floor. All over the floor and his hands, oh God Alex your hands—
Showing them off the way a child would, elbows turned, palms up. Showing them in the jittery bug-light of the kitchen in the last half hour before morning, Mitch bent almost at the waist, then sinking back, nausea subsiding but unbanished before the immensity, the drip and stutter, there was some on his mouth too. His chin, Mitch had to look away from what was stuck there.
“Go on,” he said. “Go get your sister.”