Mister October

by Christopher Golden

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Her smile turned to a half-frown. “You saw yourself in the mirror.”

  He nodded.

  “Your younger self. It’s something that happens here.”

  He stared at her. The warm, giving woman had suddenly become a stranger. What was she saying? What was happening to him?

  “Come.” She smiled again and patted the bed beside her. “Sit by me.”

  He moved to turn off the television, but Julie shook her head vehemently. She waved him forward.

  “I haven’t told you everything,” she said as he sat down beside her. “I’ve been here before. With other men.”

  He pulled away from her. Her eyes stared into him—wide open, innocent eyes, eyes maybe a little afraid. What did he expect, anyway, after the way they had met in the park?

  She stroked the side of his face. “You’re different, though. Stronger than the others. I could leave here with you. With you I could be free of this place.”

  She kissed him, slowly and tenderly. In a voice just barely a whisper, she said, “Let’s leave this place forever.”

  He kissed her again. “Anything you say.” And again. “In a minute.”

  “One more time, then,” she replied. “Then we must go.”

  * * *

  He should have turned off the bathroom light. He could hear it as they made love, even over the television, and in that moment before climax the sound filled his brain, as if small flies nested in his inner ear.

  They made love this time all in a rush, and at the end they lay exhausted in each other’s arms, the sheet beneath them drenched with sweat.

  He freed himself from Julie’s embrace with a groan. His head was pounding with the noise of the TV and that constant rustling buzz behind it. He rose from the bed on shaky legs and flipped off the television, then stumbled to the bathroom. If he could get rid of that other noise, maybe his headache would go away.

  It was funny how your head could amplify things at a time like this. The noise sounded like a chain saw, as if someone was trying to cut through the walls. The pounding was there, too, slamming against his skull. The sighs of wind sounded like urgent whispers, as if someone had a message that George had to hear.

  He looked at himself in the mirror.

  He had lost twenty years from his face. All the age had dropped away. The eyes of a man barely out of college stared back at him.

  If only this damned noise—oh, who cared about the bulb! He looked the same age as when he had married. He didn’t know how it had happened, but it was a gift.

  His first years with Alice filled his head. He needed to see his wife again.

  How would he explain this change to Alice? What would she think? She’d be happy for him, wouldn’t she?

  He stepped from the bathroom and saw Julie watching him. She was afraid of this place for some reason. She looked as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t. There was a lot here that he didn’t understand. He’d get Julie out of here now. He owed her that much. After they were free of this place, he’d figure out what to do about Alice.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re going.”

  He hurried into his clothes as Julie gathered hers about her. He grabbed her hand and rushed her from the room. They didn’t stop until they reached his car outside.

  “Where do we go now?” Julie was smiling.

  He paused to catch his breath. ““We’ll have to find a place for you to stay.” He leaned down and unlocked the door on the passenger side.

  Julie looked horror-struck. “Aren’t we going to stay together?”

  “Sure,” he said, walking around the car. “We would, if this were a perfect world. But I don’t think we can, not for a little while at least. I don’t know, really. I have to go see my wife.”

  He got into the car beside her. She was crying. He looked at her and sighed. “There are weekends like this, and then there’s the rest of life.”

  He started the car and saw his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror.

  His wrinkled eyes, set in a fifty-year-old face, with too little hair on the top of his head. He looked old, older even than he did before.

  “Julie?” he whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We left so suddenly. I wasn’t ready. There are things you have to do if you want to stay that way.”

  “I’m old.”

  “You can look in the mirror again if you want to.” She opened her car door.

  He followed her up the stairs. There were liver spots on the back of his hand that he had never seen before. How old was he now?

  Julie opened the door to the room. They had turned off the bedroom light when they left, but the light in the bathroom still burned, spilling across the room, a pathway to the magic mirror.

  George walked forward, surrounded by the noise. The walls groaned as he approached; the wind screamed with a hundred voices, all underscored by that grinding, like stone trying to escape stone, like a hornet’s nest behind his eyes.

  He looked in the mirror at an adolescent boy. Younger still, then? He reached in wonder to touch his image and saw the liver spots still on his hand.

  The mirror was a lie.

  He wasn’t getting younger. The mirror only told him so. He was old, then, older than he ever imagined. He’d never realized how much age had changed him, until he looked into this mirror.

  Anger rose in him. Everything was a lie; the image in the mirror, his weekend of passion, his life with Alice. It made him furious. The sounds filled his head. He thought he heard a hundred voices laughing.

  He raised his fist to smash the mirror.

  * * *

  It was cold and it was dark. As much as he tried, he could not really speak.

  He was old, but not as old as the others. There were many of them, hundreds perhaps. There was no way for him to know.

  Then there was light, and he could see after a fashion, although not as he was once used to seeing. And a man stood there and looked at all of them, but only saw an image of himself, a false image.

  And he who was inside tried to call out, to scream with all his will. And the hundred around him screamed as well, but none of them had voices as they once did, and their cries could be taken for a whisper of wind, a groan of wood, a buzz of wings.

  Then the light was gone, and there was nothing but laughter—Julie’s laughter, and that of a man, a man who sounded a lot like George, when he was younger.

  Copyright 1985 by Craig Shaw Gardner

  Originally appeared in Midnights, edited by Charles Grant.

  SPRINGFIELD REPEATER

  By Jack M. Haringa

  The first time I killed my brother I was 12 years old.

  We had driven to the top of Mount Tom, or as close to the top as you could get by station wagon, for a Saturday afternoon nuclear family picnic. Turning off right after the Log Cabin restaurant, my father followed a gravel road to a shaded parking lot dotted with rusting hibachis just below the ranger station. I sat in the center of the backseat, peering between my parents’ shoulders for the ride up the mountain, a cooler full of food and drinks to my left and a picnic basket of plates and utensils to my right. My brother Bobby slumped in the rear-facing third bench next to the charcoal, sourly frowning at the toes of his high-tops. Whenever I’d glance back at him, he’d covertly flip me the bird.

  The Aspen ground to a halt in front of one of the grills, and my mother took the picnic basket to let me out of the back. Bobby kicked open the rear door and slouched over to a picnic table, scuffing at the dirt as he went. My father scowled but didn’t say anything, too used to Bobby’s moodiness to bother with vain admonishments. He unloaded the car himself and set about firing the charcoal, while my mother laid out the table settings as she bounced to some rhythm in her head. I had always found my mother’s high spirits infectious, and immediately nodded along with the unvoiced melody, straightening napkins and laying down the plastic ware in her wake. Bobby was immune to t
he beat, but he did find the energy to pick up a stone and fling it at a curious squirrel.

  My father squirted lighter fluid over the charcoal and lifted his chin at us. “You guys take a walk for about half an hour. Look around. Dinner will be on the grill when you get back.”

  Bobby was on his feet immediately, scuffing up the path away from the table, away from us, and into the woods.

  “Hey, kiddo,” my mother shouted after him. He stopped but didn’t look back. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Bobby’s shoulders rose and his wrists sank deeper into the pockets of his jeans, but he turned around slowly and raised an eyebrow. My mother kissed the top of my head and pushed me up the path toward my brother.

  “Keep an eye on Kevin,” my mother said, and I could see a sneer start at the corner of Bobby’s mouth. “Make sure he doesn’t get lost.”

  Lost was the nicest thing my brother wanted to happen to me from the look on his face, but he mumbled an “OK” and slowly pivoted on his heel as I approached. I knew not to get too close to him, especially once we were out of sight of my parents, unless I wanted a rap on the skull with his big knuckles or a stiff forefinger jammed into my ribs. He’d take a shot at me just because I was there, no matter how carefully I tried to avoid his attention, and he’d learned to hit me where I wouldn’t visibly bruise.

  Thinking about it now I realize Bobby had always resented me, always hated me, and probably with good reason. I was the good kid, you see: neat, polite, obedient, studious, quiet. And I was the miracle baby.

  After Bobby was born the doctors told my parents they couldn’t have any more kids, so they doted on my brother through his wailing infancy, his truly terrible twos and threes, right into his spoiled, demanding, destructive fours. My dad called Bobby his little hellion, and he said it with a little bit of love and a little bit of fear. Then I showed up and, as Bobby told me whenever my parents were out of earshot, ruined everything. Suddenly I was the center of their world, and Bobby had become an angry shadow in their peripheral vision.

  I’m sure he would have smothered me in my sleep if he had ever had the chance. Instead, he satisfied himself with crushing my toys, tearing pages out of my books, doing any kind of damage that he could think of to what my parents gave me. Breaking things of mine was about the only thing Bobby was ever really good at. Funny, then, that in the end I was the one who broke him.

  * * *

  So I followed Bobby up the path, the sun high and bright through the pines, the scent of baked earth and juniper on the weak breeze. The trail rounded a corner and the woods ended abruptly, the path broadening into a scenic look-out at the edge of a ravine. Below lay a cascade of granite, its lower edge bordered by slender birch leading into young maple. Beyond the trees the new subdivisions of East Hampton, some with front yards of dirt and others freshly covered in bright lines of sod, had been carved into the land on either side of State Route 109. Through the August haze you could make out the big mall in Chicopee and, even farther out, the vague outlines of Springfield’s tallest buildings.

  It’s amazing the kind of details you remember when it comes to the most significant, most traumatic moments of your life, isn’t it? I can picture myself perfectly in that instant: brown corduroy cut-off shorts ending just above my bony knees, white gym socks with two parallel red stripes around the tops pulled to the middle of my calves, my feet in bright red Keds. A white tee-shirt with a Charlie’s Angels iron-on transfer across the front. Gold-rimmed aviator glasses sliding down my nose. You might as well have hung a sign that said “Pussy” around my neck.

  Bobby was infinitely cooler in his jeans and black Dead Kennedys tee, his hair two inches longer than what my father thought made him look like a girl. He was cooler still when he dropped to one knee and pulled up his cuff to slip a pack of Camels and a lighter from the top of his sock. He looked up at me as he drew a cigarette from the pack and stuck it between his lips.

  “Say anything and you’re dead, shit-for-brains.” He flicked the lighter for punctuation.

  “Dad would kill you first,” I said, and instantly regretted it. Bobby stood up fast and poked the end of his lighter hard into my stomach, then leaned over and blew smoke into my face.

  “Fuck. You.” He raised his fist, let me flinch and cower, and turned around with a snort. “Family fucking picnic.”

  I edged away from him, keeping my eye on his broad shoulders, waiting for another prod or strike. But he just looked out at the horizon and smoked.

  I moved closer to the edge of the precipice, looking down on the sharp granite boulders and the way they seemed to dissolve into smaller and smaller stones as they approached the tree line below. I felt a kind of exhilarating vertigo as I followed the tumble of a pebble that I kicked out into the air. On its second bounce over the closest big stone, I sensed Bobby behind me, saw his shadow eclipse my own, just before his fingertips dug into my ribs.

  I don’t think he planned to send me over the edge of the cliff, to trace the arc of the pebble I had launched down the rocky face below us. At least, I don’t think that now. At the time, though, I panicked, my heart leaping up to thicken my throat, my knees weakening at the prospect of sudden descent. Bobby had pulled his hands back to jab me again, harder, wanting to make me cry as he had so many times before in retribution for my very existence; he threw his elbows out and leaned forward to add force to his stiff driving fingers. And in weakness, I just dropped.

  I fell not over the lip of the look-out but only to my heels, crumpling straight down to the ground like a discarded marionette. And Bobby went right over me.

  His shins caught on my bowed back and his arms crossed over his chest as his momentum carried him forward over me and beyond the limits of the path into air where he continued to roll, his arms now flailing and his heels lifting above the plane of his head, which in turn seemed aimed toward the smooth unyielding curve of a boulder below. But Bobby twisted as he dropped, striking the stone with his left shoulder instead of his skull, and his right arm flashed out, his hand grappled with lichen and then rock and somehow the tips of those cruel fingers found purchase.

  I still rested on my heels, my arms around my knees, my eyes following Bobby’s trajectory with a newfound reverence for gravity. When he finally stopped on the rock, one arm hanging useless by his side and the other twisted above him clinging to that slender crack in the granite’s face, my brother looked up at me. His eyes narrowed in pain, but his mouth was twisted with anger. I couldn’t see any fear on his face at all.

  “Help me,” he gasped, trying to draw himself up the boulder by his one good hand. He coughed and kicked his heels. “Give me a fucking hand here, Kevin.”

  I sat in stunned silence, and I could feel a tear leak from the corner of my eye and carve a path down my sunburned face. Then I unfolded myself and stretched prone across the edge of the path, extending my legs along the ground and reaching as far as I could with one arm. I could just touch the knuckles on Bobby’s good hand where he clung to the rock.

  Bobby didn’t seem able to take a deep enough breath to scream. “Go get Dad. Hurry,” he said. When I didn’t move, he turned his head to look at me again. “Go get someone you stupid shit. For fuck’s sake, Kevin, get help. I’m going to beat you…to fucking death…with my one good arm…when I get up there.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.” Then I reached out, just under the lip of the path, and picked up a stone no larger than my small fist. Stretching over Bobby again, I brought it down on his knuckles over and over until he couldn’t hold on anymore.

  * * *

  It took the rangers and rescue workers the rest of the day to retrieve Bobby’s body from the bottom of the ravine. My father cried a little at first, but mostly he was stoical, holding fiercely to my mother and me. My mother was inconsolable. Whatever troubles she had had in raising Bobby, he still had been her first son. She wailed and beat the ground at the look-out while she watched the EMTs strap Bobby’s twist
ed body to a stretcher. Her grief was biblical; I expected gnashing of teeth and rending of garments and shrank from her ferocity.

  I don’t recall going back and telling them what had happened or how much I said at first. I think that by the time I dragged them up to the look-out, “Bobby fell. There was an accident,” had become my mantra. Everything about that day revolved around the path and the rocks.

  Except for later when we went home to a house that felt strangely empty considering it was still three-quarters full. There, lying alone in my room, came the first pricks of shamed tears, as I recognized the strongest emotion I felt about Bobby’s absence was relief.

  * * *

  They say the first is the hardest, and the one you remember best. I suppose that’s true about me and Bobby to some degree, but in other ways it was the second time that was more important. I mean, you don’t ever expect to have to kill the same person twice.

  It had been almost two weeks since Bobby had died, a week since the crowded, noisy funeral and the deluge of sympathy that nearly drowned my parents. I spun in its eddies but it never sucked me under, maybe because I wasn’t weighted with enough guilt.

  We had all lost track of time, and suddenly August had ended. It was the night before school started. I was in bed staring at the ceiling by the dim light of the street lamp coming through the window and wondering what seventh grade was going to be like and how I was going to be treated now that Bobby was gone and why girls were suddenly so much more interesting than they had been last year.

  A thick shadow bent across the posters on my wall and the stippled stucco of my room’s ceiling. It rolled from side to side and I thought it was too dense and well-formed to be the leaves on the tree that stretched to within inches of the window. I knew I didn’t want to look out and see what made that shadow. And I knew that I had to.