⟡
Tiny flames wickered in the distance. With a great effort, Lydia lifted her head to stare at the candles casting orange light and long shadows across the cellar. She forced herself to sharper awareness. Something was restricting her good left arm, holding it almost straight up, and she gradually realized he’d manacled her against a damp, chilly wall of stone. A second bracelet and chain hung past her right shoulder, rendered useless by her withered arm. But cold metal looped both ankles; short chains tethered her spread-legged to the wall.
The bastard…!
Her anger threatened to banish the numbing chill of the cellar. The first tendrils of rage were reaching into the core of her being, seeking the energy which seethed there. She would—
The tape was ripped savagely from her mouth, twisting her neck to the side. Stinging pain ate into her face as she detected movement in the shadows. He appeared out of the darkness, his eyes wide with pleasure. He appraised her with a grin and chuckled to himself. The taut muscles of his chest and arms strained against a plain white T-shirt, over which he wore a thick leather apron. Slowly he raised a barber’s straight razor until it was level with her eyes. The blade looked insanely sharp.
Lydia recoiled from the shining weapon, thrashed against the chains, but no sound could escape her throat.
“It’s okay if you want to scream,” he said in a whisper. “Nobody can hear you down here. They never heard any of the others.”
Behind him, next to a work bench full of tools, an old gas stove heated two large stewing pots. Adjacent to the stove at the end of a large, darkly stained, wooden table sat an electric rotisserie. Its interior glowed a deep orange from the glow of its heating elements.
An alarm was going off in her head. It was the klaxon of sheer panic. Naked fear capered like a demon across her mind. She was going to die. She was going to be sliced and gutted like a sacrificial pig. For an instant the alarm screeched so loud, so insistently, she felt she was plummeting into the abyss of madness.
“Going to cut you up,” said the monster in the leather apron. His face moved to within inches of her own. His breath smelled of decay, his eyes as flat and dead as a shark’s. “And then, I’m going to eat you…”
No.
The single word took substance in the very core of her being. It rose up in her, gathering up the stuff of anguish and suffering and plating itself with it like newly-forged armor. A vortex of anger whirled into life, kicking out sparks of defiance. A silent cry of pure, sweet outrage streaked out of her like an explosion of radio waves from a star going nova.
In that single instant, she hated him. Completely. With a cosmic finality.
Her anger and her hate fused into something new, becoming a tap-line which drove down into the deepest core of her soul.
“Here we go,” said the monster as he slipped the razor’s edge into her blouse, bringing it down with slow precision. The blade separated her clothing effortlessly, slicing it away like rice paper. He continued down until he had opened her garments as if they’d been zippered. With a technique smoothed by years of practice, he began removing the tatters of her clothes. As the last of her blouse fell off her right shoulder, revealing her deformity, he paused as if to study the withered appendage. His gaze seemed to traverse the short length of her slightly twisted humerus. Twig-thin, punctuated by the suggestion of an elbow and a stump of misshapen flesh, it looked unfinished. Three proto-fingers jutted stiffly from the stump.
He reached out and touched her right arm, slowly running his fingers down to the useless travesty of a hand. She wanted to recoil from his touch—for most of her life she had avoided touching her right arm as much as possible—but she refused to give him even the slightest satisfaction that he offended her. The limb had always been numb, essentially dead, but as his fingers played along its length, she felt a slight warmth beneath the shriveled skin.
“Never seen anything like this,” he said as though to himself. “Maybe I’ll save it as a souvenir…”
He looked up from her twisted arm, smiled widely.
“Why don’t you scream?” he asked softly. “It’s okay if you want to scream…”
More expert snicks of the blade, and everything fell away except her panties. Her pale skin goose-fleshed from the chilly dampness, then flushed as a wave of humiliation passed over her.
But she would not let the indignity deter her from the climax of her rage. The maelstrom of hate for him continued to expand inside her, faster and more deadly than a metastasizing growth. Like a hungry cancer it fed upon the storehouse of her pain and humiliation—a lifetime’s worth. In a frenzy of building pressure, her loathing sought an outlet…
“This will be nice,” he said, slipping the edge of the razor inside the elastic band of her panties. Slowly he moved it down, paring away the last boundary to her nakedness. Lydia stared straight ahead into the distant shadowed corners of the room as her underpants fell away in ribbons. He placed the cold steel of the blade flat against her lower abdomen, moved the blade downward over her mons, scything her blonde pubic hair like wheat, until he reached the beginning of her labia. Slowly he rotated the blade so that its cutting edge faced upward and perpendicular to her body.
“This seems like a good place to start,” he said in a half-whisper.
No!
The rage from the core of her being, engorged from the surfeit of her pain, sought form. She blinked her eyes, flinching away from the blade, and sensed that things were somehow slowing down. The warmth in her withered arm surged, bursting forth with white heat in all the places where he’d touched her.
All the years of her suffering, the humiliation and exquisitely distilled anguish, were taking substance now. Time almost stopped for her. The catalytic moment had arrived. Something shifted in the cosmos, and the great wheel of being sought a new balance-point. When he touched her dead flesh, he’d unwittingly switched on the radiant energy of her soul.
He moved the blade upward; the cold edge of steel touched her. It was only an instant, but she could feel the heat expanding, suffusing her arm with a life it had never known. Time slowed, spiraling down into a dark well. A total spectator, Lydia watched as her withered arm moved—moved for the first time in her life. Its pale flesh almost incandescent with vengeful energy, her limb lengthened, swung forward.
Things were happening so fast, and yet she could see it all unfolding with exacting detail. Time fugued around her like a storm.
He looked up as her arm moved, for the moment forgetting his intended upward thrust of the razor. His eyes widened as the stump of flesh flattened out and the stick-like projections swelled and grew into taloned, grasping fingers. Like a spade-claw, it raked his face, and she could hear him scream slowly through the underwater-like murk of distended time.
⟡
The sound of his own pained voice, his scream of pain and terror, stunned him as much as the transformation he was witnessing. As his own blood warmed his ruined cheek, he found himself marvelling at the exquisite tang of his own coppery fear, his own pain-fire burning. So different…so ironically reversed…fascinating as much as horrific. The girl’s face had become twisted into an unrecognizable mask. The gaze of her sunken eyes stared through him, past him, and into a timeless place. Her transformation was a gift from the Gods, he realized in the final moment. It was a miracle, and only he had been chosen to witness the event. Salazar smiled through his pain and his fear, and awaited her special anointing…
⟡
In an instant the hand reached into his face, index and middle fingers puncturing his eyes, the newly-formed thumb hooking the roof of his mouth. Gristle and bone collapsed from the unrelenting pressure; the razor fell away from his hand. Then the arm shot out, straightening, as the hand held his head like a ten-pin bowling ball. For a moment, he hung there, suspended, a grim marionette, legs and arms flailing through a final choreography of nerve-shock and death.
Finally, like a crane jettisoning its cargo, the hand release
d his stilled body. Then, powered by the last sparks of her rage and her pain, the hand yanked free the manacles from her wrist and ankles. Lydia blinked her eyes in the candlelight as her time-sense telescoped back to normal. The right side of her body seemed aflame and her heart raged in her chest as if it might explode. The monster lay at her feet and she’d killed him. Her stomach lurched, sending a hot column of bile halfway up her throat.
The horror of knowing she’d actually killed someone was tempered by her realization of how it had been done. Looking down at her new right arm, her new hand, it seemed impossible that it could really be there.
She kept waiting for it to fade away, to shrink back into the desiccated parody she’d always known.
But it never did.
When you’ve known somebody in this business as long as I’ve known Charlie Grant, you’re probably going to have to make reference to him more than once. Case in point, the next story. In the late Eighties, the genre of straight-up Horror was more than just healthy in the publishing world; it was a freaking juggernaut. One of its dominant high-priests was none other than my pal, Chaz, and he had a string of successful anthologies on his curriculum vitae, which had garnered him respect and a handful of awards. One series he was doing with the flagship publisher of quality dark fantasy, Tom Doherty’s Tor Books, was called Greystone Bay—a fictional town, in which each volume would feature stories that illuminated a particular (and weird) aspect of this eerie, fog-shrouded, coastal New England village.
Insert by-now-deadingly-familiar scene here: editor (this time it’s Charlie) calls me and asks for a story. He wants it for Volume 3 of the Greystone Bay series, which is subtitled The Seaharp Hotel. Which, you can figure, means all the stories required the town’s strange, old, hotel prominently featured in some way.
Okay, I can do that, I tell my buddy. And I sit down to write. The subtext of this one includes various nods to another of my early addictions and influences—none other than Howard Phillips Lovecraft, himself.1 Although I tried to avoid mimicking HP’s verbal avoirdupois and epistolary surfeit, I did want to pay my homage and carry on the tradition even if only in a small way.
I also wanted to come up with something truly horrific, and here’s what I ended up telling myself…
1 Maybe I’ll tell you later on about how I discovered Lovecraft…
“Excuse me, sir, but aren’t you forgetting something?” asked Roger Easton, chief bell-boy at the Seaharp.
“What’s that?” said the thin, disheveled guest who was walking toward the door with two arm-loads of baggage.
“That other box,” said Roger, pointing to a fairly large container in the corner of the room. It looked like one of those thin-slatted crates they shipped bottled water in.
The guest stopped at the door, eased his bags to the carpet, and looked back over a bony shoulder at Roger. “Oh, that…”
“Yeah,” said Roger. “Want me to get it for you? I can carry it out on the dolly.”
The guest looked at Roger for a moment, then tried to enact a small smile. “Actually, no, I don’t.”
Roger was taken aback. What the heck was going on here? From the minute he first saw this guy, he figured he was a weirdo—what with the trimmed goatee and the thick horned-rim glasses and the baggy suit. The guest looked like one of those jazz musicians or French painters you always saw in cartoons. Of course Roger made it his business to know as much as possible about all of the Seaharp’s guests, and he already knew this guy was a professor from Miskatonic University, and he’d been in Greystone Bay to give one of those weekend self-help seminars to all the yuppies.
“Is everything all right?” asked the guest. Roger had apparently been staring at him mutely. He did that sometimes without even realizing it. He’d start having some interesting thought, and bang, there he’d be—staring off with his mouth hanging open like he was trying to catch flies with it. He closed his mouth and gathered in his thoughts like a pile of crumpled-up laundry.
“Oh, it’s just that we don’t usually allow people to leave stuff behind,” said Roger. “If you lose somethin’ or forget somethin’, that’s one thing. But people don’t usually leave stuff on purpose.”
“I am,” said the professor.
The abruptness of the man’s answer surprised him, but Roger could only say: “And why’s that?”
The tall man paused and looked at Roger. “What’s your name, son?”
Roger told him.
“Do you make good tips here?”
“It’s okay, I guess…why?”
The professor reached into his pocket, pulled out a roll of bills. “I make out pretty good with my seminars,” he muttered. “Here, take this and do me a favor, all right?”
Roger accepted the bill, not wanting to steal a glance at the number on its corner, but when you were getting a big tip, bell-hops had this sort of sixth-sense about it. Roger just knew it was a good one and he had to check it out. Once a guy from Texas had given him ten bucks, then there was that woman from New York who promised him a twenty if he’d—he looked down into his hand—My God! A hundred!
“Something wrong?” asked the professor, still looming over him.
“Jeez, no, but, well, I…I never got a tip like this before!”
“Nor will you probably ever again. No matter, you have one now. I want you to do me a favor, all right?”
“Yeah! Just name it!” Roger stuffed the bill into his pants pocket. It seemed to glow with its own heat, radiating wealth up and down his leg. A freakin’ C-note!
“As I said before, I intend to leave that small crate behind. It isn’t necessary for it to remain in this room, however.” The professor cleared his throat, stared at Roger intently.
“Yeah, okay. So?”
“So I want you to do this for me: put the crate somewhere safe and secure within this hotel. Hide it, if you think it necessary, but remember, it must remain within the walls of this building. Is that clear?”
Boy, this guy was sounding pretty weird, thought Roger. ’Course, there was nothing weird about the hundred-dollar bill warming up his pants pocket.
“Is that clear, Roger?”
“Huh? Oh yeah, sure. I can find a place to keep it. No problem.”
The professor nodded. “Very good. Now, here, take my card. There’s my phone number on it. I want you to call me at the University if you have any problems. I will be stopping back once a week to check on the crate. Understood?”
Roger accepted the card. “Yeah, but why?”
“Well, it’s quite simple really—I want to know what things look like in a month or so.”
Jeez, that reminded him. “Hey, I meant to ask you. Just what is it you got in that crate, anyway?”
“It is none of your concern.” The professor’s voice was flat and stern, reminding Roger of his dead father’s.
“Jeez, I don’t know…I don’t want to do anything that’s gonna get me in trouble.”
A large, bony hand suddenly vised down on his shoulder. “If you don’t want to help me out, I’m sure I can find someone else who can…especially for a hundred-dollar tip.”
The thought of losing his tip sent a blue bolt of current through Roger like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. Jeez, this guy was serious.
“Oh, no sir! You don’t have to worry about that! Listen, I was just tryin’ to make conversation. I don’t really care what’s in the crate, honest. And I’ll hide it for you, no problem.”
The man stared at him, as though evaluating the proposition, then nodded slowly. “Very well. Keep my card. You shall call me if anything untoward occurs between my visits. Now, let’s go. I have a long drive ahead of me.”
“Yes sir!” said Roger, grabbing the handle of the dolly. As he walked down the hall toward the elevator bay, he could almost hear the crackle of that crisp bill against his right thigh, and he began thinking of ways he could spend so much extra cash.
⟡
“I can’t believe you wanted to st
ay in this goddamned place,” said Angela in her whining, yet still acidic tone of voice. It was a voice Daniel Rosenthal had grown to despise in a surprisingly short amount of time.
“Christ, honey, we just got here,” he said softly, trying to keep from sounding shitty. He really wanted to make a sincere effort. “What’s wrong with it? Let’s give it a chance, okay?”
Angela preened in the mirror, fingering this curl or that one. Daniel wondered why she just didn’t get her hair exactly right, get it encased in lucite, and forget about it.
“The Seaharp Hotel!” she muttered. “Didn’t this town ever hear of a Holiday Inn?”
“They’re all the same. This place has character.” Daniel opened his parachute luggage, started hanging up his shirts and pants.
“But there’s nothing to do here, Danny-Boy. No sauna, no pool. They don’t even have a night-club.”
He walked over to her, put his arms around her while she continued looking at herself in the mirror. She was not the most beautiful woman he’d ever been with, and her body was just average, but there had always been something about her that attracted him.
“If you recall, honey, we’re supposed to be ‘doing’ each other. Isn’t that what this little vacation is all about?”
He’d felt her tense up as soon as he touched her. Six years of marriage and there was about as much warmth between them as ice cubes in a tray. He’d truly loved her, but she did not love him. It was that simple, and he was having a hell of a time accepting it. They’d read countless books, been to counselors and therapists, and nothing had essentially changed. Angela resented him. She was intimidated by him, threatened intellectually by him. His list of accomplishments (Daniel Rosenthal was a nationally renowned orthodontic specialist, the author of several definitive textbooks, a wildly successful public speaker, and the holder of sixteen dental patents) made her feel inadequate, stupid, and hopelessly inferior. Since marrying him, Angela had learned to loathe Trivial Pursuit. She felt powerless and inept in his presence in all things but one—and it was from this single thing that she had fashioned a most terrible weapon.
Fearful Symmetries Page 11