“Yes,” I croaked. “I remember it.”
Denny laughed, his eyes beading down like Timken bearings and staring off into space. “It ain’t really the ring they want, Jack…it’s these…”
Denny gestured along the ring, and I knew immediately that he was seeing things I could not see. And I knew now who “they” must certainly be…
It was funny, but it was right at that moment that I realized how wrong I had been about poor Reitmann. I thought back over how I had consigned him to humanity’s trash heap, how I’d condemned him for being such a soul-less bastard, for letting the jar-heads turn him into a fucking monster. But now, as I sat there watching him twitch and leer and squirm in his bed, I knew that the guilt was writhing and twisting through him like a swarm of maggots feasting on a fresh kill. It was eating him alive like a cancer, a leprosy of the soul.
Looking at Denny was like looking into a mirror. That’s the way it is whenever we really take the time to look at anybody else, I guess.
“I’m the only one left,” said Denny. “They got everybody but me.”
“Why would they leave you till last?” I said almost in a whisper.
He chuckled, pointed at the flat sheets below his knees. “Because I’m the easiest…I’m not going anywhere.”
It seemed as good an answer as any, and I nodded, but said nothing. I couldn’t think of anything to say. How do you tell a guy with grooves of terror etched permanently into his face there’s no such thing as the boogeyman? How do you explain that the embodiment of guilt can assume many shapes and guises? That we all create prisons of our own devise?
No. That’s all bullshit to somebody who’s been standing on the edge of the Pit, who’s been hearing the demon-cries, and the flap of the leathery wings of madness.
“Help me, Jack…”
“What can I do?” I looked at him and, for an instant, he appeared to be a little boy, propped up on a fluffy pillow, waiting for a bed-time story. There was a simple pleading in his features, and for the first time, a sadness in his eyes.
“Stay with me…when they come, if you’re here, maybe it will help.”
I looked out beyond the privacy curtain to the nearest window—a black rectangle where night tapped upon its pane. A tomb-like quiet pervaded the ward, as though it waited collectively, expectant like a crowd at a public execution.
“Will you, Jack?”
“What?” I looked back and the little boy was gone. Denny was again the steel-eyed, twisted wretch. He was just a piece of litter tossed out the window while we all careened down hell’s highway. My mind was wandering. I hoped I didn’t appear to be ignoring him.
“I said will you stay with me, Jack?”
The thought of sitting by his bedside until he fell asleep should not have freaked me the way it did. My gut reaction was to say no, and simply slip away into the night. Denny Reitmann was waiting for something, and I didn’t want to hang around to find out what it was.
But I tapped his shoulder reassuringly and forced a smile to my face. “Sure, Denny. I’ll stay.”
Some of the anxiety seemed to go out of him after that. He smiled, closed his eyes, and nodded his head. I thought about giving him a shot to put him out for the night, and getting me off the hook, but I just couldn’t do it to the guy.
In addition, there was a part of me that wanted to know what he was so damned afraid of. If he thought his victims were coming back to reclaim their ears, I wanted to be there to help him get through the trauma.
I owed him that, at least.
Crazy or twisted or whatever—Denny Reitmann had sacrificed his legs. I’d never even given up anything for Lent.
And so I sat there in the darkness watching him lay on his back, eyes closed, chest rising and falling. Starlight and the albedo of a half-moon spilled through the nearby window, giving everything a whitish-blue cast. The air was tinged with medicinal smells such as ether and iodine, punctuated by the night-rattles of labored breathing, of troubled sleepers coughing and rasping through their dreams.
I don’t know how long I sat there, listening to night-sounds, but at some point I must have slipped into a half-sleep, because my neck jerked up, snapping back to reluctant consciousness. For a moment, I didn’t remember where I was, and the disorientation startled me. Responding to some atavistic stimulus, my heart began hammering and I was instantly awake. I looked at my patient, who slept calmly.
Then, suddenly, he opened his eyes, wide awake. It was weird the way he just came awake like that.
“What is it, Jack?” Reitmann’s voice reached out in the darkness.
I looked at him, just as a draft of cold air passed over us.
“What do you mean, Denny?”
“Did you feel it, just then?”
I couldn’t bullshit him. “The cold…? Yeah, I felt it.”
“They’re comin’, man. It’s tonight. I can feel it.”
His face had become drawn and pale, his eyes jittering around, blinking furiously.
“Take it easy, Denny. Why would they wait until now, after all this time? Why would they…do it…when I’m here? Don’t you think that would be too much of a coincidence?” I tried to smile casually.
“Maybe they’ve been waitin’ for you too, Jack…maybe you owe them too?”
Reitmann’s voice had a fragile edge on it, but his words still cut me. What the hell was he talking about?
“Listen…!” Reitmann half-whispered.
“I’m sorry, Denny, but I don’t—”
I stopped in mid-sentence. I did hear something: footsteps, bare feet, slapping on the cold tile of the outer corridor, growing louder, getting closer. There was no rhythm, no pattern to the sounds. A cacophony of uneven slaps and drags and shuffles.
“Aw, jeeziz…! It’s them, Jack! I know it is!” Denny screamed and his voice seemed to resonate through the ward, as though we were inside a vast cavern.
The sounds of advancing feet grew louder, thicker. Whoever it was shambling up the hall, they made up quite a crowd.
Standing up, I started away from the bed, and Reitmann reached out to grab my arm. His palm was cool, but slippery with sweat. “No, don’t go!”
“Denny, I just—”
Looking out into the ward, I blinked my eyes, lost my voice.
The ward was gone.
A low, living, ground fog was boiling up like dry-ice on a stage. All around us, the fog rolled in like waves on a beach. The double row of beds had vanished. The walls, windows, bedtables, everything…was gone.
“What the hell—?” There was a piece of me that desperately wanted to believe that this was one hell of a nightmare, that I’d better make myself wake up now because things were getting out of hand.
But there was no waking up from this one.
Denny must have seen them before I did because he started screaming, pulling himself out of the bed with his hands.
There was movement in the fog. Shapes coalesced slowly, like the ghosted images on a snowy television screen. The uneven cadence of their approach grew more distinct, and I could see the point men, the van, homing in on us.
Some of them were stick-figures, bone and tendon animated by the whirling, karmic forces which turn the gears of Eternity. Others, lean and brown-skinned, were more whole, but on the right sides of their heads, none of them had any ears…
Reitmann had pulled himself up against the headboard of his bed, teetering on his stumps. The drawer to the bed table rattled open and he thrashed around the contents frantically.
“I got it! I got it right here! I got it!” He repeated the words over and over like a litany, and without turning around, I knew what Reitmann was looking for.
There was no way to tell how many of them were there, but I saw women and children among the ranks of soldiers. Some of them were so far gone, you couldn’t tell male from female, though…
Oddly enough, the initial jolt of panic left me when I realized that I couldn’t run, that there was no place to hide. I accepted this
and waited for whatever was to come.
The first wave of them reached the end of the bed, splitting their formation and swarming around both sides of it. I could smell their foulness, the corruption which steamed off them in acrid sheets. The air was thick with the sting of their hate, and I began suffocating. They surged all around me, pressing me into the soft decay of their flesh.
Reitmann had descended into babbling madness. A pitiful wailing escaped him as they surrounded him, absorbing him into their mass like a cancer would devour a healthy cell. He threw the ring at them, and it disappeared in their midst. Reitmann continued to scream but I could no longer see him. I was overcome by a paralysis which also had a calming effect on my mind. I watched everything with the detachment of an only mildly interested spectator.
Abruptly, the screaming stopped, as though choked off. There was a finality about the silence which enveloped me as totally as the crush of putrid bodies. I could see their heads all turning, heads with new, right ears. Slowly, silently, they turreted about until the eyed and eyeless alike were all looking at me…
…Orderlies found me the next morning, sagged in my bedside chair. Reitmann had died during the night, leaving us with a bug-eyed, lip-peeled expression engraved into his waxy face. One of the orderlies said Denny looked like he’d opened the cellar-door to Hell, and I wanted to tell him how close to the truth he might have been.
But I remained silent, waiting for them to gurney his legless corpse off the ward. My memories of what had happened were painfully crisp, having none of the ragged edges of a nightmare. But I also had the feeling there was a segment of the whole experience still missing. Something else had taken place last night, I was certain, but I didn’t remember until much later in the day, when evening crept up to windowsills on stalking-cat feet.
I was in the hospital cafeteria standing in line. Ahead of me were several medics—part of a class receiving emergency field surgical training—and as I stared at their uniforms, a vision passed through me like a wide, cold blade.
Like an epiphany, I had a flash of memory which filled in the dead space. I suddenly knew what I had so obviously repressed.
“Are you all right, Doctor?” asked a nurse who had been standing behind me. Looking down, I saw the contents of my tray littering the floor. I felt as though emerging from a time-fugue.
“I don’t know…” I said, and staggered from the line feeling the stares of others in the room as I turned in slow circles. I wanted to escape, but there was no place to run.
Then, remembering:
They had taken me to their battlefield. A vast, featureless plain where time melted and ran like lava, where light and shadow danced eternally at the limits of your peripheral vision. The ground was thick with their bodies. Stacked and jammed like endless cords of kindling wood, the arrangement of battle-corpses stretched off to the dim horizon in all directions. But there lay some who still lived, who still twitched and shook in the depths of the charne-field, and it was for them that I had been brought. Down all the hours of the tunneled night, I pushed back entrails into ruptured bellies; pulled shrapnel from slivered torsos; sutured severed legs and arms…and ears. I washed myself in the equitable blood of revenge. There was no end to the carnage, no end to the tuneless song of their pain.
But it was not this knowledge which had so stunned me, as much as the certainty they would be coming back for me—tonight and every other night.
For as long as the hate burned like the heart of a star…
Forever.
Back in the late Seventies and early Eighties, there was a talented writer by the name of Alan Ryan, who broke in writing under the editorial eye of Roy Torgeson. He lived in New York, started attending the usual circuit of conventions, and that’s where I met him. He came up with this idea for an anthology called Halloween Horrors, which he sold to my old goombah, Pat Lobrutto, when he was the editor at Doubleday, and the book appeared to good reviews. Flushed with success, Alan talked Pat into a Halloween Horrors II, and asked me to do a story.
I grabbed one of my favorite reference books when I am doing a story which requires a grounding in myth, ancient history, folklore, and all that other old magick stuff—The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by Sir James George Frazier (1922)1, and found some arcane references to Halloween, or as some call it “All Hallow’s Eve’n.” I used a kid as my protagonist because Halloween and kids are a natural combination, and wrote a story that has proved to have remarkable legs.2 Alan accepted it, paid me for it, and I waited for it to appear in print…for about ten years. For some reason or another, Halloween Horrors II was never published, and I had the story in the file waiting patiently. After the statute of limitations expired, I figured I could sell it somewhere else, and Rich Chizmar bought it for Cemetery Dance. I guess the lesson learned here is patience—if your story is any good at all, it will eventually force its way into print and the minds of your audience.
1 I’m giving away trade secrets here, but hey, I do it in the hope that at least one of you out there will go on to be a great writer because I inspired you and influenced you. So let me say The Golden Bough is one of those great treasure chests of Cool Stuff. I guarantee someone of imagination could find more story-ideas in its dusty pages that he or she would ever have time to write…So if you don’t have a copy on your shelves, go get one, and…do-it-today!
2 The story has been reprinted in several languages, included in a “best of” anthology, adapted as a comic, and produced by George Romero for his Tales from the Darkside TV series. Hey, all my short fiction should do so well…
Twelve-year-old Jamie stood with his parents and his little sister, Gloria, around Great-Grandmother McEvan’s bed while a cold autumn wind rumbled the shutters and whistled through the seams of their old house. Rain tapped on the windowpanes like tiny fingers, slapped against the shingles like sheets on a clothesline.
Great-Grandma was a tiny bird of a woman at the age of 103. She had always looked the same to Jamie: silver-blue hair in a bun, thin pointy face, dark sparrow eyes, and long, spider-leg fingers. But she had always been a strong old woman. She had never been to a doctor in her life, and she had birthed eight children. Lost five, and raised the rest as best she could.
Now she lay in the warmly lit bedroom, her eyes closed, mouth half-open, breath wheezing in and out of her like a cold wind.
“She’s not going to make it, is she, Dad?” asked Jamie with the matter-of-factness of a twelve-year-old.
“Jamie! Stop that!” said his mother.
His father sighed, touched her arm. “No, he’s right, Hon. He’s just saying out loud what we’ve all been thinking…”
“Is she going to die?” asked nine-year-old Gloria with a touch of awe in her voice. “Is she really going to die right here in our house?”
“We don’t know that for sure, sweetheart,” said Mother. She looked at her husband. “Should we call Dr. Linton?”
“I don’t think there’s much use in it. You remember what he said…”
Jamie noted that no one was actually crying, but everybody was fighting their feelings. They were all witnessing something they had known was coming for a while now. He was thinking about the idea of death and dying, and how it changed people into such bad imitations of themselves. His great-grandmother had always been so lively and active. She had entertained him and Gloria with stories of her native Scotland and the Highlands she loved so dearly.
Now there would be no more stories.
The sheets rustled as the old woman stirred. Jamie saw her eyelids flutter as she gathered the strength to look at him and the others around her bed. “What day is it?” she asked.
“Thursday,” said Jamie’s father, without thinking.
A pause, then: “No…” Great-Gran’s voice was hoarse and low. “What date?”
“Oh…” said his mother. “It’s the thirtieth.”
Another pause, a wheezing of breath, then: “Of October?”
“Yes, Gr
eat-Gran,” said Jamie, keeping his own voice low and soft.
“All Hallow’s Even,” said the old woman. There was a different tone in her voice, an inflection that could have been awe or respect, or even fear.
“What? What did she say?” asked Jamie’s mother.
“I’m not sure,” said his father. “Grandma, what was that you said?”
“All Hallow’s Even. I’m going to die. On All Hallow’s Even.”
“Jim, what’s she talking about?”
“Halloween,” said Jamie’s father. “Tomorrow’s Halloween. That’s what they called it in Scotland.”
“But why…I mean, what does she mean?” Jamie’s mother held his father’s arm tightly.
“I don’t know…” his father looked at his watch.
Outside a gust of wind whispered against the house. “Eleven-thirty. It’ll be the thirty-first soon…”
Jamie’s mother leaned over the bed, tried to talk to Great-Gran, but the old woman’s eyes had closed and her breathing had returned to its former shallowness. Turning back to her husband, Jamie’s mother looked distressed.
“I think we’d better call Dr. Linton.”
His father nodded, sighed. “All right, I’ll call him. You kids, it’s time to get off to bed.”
Hours later, Jamie lay in his bed in the darkness. The storm still buffeted the house and the trees around it. He could not fall asleep, was not even feeling tired. He’d been awake when Dr. Linton arrived, wet and blustery in the downstairs foyer. The tall, white-haired doctor had looked in on Great-Gran, then returned downstairs to confer with Jamie’s parents. He listened to Dr. Linton’s words: “…and I’d say there’s nothing much more you can do to make her any more comfortable. She’s lapsed into a coma. Might hang on for weeks—or, she might not make it till morning.”
The words stung Jamie as he lay in his dark bed. Great-Gran dying was one of those terribly impossible things to imagine. She’d always been a part of his life. Rocked him as a baby, fed him his bottles, bathed him, and always the stories about Scotland. To think of her as gone was like knowing when you woke up in the morning your right arm would be missing. Unthinkable.
Fearful Symmetries Page 15