by Gahan Wilson
Henry started down the hall, holding his schoolbooks to his chest.
"Whoever he was, he seems to have gone," said Henry's father, and the rain, which had suddenly grown much fiercer, began throwing itself against the window in alarming, angry-seeming gusts.
"Well, he certainly doesn't sound like anyone we know," said Henry's mother, and his father, chewing his lip a little, casting a glance or two at the front-hall door of the apartment, settled again into his easy chair.
Lying in his bed, staring up at a ceiling too dark to be seen, Henry listened to the roaring wind and considered the situation.
Outside, in the wet wildness of this awful night, prowled a being dangerous to Henry and his family. It would not do just to give back what was asked for. Wearing the skin had roused something in Henry that knew all that and relished what it now made necessary.
When it seemed from the stillness of the apartment that his parents were asleep, Henry rose, carefully and quietly, padded across the floor to his bureau, extracted the skin from its double confinement of sack and drawer, and slipped it on.
The cat hissings merged into one smooth, unbroken cry when he donned the costume all at once, going from a kind of throaty purr to a final yowl of triumph as the mask sealed on, but all blended into the sound of the rain. Henry was sure his parents had heard none of it.
His passage through the apartment to the kitchen was so near to silent that even his hearing, heightened astoundingly by its joining with the high-peaked ears of what he wore, was unable to detect any of it save for the tiniest clicking as he turned the back-door lock. He took a deep breath, opened and closed the door as quickly and softly as he could, and he was standing in the wind and pelting rain on the apartment's back porch.
He rested his claws—for they were claws, not hands-on the wooden railing of the porch and peered down and around three stories below at the apartment's huge backyard.
There were occasional lights mounted here and there, none too solidly from the wild way they swayed in the wind: some on posts, spewing their swaying beams on parked cars; some fixed to the brick walls of the building, making a dancing shine on dark, wet windows or creating ominous shiftings of shadows in the depths of basement entrances; but none of them did much to dispel the dank gloom all about.
Henry lifted his snout and inhaled deeply and questingly and got a wild medley of night odors: rain and cinders; something strong blown in from the lake; a nest hidden on a nearby roof whose smell of new eggs and bird flesh made his mouth, with its needle-sharp teeth and long, lolling tongue, water— but not a whiff of his enemy.
He began to trot quietly down the rain-slicked wooden steps, glancing sharply about with his incongruous blue eyes as he moved.
He did not stop at the foot of the steps—there was a revealing pool of light from a lamp—but ducked quickly into a sooty patch of shadow before he crouched and sucked in great pulls of air, analyzing each one carefully before turning an inch or so to sample again. Then, suddenly, he froze and blinked and inhaled again without moving, this time even deeper, and a snarling kind of chuckle came from his throat, and his teeth were bared in a human, if singularly cruel, grin.
Bent low, ducking craftily from shadow to shadow, Henry dodged his way nearer and nearer to the wide gap in the wooden fence that led to the alley in back of the building.
He pressed himself against the wall, listening with his animal ears and feeling the rain exactly as though it were falling on his own bare skin. He could make out the motor of a far-distant car; someone in an apartment was playing dance music on a radio and humming to it; there was a muffled mewing from a covered nest of kittens; and there was the harsh, slurred breathing of his enemy.
He was near. His smell was mixed with garbage smells: moldering oranges and lamb bones gone bad mingled with a hot hate smell, a killing smell out there in the dark. He was very likely watching the opening in the fence. Henry slowly backed up along the fence away from the opening until it joined a porch. After a listening pause to make sure the enemy had not moved, he stealthily climbed the porch's side, which gave him a perch just overlooking the alley.
The tar of the alley gleamed like black enamel in the rain from the light of the bare bulb mounted over the rear door of the apartment building opposite. The first sweep of his glance seemed to indicate that the alley .was innocent of anything save a tidy army of garbage cans beside the building's concrete landing and a less respectable accumulation of cans and rubbish just outside the backyard of a private house farther down, but a squinting second look showed an ominous bulk hunkered down between the second batch of garbage and a low wooden fence.
Silently, hurrying as fast as he could so as not to give the enemy time to mull things over and change position, Henry made his way through his building and around the block so that he could approach the alley fence of the private house from its rear. Once in the house's backyard, he dropped to all fours and inhaled deeply. He grinned again, and this time the grin was significantly less human than it had been before. His prey was still there.
The impulse to rush with all speed so that he might throw himself at once upon his enemy and rip his skin and drink his spurting blood was so devastatingly strong that the flesh of Henry's flanks rippled suppressing it. He hunched down, puffing from the effort of wresting control from the sudden killing urge. He could not let such a thing master him. A blind scurry forward might undo all his cleverness so far. He had done well as a neophyte; he must continue to do so.
But still the smell of the enemy, the rich meatiness of it, was maddening. It seemed he could even detect the pulsings in the veins and arteries!
He forced himself into calmness, hunching low into the wet grass. He took a deep snuff of the earth scent in an attempt to clear his head and then began to work his way slowly and silently forward toward where the pile of garbage and his victim were lumped together on the fence's other side.
But as he drew nearer, he became aware of some confusion. It seemed the garbage stench was growing stronger than his victim's. Then it crossed his mind that that might well have been the reason that place had been chosen. He was, after all, dealing with someone far more experienced than himse—
Then there was a terrific shock and a sidewise lurch, and Henry's head exploded in a searing blast of light followed by a great, black rushing that threw him into a confusion of motion, not himself moving but himself being moved, roughly, brutally, and he screamed because of the awful, horrible pain—someone was tearing the skin from his face, ripping it off him, roots and all, and now his scalp and now the flesh of his neck—and he screamed and screamed and cried out, "Please, please stop!" but the tearing of the flesh from his body did not stop, only went on and on; and with each violent ripping and rending of himself from himself, the raw agony burned over more and more of him, until he was nothing but a scorched, stripped leaving thrown aside.
He lay naked on the wet grass, confusing his tears with the rain running over his body, and was profoundly grateful for the tears and the rain, for they were cooling and healing the rawness of him so that he was becoming aware of something other than pain, aware of the night and of movement before him.
There was the enemy before him, the victor, not the victim, huge and smelling—even to Henry's human nose, the stench of him was clear enough—hunched down and pulling this way and that at something in his hands.
"You spoiled it, goddamn, you little bastard!" the enemy sobbed and, leaning over, huge and dark in the night, sent a pale fist lashing out and knocked Henry's head back painfully against the fence. "You fucked it up; you little prick!"
Henry curled closer into himself and for the first time realized that the thing the enemy was tugging at was the costume. He did it with such absorption and violence that at one point his hat fell from his head and the rain streaked his long, black hair in curling ribbons down his furrowed forehead without his noticing.
The enemy's eyes were shiny and black, as Henry had sensed they were ba
ck in the park with the Grecian temple, and his teeth, though human, seemed much more pointed than the norm, the canines longer and sharper. All were bared in alternate snarling and sobbing, for the enemy was desperate. At length, he threw the costume down in fury and then lunged at Henry, taking him by the shoulders and shaking him hard enough to make his teeth rattle.
"It's all gone small, you little son of a bitch!" he shouted into Henry's face, and the stink of his breath made Henry gag. "What did you do, hah, you fucker? How did you make it shrink, you shit?"
"I put it on!" Henry sobbed, his head bouncing crazily as the enemy continued to shake him. "I put it on!"
A crafty look sprang into the enemy's face. He held Henry still for a long second, staring closely at his face.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I remember. It changed when they gave it to me!"
He threw Henry hard against the fence and clawed up the skin, holding it spread open before him like a huge, soggy bat.
"Yeah," said the foe to himself, his wet face gleaming, his long canines shining. "Yeah!"
Then, with a growling chuckle, he lifted the costume's arm, pushed his huge hand into the skin glove of it and grinned wider and wider until it seemed that all of his teeth, his not really human teeth, were showing. The glove had stretched easily, and that which had been a small claw when Henry wore it was now something like a grizzly's paw.
He held his hand wearing the glove high into the rain in savage triumph, the rest of the costume trailing from it like a shaggy banner, and then he thrust it in front of Henry, waving it as a fist under his nose.
"You wait, you little piece of shit!" he crowed. "You wait till you see what I do to your face with this!"
He pulled on the other glove with equal ease, then stood and stepped into the hairy costume with his long, powerful legs, roaring with laughter when they slid in smoothly. A great flash of lightning made Henry blink, and when he opened his eyes, it was to see the costume curling round his enemy's chest, fitting it with a loving closeness.
His foe looked down at him with a grin of hate that made Henry shudder, and then, as a sudden crash of thunder made the ground jump, the grizzly paws took hold of the costume's mask, pulling it over the brutal, laughing face, so that the following volley of crackling lightning showed the monster standing there complete, towering awesomely over Henry, striding toward him, bending down and picking him up with a paw clutching either side of his throat. "I got you now, you little fuck!" the monster said, and Henry felt his weight making the long claws dig into his neck as he was swung in a high arc close to the hairy face grinning with fangs of such a fearsome length and sharpness that he almost vomited at the sight of them.
Then the monster suddenly froze position, and as Henry watched, the ghastly maw's grin made a weird, rapid transition, faltering, twisting, and finally turning into a wide gape of dismay.
"Naw!" his enemy snarled. "Naaaw!”
And then came a shocking crash of thunder, loud enough to make the very ground of Lakeside shudder, and as it pealed and pealed, rolling round in the sky, Henry saw the monster's eyes bulge impossibly, and then the paws released him with a spastic gesture and he landed with a hard thump on the ground to stare up in astonishment.
Lit by endless lightning, all sound of him drowned out by the ceaseless, merciless, air-flung cacophony, the monster pranced wildly in a crazy dance, arms and legs swinging like a mad jumping jack's, and from the gape of his horrible jaws and the spewing of blood and saliva, his screams must have been bloodcurdlingly ghastly could they have been heard.
But they could not; thunder censored all—and so it was in a kind of earsplitting silence that Henry saw the monster's eyes bulge more and more until the roundness of them projected entirely outside the sockets of the mask, and then they were violently ejected in a double spray of blood, and Henry found himself staring unbelievingly at the extraordinary sight of his blinded enemy beginning to shrink before him!
At first, the process was uneven, one huge paw shriveling at a time, an arm bunching oddly and then shortening in a jerky telescopic fashion; but then, almost as if getting the feel of it, the whole creature began to reduce itself in step, so to speak; and as Henry watched in appalled fascination but with an undeniable undertone of profound satisfaction, he saw the being crushed down by stages, dancing and screaming all the while, kept alive and conscious by some horrendous magic until it was no larger than he had been while in the costume— until, that is, the costume had returned itself to a perfect fit for Henry Laird. Only then, and not before, was the suffering of his enemy terminated and the creature allowed to drop to the rain-and blood-soaked grass on which it had danced these last awful minutes.
Its murderous readjustments completed, the costume opened its various slits and slowly disgorged Henry's enemy, now only a shapeless, glistening redness, washing itself carefully in the pouring rain after it did so. When it was entirely free of all traces of its recent tenant, and not before, it slithered smoothly over to Henry's curled and shivering legs, very much as a cat will work its way to the side of a beloved master, and, snuggling close to him, waited to see what he wanted to do next.
It Twineth Round Thee in Thy Joy
Ehnk Nahk S'Tak'n softly settled down on the coiling of his legs, but his eye never left the diary as his smallest frontal tentacles gently turned its yellowed, fragile pages while his midbrain deciphered and his aftbrain recorded the words written in faded ink upon them.
The first part of the diary was the routine sort of record any tourist might have kept in order to refresh himself so that he could enrich the anecdotes and brags he intended to inflict upon his home folk once he'd returned from his wanderings.
It began by describing the delights and wonders of voyaging first class on an interstellar ship, including a lengthy account of a conversation he'd had with a celebrity while seated at the captain's table. This was followed by a brief description of his arrival on New Mars, some details of his stay in the best hotel in its capital, and a list of historic sights he'd seen there with the more impressive ones carefully underlined.
Then the first hint of the strange turn this heretofore prosaic journey was to take appeared in the account of the diary writer's meeting with an ancient New Martian guide in the hotel's cafef and S'Tak'n's found his interest quickening as he read the guide's intriguingly vague description of a legendary, deserted village, which climaxed with the following tantalizing comment:
"Understand, sir visitor, that there is no specific statement as to what is there,” the old guide told me as he leaned over his still-living meal, "Tis only said that it is all one could wish for in this life.”
The author, who S'Tak'n judged to be a rather prissy sort of fellow, paused to express his disgust at the guide's meal stirring as he forked it, then went on to describe his arrival at his decision to abandon his original plans and form an expedition to the village. S'Tak'n's mouths worked themselves into a variety of ironic grins as the old script spelled out to him the story of a desert trek very like the one he'd finished within the last half hour. It was exactly the same geographically, but significantly different in most other respects from the one he had just completed since it had occurred a full three hundred years ago.
He paused, lowered the delicate document, and focused his gaze on the New Martian bearers he had hired. They were, under the astute direction of the head guide, efficiently and carefully cutting their way through the thick, complex tangle of desiccated vines which completely filled the narrow street leading from the city's gate to its interior.
Moving their tall, excrutiatingly thin bodies with the careful economy of movement so typical of them, they were guiding the tightly focused, scarlet rays of their beam guns cagily since they did not wish to start a general conflagration, but had already cleared the way to the streets first turning, and the lead members of the party were disappearing under two overhanging balconies of bright pink stone. It would not be all that long before they had carved a tunnel all t
he way through the twisting tangle of wood to the central square of the city and S'Tak'n might make his way there with ease and see for himself if the heart of the mystery lay there as the eons-old rumors held it did.
The diary had been plucked from the vine, or rather from the fingers of a mummy complicatedly entwined within it, by Soonsoon, the guide of the expedition. He had presented it to his employer at once, without opening it, but S'Tak'n had not been unaware of Soonsoon's many covert glances full of speculation as the New Martian watched him reading it. S'Tak'n beckoned with a wormish wiggle of the tentacles atop his head, and striding like a wading bird, the guide approached him.
"What was that in life?" S'Tak'n asked, gesturing delicately in the direction of the mummy.
"A humanoid," Soonsoon said in the dry, whispering voice typical of New Martians. "Perhaps an Earthling. He has the most amazing death grin I have ever seen. It appears to stretch even beyond the lobes of his ears. I do not know whether it is due to joy or dehydration."
S'Tak'n nodded, waved the guide back to his clearing of the vine, and resumed reading the diary with increased curiosity since it had begun to describe the clearing of an identical vine in this same identical street. Three hundred years had again made a considerable difference, however, and the diarist's progress had been slow and laborious in the extreme:
It has taken us three full days to chop our way within the village's square. There is a large fountain at its center and from a distance it seemed as though the bright, curling green coiled round it might be the body of a gigantic serpent, but as we drew closer we saw that it was, in truth, the living beginnings of the vine whose dead branches tilled the rest of the city with their frozen writhings.
I went to touch it, but the old guide took hold of my arm with his spidery fingers and whispered, even more softly than was usual with him, that it might be best if someone else risked the first contact. He beckoned and one of the carriers bravely stepped ahead of all the rest. We all leaned forward eagerly to watch as he reached cut and laid both his palms upon the smooth, glistening swell oft an uppermost coil.