Horror Hunters

by Roger Elwood

  He hesitated. “I’m not quite sure,” he said. “The X-ray was . .. oh, such things are apt to be odd, though harmless stuff—teeth, hair, nails you never can tell. We’ll know better later.”

  “Could I see the X-ray?”

  He hesitated again. ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t mean anything to you. Just a lot of shadows.”

  “Could there be … other pockets of fragments?”

  “It’s not likely. And if there are, it’s improbable they’ll ever bother you.”

  There was a pause.

  Nancy said, “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it,” she repeated. “It’s as if Beth had come back. Inside me.”

  “The fragments have no connection with your dead sister,” Dr. Ballard assured her. “They’re not part of Beth, but of a third sister, if you can call such fragments a person.”

  “But those fragments only began to grow after Beth died. As if Beth’s soul… . And was it my original cell that split a second time?—or was it Beth’s?—so that it was the fragments of half her cell that I absorbed, so that. …” She stopped. “I’m afraid I’m being silly again.”

  He looked at her for a while, then with the air of someone snapping to attention, quickly nodded.

  “But, doctor,” she said, also like someone snatching at practicality, “what’s to happen now?”

  “Well,” he replied, “in order to get rid of this disfigurement to your ankle, a relatively minor operation will be necessary. You see, this sort of foreign body can’t be reduced in size by heat or X-ray or injections. Surgery is needed, though probably only under local anaesthetic. Could you arrange to enter a hospital tomorrow? Then I could operate the next morning. You’d have to stay about four days.”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, I think I could manage that.” She looked distastefully at her ankle. “In fact, I’d like to do it as soon as possible.”

  “Good. We’ll ask Miss Snyder to arrange things.”

  When the nurse entered, she said, “Dr. Myers is outside.”

  “Tell him I’ll be right along,” Dr. Ballard said. “And then I’d like you to call Central Hospital. Miss Sawyer will take the reservation we got for Mrs. Phipps and were about to cancel.” And they discussed details while Nancy pulled on stocking and shoe.

  Nancy said goodbye and started for the waiting room, favoring her bad leg. Dr. Ballard watched her. The nurse opened the door. Beyond, Nancy’s friend got up with a smile. There was now, besides her, a dark, oldish man in the waiting room.

  As the nurse was about to dose the door, Dr. Ballard said, “Miss Sawyer.”

  She turned. “Yes?”

  “If your ankle should start to trouble you tonight—or anything else—please call me.”

  “Thank you, doctor, I will.”

  Dr. Ballard nodded. Then he called to his friend, “Be right with you.” The dark, oldish man flapped an arm at him.

  The door closed. Dr. Ballard went to his desk, took an X-ray photograph out of its brown envelope, switched on the light, studied the photograph incredulously.

  He put it back in its envelope and on the desk. He got his hat and overcoat from the closet. He turned out the light. Then suddenly he went back and got the envelope, stuffed it in his pocket, and went out.

  The dinner with Dr. Myers and three other old professional friends proved if anything more enjoyable than Dr. Ballard had anticipated. It led to relaxation, gossip, a leisurely evening stroll, a drink together, a few final yams. At one point Dr. Ballard felt a fleeting impulse to get the X-ray out of his overcoat pocket and show it to them and tell his little yam about it, but something made him hesitate, and he forgot the idea. He felt very easy in his mind as he drove home about midnight. He even hummed a little. This mood was not disturbed until he saw the face of Miss Willis, his resident secretary.

  “What is it?” he asked crisply.

  “Miss Nancy Sawyer. She… .” For once the imperturbable, graying blonde seemed to have difficulty speaking.

  “Yes?”

  “She called up first about an hour and a half ago.”

  “Her ankle had begun to pain her?”

  “She didn’t say anything about her ankle. She said she was getting a sore throat.”

  “What!”

  “It seemed unimportant to me, too, though of course I told her I’d inform you when you got in. But she seemed rather frightened, kept complaining of this tightness she felt in her throat…

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “So I agreed to get in touch with you immediately. She hung up. I called the restaurant, but you’d just left. Then I called Dr. Myers’ home, but didn’t get any answer. I told the operator to keep trying.

  “About a half hour ago Miss Sawyer’s friend, a Marge Hudson, called. She said Miss Sawyer had gone to bed and was apparently asleep, but she didn’t like the way she was tossing around, as if she were having a particularly bad dream, and especially she didn’t like the noises she was making in her throat, as if she were having difficulty breathing. She said she had looked closely at Miss Sawyer’s throat as she lay sleeping, and it seemed swollen. I told her I was making every effort to get in touch with you and we left it at that”

  “That wasn’t all?”

  “No.” Miss Willis’ agitation returned. “Just two minutes before you arrived, the phone rang again. At first the line seemed to be dead. I was about to hang up. Then I began to hear a clicking, gargling sound. Low at first, but then it grew louder. Then suddenly it broke free and whooped out in what I think was Miss Sawyer’s voice. There were only two words, I think, but I couldn’t catch them because they were so loud they stopped the phone. After that, nothing, although I listened and listened and kept sayin ‘hello’ over and over. But, Dr. Ballard, that gargling sound! It was as if I were listening to someone being strangled, very slowly, very, very… .”

  But Dr. Ballard had grabbed up his surgical bag and was racing for his car. He drove rather well for a doctor and, tonight, very fast. He was about three blocks from the river when he heard a siren, ahead of him.

  Nancy Sawyer’s apartment hotel was at the end of a short street terminated by a high concrete curb and metal fence and, directly below, the river. Now there was a fire engine drawn up to the fence and playing a searchlight down over the edge through the faintly misty air. Dr. Ballard could see a couple of figures in shiny black coats beside the searchlight As he jumped out of his car he could hear shouts and what sounded like the motor of a launch. He hesitated for a moment, then ran into the hotel.

  The lobby was empty. There was no one behind the counter. He ran to the open elevator. It was an automatic. He punched the twenty-three button.

  On that floor there was one open door in the short corridor. Marge Hudson met him inside it.

  “She jumped?”

  The girl nodded. “They’re hunting for her body. I’ve been watching. Come on.”

  She led him to a dark bedroom. There was a studio couch, its covers disordered, and beside it a phone. River air was pouring in through a large, hinged window, open wide. They went to it and looked down. The circling launch looked like a toy boat. Its searchlight and that from the fire engine roved across the dark water. Shouts and chugging came up faintly.

  “How did it happen?” he asked the girl at the window.

  “I was watching her as she lay in bed,” Marge Hudson answered without looking around. “About twenty minutes after I called your home, she seemed to be getting worse. She had more trouble breathing. I tried to wake her, but couldn’t. I went to the kitchen to make an ice pack. It took longer than I’d thought. I heard a noise that at first I didn’t connect with Nancy. Then I realized that she was strangling. I rushed back. Just then she screamed out horribly. I heard something fall—I think it was the phone—and footsteps and the window opening. When I came in she was standing on the sill in her nightdress, clawing at her throat. Before I could get to her, she jumped.”

  “Earlier in the evening s
he’d complained of a sore throat?”

  “Yes. She said, jokingly, that the trouble with her ankle must be spreading to her throat. After she called your home and couldn’t get you, she took some aspirin and went to bed.”

  Dr. Ballard switched on the lamp by the bed. He pulled the brown envelope from his coat pocket, took out the X-ray and held it up against the light.

  “You say she screamed at the end,” he said in a not very steady voice. “Were there any definite words?”

  The girl at the window hesitated. “I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “They were suddenly choked off, exactly as if a hand had tightened around her throat. But I think there were two words. ‘Hand’ and ‘Beth.’ ”

  Dr. Ballard’s gaze flickered toward the mocking face in the photograph on the chest of drawers, then back to the ghostly black and whites of the one in his hands. His arms were shaking.

  “They haven’t found her yet,” Marge said, still looking down at the river and the circling launch.

  Dr. Ballard was staring incredulously at the X-ray, as if by staring he could make what he saw go away. But that was impossible. It was a perfectly defined and unambiguous exposure.

  There, in the X-ray’s blacks and grays, he could see the bones of Nancy Sawyer’s ankle and, tightly clenched around them, deep under skin and flesh, the slender bones of a human hand.

  One Foot and the Grave

  Theodore Sturgeon

  I was out in Fulgey Wood trying to find out what had happened to my foot, and I all but walked on her. Claire, I mean. Not Luana. You wouldn’t catch Luana rolled up in a nylon sleeping bag, a moonbeam bright on her face.

  Her face gleamed up like a jewel sunk deep in a crystal spring. I stood looking at it, not moving, not even breathing, hoping that she would not wake. I’d found that horror of a skull ten minutes ago and I’d much rather she didn’t see it.

  She stirred. I stepped back and sideward into a bear-trap. The steel jaws were cushioned by my heavy boot; they sliced through from instep to heel, but did not quite meet. All the same, it was a noise in the soughing silences of the wood, and Claire’s eyes opened. She studied the moon wonder in gly for a moment because, I presume, her face was turned to it. Then she seemed to recall where she was. She sat up and glanced about. Her gaze swept over me twice as I stood there stiff and straight, trying to look like a beech. Or a birch. I must be of the wrong family. She saw me.

  “Thad . . She sat up and knuckled her eyes. Claire has a deep voice, and meticulous. She peered. “It—is Thad?”

  “Most of me. Hi.”

  “Hi.” She moved her mouth, chewing apparently, the end of sleepiness. She swallowed it and said, “You’ve been looking for me.”

  “For years,” I said gallantly. That might have been true. At the moment, however, I was in pursuit of my foot, and possibly some peace and quiet. I hadn’t counted on this at all.

  “Well, Lochinvar, why don’t you sweep me into your arms?”

  “I’ve told you before. You’re everything in the world I need, but you don’t strike sparks. Go on back to bed.”

  She shook her hair, forward, out and down, and then breath-takingly back. She had masses of it. In the moonlight it was blue-gray, an obedient cloud. “You don’t seem surprised to find me out here.”

  “I’m not. The last thing I said to you in town was to sit tight, stay where you were, and let me handle this. The fact that you are here therefore does not surprise me.” “You know,” she said, putting one elbow on one knee, one chin in one palm, and twinkling, “you say ‘therefore’ prettier than anyone else I ever met. Why don’t you come over here and talk to me? Are you standing in a bear-trap?”

  She was wearing a one-piece sunsuit. It was backless and sideless and the summer flying-suit, hanging on the bush at her head, plus the light nylon sleeping bag, were obviously everything in the world she had with her. About the bear-trap I said, “Well, yes.”

  She laughed gaily, and lay back. Her hair spread and spilled; she burrowed into it with the back of her head. She pulled the sleeping bag tight up around her throat and said, “All right, silly. Stand there if you want to. It’s a big boudoir.”

  I said nothing. I tugged cautiously at the trap, moving just my leg. The boot all but parted; the moon gleamed on the steel jaws, now only an inch apart and closing slowly. I stopped pulling. I hoped she would go back to sleep. I hoped the trap wouldn’t clank together when it finally went all the way through. I stood still. There was sweat on my mouth.

  “You still there?”

  “Yup, I said.

  She sat up again. “Thad, this is stupid! Do something! Go away, or talk to me or something, but don’t just stand there!”

  “Why don’t you just go on back to sleep and let me worry about what I do? I’m not in your way. I won’t touch you.”

  “That I don’t doubt,” she said acidly. “Go away.” She thumped down, turned away, turned back and sat up, peering. “I just thought … maybe you can’t. . . .” She flung out of the bag and stood up, slim in the moonlight. I could see her toenails gleam as she stepped on the fabric. Her right toenails, I mean. Her left foot wasn’t a foot. It was a cloven hoof, hairy-fetlocked, sharp and heavy. She was as unselfconscious about it as she was of the casual coverage her sunsuit afforded her. She came to me limping slightly.

  “Go on back to—let me al—oh for Pete’s sake, Claire, I’m perfectly—”

  She breathed a wordless, sighing syllable, all horror and pity. “Thad,” she cried. “Your—your foot!”

  “I didn’t want you to know.”

  “How could you just stand there with that—that—Oh!” She knelt, reached toward my trapped foot, recoiled before she touched it, and stayed there looking up at me with her eyes bright in the silver light, silver tear-streaks on her face like lode-veinings. “What shall I do?”

  I sighed, “Keep your fingers away from the trap.” I leaned back and pulled. The macerated leather of my high-laced hunting boot held, gave, held—and then the jaws whanged together, close-meshed. I fell back against a birch-trunk, banging my head painfully. Claire, seeing almost the entire foot dangling under the arch of the trap’-s jaws, started a shriek, then jammed it back into her mouth with her whole hand. I grunted.

  “Oh,” she said, “you poor darling! Does it hurt?” she added inanely.

  “No,” I said, rubbing my skull. “It was just my head.”

  “But your foot! Your poor foot!”

  I began unlacing what was left of the boot. “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it,” I said. I pulled the boot-wings aside and slipped my leg out of boot and woolen stocking together. She looked, and sat down plump! before me, her jaw swinging slackly. “Shut it,” I said conversationally. “You really looked beautiful a while back. Now you look silly.”

  She pointed to my hoof. It was larger than hers, and shaggier. “Oh, Thad! I didn’t know … how long?”

  “About three weeks. Damn it, Claire, I didn’t want you to know.”

  “You should have told me. You should have told me the second it started.”

  “Why? You had enough on your mind. You’d already been through all the treatment that anyone could figure out, and I was in on all of it. So when it happened to me, I didn’t see the sense in making a federal case out of it.” I shrugged. “If Dr. Ponder can’t cure this no one can. And he can’t. Therefore—”

  Through her shock, she giggled.

  “Therefore,” I continued, “there was nothing left for me to do but try to find out what had happened, by myself.” I saw her lower lip push out before she dropped her face and hid it. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I—kind of thought you were trying to help just me.”

  Claire can switch from giggles to tears, from shock to laughter to horror to fright, faster than anyone I ever met. It goes all the way down too. I said, “Don’t kid yourself. I don’t do things for people.”

  “Well,” she said in a very small voice, “that’s
what I thought, for a while anyway.”

  “You better get back in that sleeping bag. You’ll catch cold,” I said.

  She rose and crept obediently back to the sleeping bag. Once into it, she said, “Well, you care if I catch cold.”

  I went and hunkered down beside her. “Well sure, I might catch it.”

  “You wouldn’t get that close!”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I read somewhere that a sneeze can travel thirty feet.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Because I sneaked out behind your, back and got a fancy foot just like yours?”

  “Oh, Thad! How can you joke about it?”

  I sat back and lifted my hoof, regarding it thoughtfully. I had found it possible to spread the two halves and relax suddenly. They made a nice loud click. I did this a couple of times. “I’d rather joke about it. How frantic can you get?”

  ‘Thad, it’s my fault, it is, it is!”

  “That’s what I get for playing footsies with you in roadhouses. You’re contagious, that’s what.”

  “You’re no comfort.”

  “I don’t comfort stupid people. This isn’t your fault, and you’re being stupid when you talk like that. Does yours itch?”

  “Not any more.”

  “Mine does.” I clicked my hoof some more. It felt good. “What gave you the idea of coming out here?” “Well,” she said shyly, “after you said you’d track this thing down for me, but wouldn’t say how, I thought it all out from the very beginning. This crazy trouble, whatever it is, started out here; I mean, it developed after I came out here that time. So I figured that this is where you’d be.”

  “But why come?”

  “I didn’t know what you’d get into here. I thought you might—might need me.”

  “Like a hole in the head,” I said bluntly.

  “And I thought you were doing it just for me. I didn’t know you had a foot like that too.” Her voice was very small.

  “So now you know. And you’re sorry you came. And first thing in the morning you’ll hightail it straight back to town where you belong.”