Horror Hunters

by Roger Elwood

  Now Elliot stood up. “I get it,” he murmured. “You’re humoring me because I’m a psycho and that’s what you want them all to think. Maybe you’re afraid she’ll be coming after you, too. Well, don’t worry. She won’t, unless you try to stand in her way. I’m the one she really wants, and I’m going to her. I want to see—”

  “Listen, Joe,” I began, but he wasn’t listening.

  He reached out suddenly and his hand swept across the tabletop, gripped the half-empty bottle, raised it, and smashed it down until it shattered. Then he took a quick step forward, swinging the glittering weapon.

  The whole operation from start to finish was almost instantaneous, and it silenced me.

  He stood there, holding the jagged length of glass that splintered down from the broken bottle-top.

  “Sorry to cut you off,” he said. “Now you’d better go. Before I really cut you off.”

  I took one step forward. The gargoyle returned to his face, and I took two steps backward.

  “I’m the one she wants,” he said. “You can’t stop me. And no sense going to the cops. They can’t stop me, either. She won’t let them.”

  I should have jumped him then, even though he was a maniac with a broken bottle in his hand for a weapon. I often wonder what would have happened if I had jumped him.

  But I didn’t.

  I turned and ran, ran out of the apartment and down the stairs and through the hall and into the street, and I kept telling myself it wasn’t just because I was afraid. I had to find help, this was a job for the police.

  There was a call-box two blocks down and around the comer, and I used it. I suppose it didn’t take more than five minutes between the time I left the apartment and the time I got back to meet the squad car as it pulled up.

  That was enough, however. Joe Elliot had disappeared. They sent out a prowl car, and they put it on the police broadcast band, and you’d think a pajama-clad man would be easy to spot on a deserted city street.

  But it wasn’t until I broke down and told them where I thought Joe Elliot was headed for that we got any action—and then it was because we piled into the squad car and drove all the way out to Forest Hills.

  He couldn’t have made the trip out there in that time on foot. He must have stolen a car, although they never found one or heard a report of a missing vehicle.

  But he was there, of course, lying across her grave. And he’d been digging long enough to claw down a good six inches through the thick turf and solid soil.

  That’s when the stroke must have hit him. They never did agree as to the exact cause. The point is, he was dead.

  And that left me to answer the questions.

  I tried.

  I tried to answer questions, and at the same time to leave out all the crazy stuff, the unfashionable stuff about ghosts and shadows and a succubus that kept getting stronger and stronger. They brought up the idea of a love reaching past the grave; it was their own idea, only of course they thought he was trying to reach her.

  I tried to keep the murder part out of it too—because there was no sense opening that up now.

  But they were the ones who finally got around to it, and they opened it up. The case, I mean. And then the grave.

  If it had been just the case, I could have managed to hold on, I think. Hold on to my story, and to my belief, too.

  But when they opened the grave, it was too much.

  They dug down the rest of the way through the thick turf and solid soil; dug down to what hadn’t been disturbed for ten long months.

  And they found her, all right, although there were no marks or anything to prove murder. No proof at all.

  And there was no explanation for what else they found, either. The tiny body of a newborn infant in Donna’s intact coffin—lying there just as dead as Donna was.

  Or just as alive.

  I can’t make up my mind which is which any more. And of course the police keep asking me questions for which there are no answers. None that they’d believe.

  I can’t tell them Donna wanted Joe so badly even death couldn’t deny her. I can’t tell them she came to him at the last and summoned him proudly, that he went out to Forest Hills to see their child.

  Because there is no such thing as a succubus. And a 191

  shadow does not speak, or move, or hold out its arms.

  Or does it?

  I don’t know. I just lay in bed at night, now, when the bottle is empty, and look up at the ceiling. Waiting. Maybe I’ll see a shadow. Or shadows.