I admit it didn’t take me long to climb the steps, yet by the time I reached the top I’d managed to persuade myself that I couldn’t have seen all that, couldn’t have seen anything like it. The pub looked as dim as the steps now. I might have asked the Admiral to put on the lights, but just then I wanted to ask my questions and get out of there. “Have you been crossing any Russians lately?” I said, as lightly as I could.
“Not unless you count selling Vladivar, no.”
He thought I wasn’t serious. “Just think about it. You haven’t had trouble with anyone Slavonic?”
“Not in the pub, no.”
I could tell he was remembering. “Outside?”
“Might have been. They could have been Slavs. A couple of sailors pulled knives on each other in the car park one night, and we had to sort them out, that’s all.”
“They couldn’t have sneaked in here afterward, could they?”
“Not a chance.”
“That makes sense.”
He stood up to switch on the lights. “Going to tell me about it?” he said.
“When I’ve told you how I know.” Both his gaze and the parrot’s were making me uncomfortable. “You see,” I said, “I once did some research for a novel about the basis of all the vampire legends, until I found someone else had already written it. One thing I did was talk to a specialist in Slavonic languages who told me some of the old Slavonic incantations. There were a couple I wouldn’t have used even if I’d written the book; not once he told me what they were supposed to call up. Well,” I said, glad to get it over with, “one of them was written on the wall in your Gents.”
He jumped up. “It’s there now?”
“It was until I rubbed it out.”
He sat down again and gave me a doubtful look. I could see he thought I was making up the story for his newspaper. “How come you can read Slavonic writing?” he said suspiciously.
“I can’t. I copied the stuff I researched down phonetically, and that’s what whoever wrote it in the Gents did. Don’t you see, whichever sailor wanted to get his own back on you sent someone in to write it for him, told him what to write. And that’s not all they did—”
But there was no need for me to go on, for the parrot had started croaking—croaking the words it had already tried to pronounce. I pointed nervously at it while the Admiral frowned at me, then I punched the cage to interrupt the bird before it could finish.
The Admiral’s frown was no longer puzzled but dangerous. “What did you want to do that for?” he demanded.
“Didn’t you hear what it was saying? Whoever was sent in here didn’t just write the words on the wall, they must have spoken them as well when there was nobody to hear—nobody but him,” I said, nodding at the parrot, which glared at me. “Couldn’t you tell it was Slavonic?”
The Admiral wasn’t convinced. “You haven’t told me yet,” he growled, “what it was supposed to do.”
I couldn’t go into that, not then, not there. “Let’s just say that if you used the invocation in a graveyard, what it called up would be dreadful enough, but if you weren’t in a graveyard it would be something even less human,” I said, but my last few words might well have been inaudible, for he was turning his head toward the steps. I saw his face change, and knew what he was hearing before I heard it myself.
I should have known that the footsteps would be terribly slow. “They’re bigger,” the Admiral whispered, and I could hear what he meant, though I was hearing them for the first time: they sounded as if they were growing as they lumbered up the stairs—as if they were putting on more substance. I had disliked the dimness, but now I wished desperately that he hadn’t turned on the lights: at least then we would have been spared seeing. The footsteps came up halfway, unsteadily but purposefully, and I saw what might have been the top of a head, something white and rounded that seemed to be having trouble in keeping its shape. I was praying to be able to look away, to be able not to see any more, when the white dome jerked downward, the footsteps plodded back to the basement. Interrupting had achieved something after all.
Well, I told you at the outset that I couldn’t promise you a proper ending. I still visit the Baltic Fleet, for the food as much as anything, but not after dark. I admit I keep a sharp eye on the parrot and the graffiti, and sometimes I need to be spoken to twice. I know the Admiral doesn’t take kindly to people hitting the parrot’s cage, and so I can only suggest that if you hear the bird speaking what sounds like Slavonic you do your best to interest it in something else. Quickly.
I delivered the story to John Meakin at the beginning of May 1983. I visited the pub several times during that year, but the newspaper hadn’t yet been published. Close to Christmas 1983 I arrived at the pub to find it locked and shuttered. It reopened under the new management this year. Nobody seems to know where John Meakin is.
Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You by David S. Schow
David J. Schow was born on July 13, 1955, in Marburg, West Germany—a German orphan adopted by American parents. He left Europe while a child and traveled all across the United States, before settling down in Los Angeles. As his fiction indicates, Schow is an avid film buff, and he claims to know more spatter films trivia than anyone on Earth. Most of his writing has been on films, either as a columnist for various publications or as a contributing editor to film books. He has recently completed an eight-part series on the television show The Outer Limits for Twilight Zone Magazine. (He had to use a pseudonym, Oliver Lowenbruck, when the following story appeared in the same issue of that magazine as did one of the series.) An outgrowth of those articles was The Outer Limits Companion, out this fall from Berkley. Schow has written eleven novelizations and series novels under at least four separate pseudonyms for Warner and Universal. His short fiction has appeared in Whispers, Weird Tales, Fantasy Tales, Night Cry, Galileo, and Ares.
Schow also appeared in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII—also with a story set in a movie theatre, “One for the Horrors.” Despite its title, this last was a piece of whimsical fantasy; despite its title, the following story is out-and-out horror. Schow seems to be a connoisseur of rundown movie houses. He writes: “Like J. A. Bijou’s in ‘One for the Horrors,’ the Omicron was based on a real theatre (one in L.A.) that was massively refurbished as soon as I wrote about it.”
Jonathan Daniel Stoner recognized the dude inside the Hollywood Magic Shoppe, the fellow poring over the display plaque of artificial eyeballs. He was from the Omicron Cinema; one of the employees. Always having five minutes to squander, Jack (as Jonathan had been dubbed in Nam by the few comrades with enough intellectual candlepower to add his first and middle names up to the sum of a tepid joke: hey there’s another guy here named Richard Whiskey but we call him Dick Liquor yock yock yock) pulled himself in. He saw that the fake eyeballs were pretty damned authentic. Nested in felt, they were glossed with some special shellac that made them gleam like real, living, wet eyes. Artificial substitutes, he thought, and his missing right leg sent a wholly imaginary local wince up to his brain.
“Say hey,” he said.
The dude from the Omicron looked up. As his face was hit by the combination of the sputtering fluorescents above and the dirty gray daylight sneaking in off Hollywood Boulevard, Jack thought maybe the guy had mononucleosis or something; superficially he looked like mere hippie fallout a decade and a half out of step with the real world, but close up Jack saw that his face was the color of a kitchen sink stained by coffee grounds. Above the face was hair skewed in a dozen directions, matted, unwashed; below, a physique withered by hard weather or drugs or both. His eyes were sunken and glazed with the slightly stoned expression Jack had learned from the perimeter snipers at Nest Kilo—burned-out Qui Nohn alumni who just didn’t give a shit anymore. And the hippie image was jelled by the overpowering miasma (no, stink) of patchouli oil wafting from every pore toward Jack like mustard gas. God, he hated the stuff.
The dude had not quite connected yet, and a
ppeared to be waiting for more input.
“I come into the Omicron all the time,” Jack prompted. “Last week I caught Dial M for Murder and House of Wax. The two-way 3-D glasses were a neat idea.” Some management genius had stamped out dual lenses that were red-green for the black-and-white-feature, and flipped to polarized lenses for color. The two-dollar show had been packed.
It seemed to take entire geologic ages for the dude to react. “Oh yeah,” he said in an arid, rasping voice. “I seen you lotsa times. I remember your walking stick. Yeah.” He turned back to his tray of eyeballs.
Jack shifted his weight from his government-issue cane, leaning closer to regain the dude’s attention despite the eye-watering, minty stench. “What’s next?”
Again the slow shift, as though the dude were crippled in a way Jack could not see. Always say handicapped, not crippled, Compton, the CO, had advised with shit-eating sincerity before his discharge. At least you’ve fought your last battle, soldier. Compton had always had a supreme rectal-cranial inversion.
Crippled. The dude arm-wrestled his own memory and won. “Uhh—Bloody Mama and Bonnie and Clyde. That’s it for Crime Week. For the weekend we got Black Moon. And . . . uh . . .” He plucked a wine-bottle-green eyeball from the tray and inspected it through a nonexistent loupe, turning it like a jewel. “Some other Louis Malle film. My Dinner with Andre, maybe.” His voice was strep-throat dry, and sounded like a bad parody of the Man with No Name.
“Or Atlantic City?”
“One or the other. See ya there, my man.” He extended his free hand and Jack found himself receiving his first power-to-the-people handshake in ten years. The dude’s yogurt pallor was easy to dismiss as the cost of toiling in the eternal darkness of a theatre, but the papery texture of his flesh made Jack think of shaking hands with a mummy. The brittle skin seemed to crackle in his grasp, the bones beneath rearranging themselves arthritically like dried voodoo talismans. Up, down, once, twice, zomboid and mechanical. Jack remembered the rack of artificial steel and vinyl arms stored near the shelves from which the medics picked a leg to replace the one he’d lost. It had been like a tombful of dismembered mannikins, the limbs and parts devoid of viscera; hollow, lifeless surrogates. The Omicron dude’s dead grasp was what Jack thought shaking with one of those plastic-coated hooks would feel like.
The dude unclasped, then produced from his pocket a slim card in a cashier’s-check pattern of waffled green lines, with GOOD FOR ONE FREE ADMISSION stamped on front. “Yours,” he said. “Got to keep our regulars satisfied.”
“Hey, thanks.” Abruptly Jack felt like a heel for mentally bumming the dude.
“See you there.” He sought the mate for the single glass eye he balanced in his palm, like pairing dearies for luck in marbles.
Jack executed his stiff, clockwork 180-degree turn and left the store, the thump-click of his workboot and cane in concert barely audible. He practiced to make it unobtrusive; he hated it when newly introduced people gawked at his right leg before looking at his face. He thought he could empathize with the way women felt about their breasts.
On the Boulevard, somebody had pried out the bronze disc of Rhonda Fleming’s sidewalk star, stolen it, leaving a crater. A musclebound black superstar, towering above the pedestrians on a hyperthyroidal pair of roller skates with Day-Glo orange wheels, swerved to miss the crater and nearly center-punched Jack. He and the cacophony of his gigantic ghetto-blaster blended into the Friday swarm of walkers before anyone could swear. He’d been wearing an Army fatigue shirt with the sleeves ripped off.
Jack steadied himself against the display window of the Hollywood Magic Shoppe and allowed himself ten seconds of hemlock-pure racism. It primed him, erasing the good feeling of copping a free pass to the Omicron, and as he walked through the grimy, humid smog and the abrasive tide of Boulevard flotsam, he escalated his irritation into unfocused, hair-trigger anger. Everyone around him on the street was loping along, trying to look badder than everyone else.
Jack’s cane attracted no notice on the Boulevard. He was a mundane diversion in the midst of the jarhead Marines on leave, the slutty preteen heartbreakers leaning on the bus stop posts, the meandering gaggles of Japanese tourists, the smug pairings of smartly leathered punks and overconfident faggots, the Hollywood vets with their straight-ahead stares (the better to avoid the pushy Scientologists just this side of Las Palmas), the garbage-pickers and shopping-bag loonies. The Walk of the Stars seemed perpetually encrusted with a gummy vomit of spilled drinks and litter, like the sticky floor of a porno theatre. Along the maze of blaring rock noise and Iranian jewelry shops, step-in eateries displayed steaming, greasy triangles of pizza, or the oily components of colorless hero sandwiches, or peculiar platefuls of what looked like Korean food, varnished for presentation, reminding him of those eyes—preserved, fakely realistic surrogates. The lavender spire of Frederick’s pierced the waistline of the Boulevard somewhere behind him, a centerpiece to the whole tacky, vulgar carnival.
You’ve fought your last battle, crip.
The words fried into Jack’s brain, spoken too many times in too many subtle ways. The sentiment ate into his calm like fluoric acid into the fuse of a beer-bottle bomb. This place could really drag you down.
He decided the Omicron pass was not snotty charity, and then forgot about it, feeling a little better.
His grimace into the mirror told him he should shave more often, pay more attention to his hair. But what the hell—he wouldn’t care so much half an hour from now.
The prostitute pulled her sweater over her head. Her corner was by the House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard, and Jack always thought there was a terrific joke in that somewhere. The first thing she looked at while she stripped was the fleshtone plastic and metal ornamentation of his right leg.
Traveling light. M-16 on rapid-fire, clips in his shirt, rifle grenades taped across his thighs. Bravo Patrol’s point man was fifty yards back, sauntering down the dead center of the jungle trail because he knew the anti-personnel mines were salted slyly into the border of the path where careful soldiers might tread. They all knew. Across from him, his counterpart, Teller, eased ahead to help flush out snipers on the opposite side of the path. He and Teller were Bravo Patrol’s big mavericks. Teller collected VC ears and sometimes their balls. The crumping sound of 60-millimeter mortar fire was starting to deafen them. Time to be careful.
She crushed out an unfiltered Lucky Strike and said, “They almost took a packet of your shot, lover.” He saw the wings of flab curving over her kidneys. Her ass seemed a yard wide.
“No, they didn’t,” he said, rehearsed. “And yes, it all still works.” He waited naked on the bed. Exposed.
“Talkers are always comedians,” she said as she descended on him. The roots of her hennaed blond hair were brown.
Ears pricking. Seeing that stupid bastard Teller and realizing and forgetting his craving for a smoke and using up three more seconds ripping a grenade loose and locking it into the muzzle of M-16. No time. Wanting to scream they’re right above you stupid asshole! No time—stock to shoulder, finger to trigger. The weapon kicks and the tree thirty yards over mushrooms into an orange blossom of fire and screaming Cong. Teller’s mouth drops like a stag party patsy’s in surprise and he sprays the tree above uselessly with slugs. The whole goddamn jungle comes alive with the nasty, spattering racket of weapons fire like a crazy typewriter noise or water dripped into a pan of hot bacon grease. Not like movie gunfire. The flaming tree lights up the entire perimeter and he is exposed. Has to buy five seconds, has to retreat to cover while Bravo charges to catch up. Backing gingerly through fronds onto the trail. Feeling his foot fall short. He makes one step blind because he’s watching Teller’s head leave his body. It spins.
There was flat, sour bile in his throat. The whore had too much mileage on her and was unappetizing with her duds off. He felt unaroused and ill. With a fatalistic devotion to duty she worked to excite him reflexively, to make his own body betray him.
It became boring, repetitious, like a grindhouse stroke flick. He felt cold lying there, watching thin smoke from the ashtray unreel toward the ceiling.
Nothing happens until he lifts his foot, then the mine POPS beneath him, smacking air concussively through his head. He doesn’t feel the rifle grenade taped to his thigh explode. No details; just a stab of heat and bright light. The dispensary lights hurt his eyes more when he awakes, four days later, thinking Bravo Patrol did his job for him.
She pushed off him immediately, and left her sweat on one of his bathroom towels.
“Have a nice day,” he said to the empty room, watching daylight fade across his barrack-neat arrangement of serviceable furniture, of homemade bookshelves and desk. He clicked on his TV remote, a do-it-yourself project he’d tinkered together two months ago, and browsed the free program guide he habitually picked up every Wednesday at the Mayfair Market. Automatically, for a giggle, he thumbed back to the Community Classifieds.
Beached Manatee Shelley Winters uses the Grand Canyon for a toilet! Signed, The Scumbag.
If you wanted a good barometer of Hollywood’s blue-collar weirdness, you turned to the Community Classifieds, suitably on the inside back page of the TV schedule and printed on pulp stock so cheap that your reading fingers were black by the time you got to the good stuff. For those too illiterate to make the letter column of the L.A. Times, too straight to ever consider undergrounds (now facetiously termed the “alternative press,” Jack thought with contempt—another sellout), too normal and mundane to ever air their petty beefs anywhere but in a playroom or a bar with a constantly burbling television set, the Community Classifieds were a steam valve and a cheap thrill all rolled into a single weekly page of lunacy. Any local nonentity could phone in a two-line “ad” or editorial comment for free; the paper always had too many to run, and the week-to-week progressions offered by the column’s stalwarts—people who by journalistic squatter’s rights appeared regularly, trading barbs under obnoxious pseudonyms—were more entertaining than any diversions offered by the cursed tube.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 13 Page 11