The Night Listener & Others
by
Chet Williamson
Introduction by Richard Christian Matheson
Introduction
When I began writing short stories, I took particular note of authors who blended originality and elegance. Either was rare; both a regal improbability.
Incapable of the merely probable, Chet Williamson transcends the taxidermy that passes for much of contemporary writing, stirring admiration in peers, famished demand in readers, and cloudbursts of devout ink from critics. In a field gasping with juiceless prose, his hypnotically graceful work, whether in novels or short stories, is a rescuing oxygen.
From the start, Williamson’s writing glided over black ice, eluding category. With horizon tilted and voice refined, he quickly became an understated star in the best anthologies and top magazines, including Playboy, Esquire, and The New Yorker, elevating the game. Horror, suspense, autopsies of modernity. It seemed he could do it all.
Consider the paranoid spell of The Searchers, in which three CIA operatives are tasked with debunking the venal agendas of psychic fraud and other paranormal duplicities that threaten America—a transgressive ride, wild and distressing. And Williamson shimmers.
In a departure which exports his gifts into a nightmarish, Japanese fairy tale, his novella, The Story Of Noichi The Blind, captures supernatural horrors with unsettling brushwork. He has even turned its traumas into a play for puppet theater, and like the Noh actors of Japan, leaving behind the world of pretense, evolving into places beyond earthly constraint, Williamson’s work mourns and overwhelms, doing exactly that. As an interesting side note, he has confessed to a fondness for all things Japanese; perhaps a past life. Given this novella, perhaps an embroiled one.
Among his nearly twenty books and over 100 short stories, are the anti-hunting suspense novel, Hunters, and the fierce indictment of religious zealotry and sexual abuse in his novel, Defenders Of The Faith, each more of Williamson, unable to stop himself from being riveting. As with all his work, duality is a provocateur, explored with harrowing insight.
Somehow bringing to mind the nervous ecstasy of Miles Davis, Williamson’s superb story collection, Figures In Rain, gathers dark, brilliant magic, the tales of love and loss chronologically arranged in order of their first appearances in print. The book includes his observations about each story and won the International Horror Guild Award…another in the spire of nominations and honors heaped on Williamson’s work.
He has written adaptations, rich with haunting nuance, like The Crow: Clash By Night and The Crow: City Of Angels, not to mention “The Blood-Red Sea,” a pacifistic Crow tale, poignantly suggestive of the poet Homer. His best-selling book to date is Pennsylvania Dutch Night Before Christmas, a Yule tale that became a regional sleeper. In a twist befitting his varied passions, he also wrote about the history of a college in Uniting Work And Spirit: A Centennial History Of Elizabethtown College. Stand back for its effect; Williamson could make a grocery list involving.
He dangerously strolls wounded streets in McKain’s Dilemma, a detective yarn written in the unenlightened days of 1988 that pivots, rather controversially for its time, on a gay character and even AIDS as possible villains; politically incorrect now, beyond bold then.
Though his ideas are remarkable, it is his characters that most powerfully define Williamson’s depths as a writer, running on red blood and lingering complexity; his pages rich with the tormented and heroic, the cruel and somehow redeemed; his very human cast lost and sometimes found, amid heartbroken scapes.
Some argue it is Williamson’s short stories with their sterling cadences and potency that most soar. As a minimalist at heart, I love the claustrophobia, irony, and misleading simplicity of them. Among the trove, my personal favorite is “The Heart’s Desire” a subversive story of longing for former days and the torturing untruths in a life falsely recalled. I find it a perfect story, written with lyricism, empathy, and not a drop of sentimentality.
Though often about pain-seeped lives, and fluent in the twisted and forbidden, Williamson judges none by judging all; a daring trick. Few are untouched, all are changed, and he is a fearless witness. There is no knowing where Williamson will next smuggle his prodigious knack. Whatever genre he chooses, crossing borders of length and style, he will simply fit in like a local and quietly make trouble. Without a creative country, the man is a danger. For those privileged few, lucky enough to be new to the miraculous Chet Williamson, you are about to enter worlds of glorious and sinister wonder.
I envy you.
Richard Christian Matheson
Malibu, California
To Laurie, who lives with me in every word…
The Night Listener
I begin to be aware of the sounds of night when my wife buys the electric blanket. Oh, there have been other sounds before—the hushed roar of the furnace, the weary hum of late-night cars passing on the road at the bottom of the yard, the whir of the refrigerator—but the electric blanket is what opens my ears to the night and makes me hear, makes me aware of what is waiting in the dark, what is stirring just outside, unheard by those who welcome sleep, shrouding themselves under covers, closing themselves off to the warnings.
It is that premeditated, deliberate click of the thermostat, as if a black finger had come down on a metal button, that keeps me on my back, eyes opened wide, fixed on the single red eye of my individual control on the headboard. The light for my wife’s side hovers over her sleeping head, bathing her hair in a crimson glow, and I think these two lights are like the piggish eyes of a monster whose head is as big as the bed, who could swallow us up, covers, mattress, box spring and all, before moving to the next house.
A fancy, that, and one at which I am quickly able to smile. But that steady clicking continues. Every few minutes I hear it, and it brings me back from the half-sleep I have entered. I remember then the books I have read as a boy, in which Tarzan awakes from sleep to a sharp alertness, with none of the slow drifting up that civilized man experiences, no dull druglike flicking of eyelids, jarring from the light, none of that. It was once necessary to survival to awaken quickly, like an animal. It may be necessary still.
I practice with the blanket.
Click. I awake, alert, eyes wide, pupils huge, struggling to make light from darkness. There is nothing. I allow myself to sleep again.
Click. Again I awake, muscles tensed, ready to spring up, to move right or left. My wife sleeps through it all.
That is how I spend the night—awake, asleep, awake, asleep, over and over again, like a Pavlovian dog trained for insomnia. The next morning it is strange, but I feel rested, even vital. I consider having my wife return the blanket, but decide not to. There is something deeper here, something beyond switched-on switched-off night. There is a reason for me to spend the night on sleep’s fine edge. Soon I learn what it is.
It is outside. I hear it several nights later, rustling the bushes by the bedroom windows. At first I think it is the wind, and I listen for the rapping of the yew limb on the roof overhang, but it never comes. So I listen more intently, not fading into sleep after the blanket’s most recent click as I usually do, and I hear it moving around the outside of the house, passing and pausing at the front door, sliding around toward the backyard, stopping at the back door, and then moving on. And somehow I know that it will not enter tonight, nor perhaps ever. It will pass by, and I will wait for its return. I will be alert, and will wake from my surface sleep to meet its coming.
I go to the next room where my young son lies sleeping, his door ajar. Through the crack I listen for his light, shallow breath. There is silence. I strain to the uttermost, but still cannot hear
him, so I push the door open slowly, lifting up on it to keep the bottom from rubbing on the carpet and making a noise to wake him. He has thrown the covers back in his nocturnal tossings. Leaning over him, I listen on pointe for the sweet small breaths whistling in and out. I hear them now and touch the warmth of his cheek, allowing my index finger to slip beneath his tiny nose, where I feel the light puffs of lung-heated air. A kiss on the cheek, and I straighten up, tucking the quilts and blankets under his shoulders so that his own weight holds them on securely. Then I look about the room in the weak yellow glow of the night-light.
The curtains are drawn, the windows closed against the bitter cold. The furnace is running, and the hot air makes the curtains above the heat duct billow outward, as if someone is standing behind them three feet above the floor. Finally the furnace stops, the shape becomes a curtain once more, and the house falls silent. I listen, but there is nothing, and I leave the room and go back to bed, where my wife sleeps soundly. And well she may, for I am awake to listen.
More weeks pass, and I hear it once nearly every night now. I stay awake until the sound of its shambling through the winter-dry grass assails my ears, and then, naked, I rise silently from the bed and follow it as it moves around the outside of the house, the two of us like the plastic Scottie dogs whose feet are magnets, so where one moves on one side of a thin plane, the other moves as well.
Past the drawn curtains of the living room we go, through the dining room out to the kitchen, pausing at the double-locked back door. If I pull the sheer curtains back I may see it just outside, its face pressed against the cold brittleness of the storm-door pane.
Then I hear it move away. A loose stone rattles on concrete as it crosses the drive, a bone-dry leaf cracks in the grass at its passing, and the weeds in the field snap like kindling. The night is silent again. I visit my son’s room to cover him, and return to my bed. My skin is mottled with goose-prickles, and I slide toward my wife to steal her warmth. She shivers in some secret dream as my coldness attacks her, but only for a moment, and then she burrows closer, the unselfish sacrifice that love demands ruling her even in sleep. In a minute I am warm, and I think of how much I love her and the boy. With that thought embracing me, I allow myself to sleep just a breath from waking. It has never come back twice in one night, but that does not mean it never will. As long as I remember this they will both be safe.
Two weeks later it leaves and returns in the same night, and I know that the confrontation is drawing near. It comes again some time after I return to my bed—how long I cannot say, since the night devours time. There is a rubbing noise that makes ripples in the pond of sleep, and my head, just below the surface, breaks water and I wake. I know it has returned, for I hear its sound of passage, a sound I know as well as my dear wife’s gentle breathing. And there is another thing now.
There is a smell to it, light yet unmistakeable. I do not know when I first noticed it, and I suppose it came upon me little by little as one grows aware of a dull ache. It smells like flowers. Not the pleasing scent of fresh-cut blooms, but of flowers just past their prime, just when the edges of the petals start to curl and discolor, and the thought that soon they must be discarded diminishes the looker’s joy. It is the scent of shadowy death crossing life’s border.
I smell it now: not the lingering wisps of odor left by its first visit, but the full aroma of its presence. It is directly outside the window next to our bed, and it makes a thin scrabbling sound as if tapping at the sash with spindly nails. I throw off the covers, put my feet on the chilly floor, and rise as furtively as a wraith, so that the bed-frame makes no creak to disturb my wife’s slumber.
On it moves, pausing more frequently than on its first visit. At the living room window on the shadow side of the house it stands for a very long time, and when I finally decide to time it I count eight hundred and thirty ticks of the mantel clock’s pendulum before it moves on, rushing past the kitchen and bathroom, and circling its way to my son’s room, where it waits outside the curtained window so long that I grow tired and sit beside the crib, my back to the wall. But I become uncomfortable facing away from it, even though thick brick and plaster lie between us. So I turn and sit Indian fashion, staring at the wall.
Then suddenly it moves with wind-swiftness around to the back of the house again, and I must spring up and run so as not to lose it. When I enter the kitchen I feel certain of its presence. It is at the back door again, and I hear the rattle of metal against metal as its cold fingers fondle the handle of the storm door and its thumb caresses the button. I know the door is locked. I locked it myself before I went to bed.
Then why does a soft click, like a disengaged latch, whisper in the kitchen’s silence? And why is there a squeak like a thin scream in the night, as the storm door slowly angles outward, letting the wind press against the wood and glass of the inner door?
I reach out and touch the doorknob. The latch is set. My hand moves up to the bolt and finds it secure. And then, before I can stop myself, I pull the curtain back and look through the window.
There is nothing. Nothing but the storm door held open by an unseen hand that now releases it to drift closed on its hydraulic spring. Then the holder of that door retreats into the night, and its sound recedes more swiftly than ever before.
It returns every night now, and I am growing weary. I cannot trust myself to descend too far into sleep for fear that I will miss its second coming, and even then how can I be sure it will not pay a third visit? I cannot help but feel that when it comes three times in one night, I shall finally see it and fight it.
Something in me thrills at that thought. It is becoming increasingly difficult not to fling the doors and windows open and attempt to fall upon it with all my strength.
But I control myself. When the conflict comes it will be of its making. Its intrusion upon my house, my domain, will trigger our clash. I pray that it comes soon. I thirst for it as I thirst for the deep deathlike sleep that may no longer be mine in this life.
So it comes again this night, and on its second visitation we stand, thin door between, while wind blasts against the house like a fist with uncounted knuckles that burrow into every crevice. Its smell is strong, and my ears are filled with the sound of it, even through the roar of rushing air. Then something new occurs.
I feel a force that passes through the door as though the wood were butter and wraps itself around my bare skin. And for the first time I know the overwhelming strength of it, and the strength of the fear it inspires, and I tremble as though I were standing outside, my nakedness exposed to the freezing winds. From beyond the door I hear a low laugh, and I realize that, as I feel its power, it tastes my fear. Then it turns and moves away over the yard to the field, and its power goes with it, melting away my fear like ice under the sun, leaving a gray puddle in my mind to mark its memory.
It will return. Now I am sure of it. There is no reason for it to wait any longer.
I go to my bedroom and check the window locks, then leave, closing the door behind me. In my son’s room I rattle the levers, making sure the screws in the window frame are tight. I cover his shoulders with the blankets, kiss him, and shut his door securely.
I think the sword will do. It hangs on the wall of the den next to the large bookcase, nailed there years ago in a moment of Gothic romanticism, and I have been half embarrassed by it ever since. But now I am grateful for my unintended foresight as my fingers wrap around the hilt in the dark and I slide it from its scabbard. It makes an abrasive noise as it leaves its longtime home, and I let my hand slip down the length of its blade. There are small rough patches I take to be rust, and the edges are so dull that I can easily rub the heel of my hand over them without pain. But the point is still sharp, and a quick firm thrust should pierce anything possessing the softness of life.
I go into the living room where I sit waiting on the sofa, the sword between my knees, my hands on the hilt, the point against the carpet. Finally I hear it, and its boldness fri
ghtens me for a moment. There is none of its previous stealth in its tread; the weeds and sticks and grass beneath it cry out at its passing where before they would only have whimpered. There is no fear in it.
The front door trembles and holds. The lock is on, and it does not break the glass. Now around to the back it comes, passing the living room and den windows with a steady imperious tread. I know that tonight it will enter.
My stomach twists as I pad into the kitchen, the blade angled weakly toward the floor, no d’Artagnan gaily swinging a beribboned rapier, but a naked primal man, guarding his cave against the beast that seeks entry.
The screen-door handle rattles, and outside I see it in its multifarious shapes—sabertooth, lamia, ghoul—the night-horror standing outside the door. Even if I die, I will finally see its face; despite the dark, despite the speed with which it may come, like a juggernaut, upon me, I will see its true face.
The storm door opens, thrown back with no thought of secretiveness, and now the thing’s hand grasps the cool roundness of the second knob. It turns a hair and stops. It is locked, as always. I have locked it. The thing pauses, and in that second I detect an unease, a thought of turning around and walking back into the darkness.
But no! No more of this! And my left hand reaches out and quietly turns the catch on the knob, unlocking the door so that even a cripple might enter.
Try again! I think savagely. Please, damn you, try again!
It does. The knob turns, the latch leaves the security of its hole and draws into the door itself. The way stands open for a push. I step back and ready the sword. When it comes through it will be huge, larger than man, so I lift my arm back and high. If I aim high, perhaps I may reach its heart.
The door opens. Against the outer dark I see a deeper darkness that fills the doorway. I wait only until the door is opened wide, until the rubber stop thuds against the wall, and then I thrust with all my strength, blade rocketing forward like a javelin.
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