The Night Listener and Others

by Chet Williamson

  The perverse sight was all that Dan needed. In a frenzy of rage he burst apart the frayed leather strap that held his wrists, and in another second he had freed his legs as well. He raised his eyes to see the dwarf Gunther bolting toward him on his bandy legs, a huge knife raised over his head.

  Dan quickly sidestepped and tripped the dwarf so that he fell headlong onto the stone floor, dropping his knife. Then Dan picked up the little man and threw the squirming bundle of muscle and bone directly at his master, Dr. Schwarzenwald.

  The dwarf struck the madman in the chest, knocking him backward so that his feet went over the edge of the acid pit. In another second both the repugnant servant and his maniac master had fallen into the pit. Their screams lasted only seconds, but they were the second most welcome sounds Dan Beecher had ever heard.

  The most welcome was heard a few seconds later, after he had freed Joan from the wires that had held her, wrapped her gleaming nudity in a sheet, and was holding her trembling body against his own. “Oh, Dan,” she breathed, “I’m so glad it’s all over. I…I love you, my darling…”

  They were words that he knew he would hear again and again, every day of his life, now that their horrible nightmare was finally over.

  From “The Friendliest Corner,” Street & Smith Love Story, April 20, 1935:

  Perhaps someone can help this gentleman.

  DEAR MISS MORRIS: I know that your department usually helps people find friends and pen pals they don’t normally know, but in this case I hope you will make an exception. I am looking for an eighteen-year-old young lady named Ruth Lundy of Sterling, Colorado. She has been missing for nearly eight months, and her parents are naturally very worried about her. If any of your readers are familiar with Miss Lundy, would they be kind enough to write to me at the Pierce Detective Agency, Denver, Colorado. Thank you.

  J. W. SHEPARD

  From Best Detective Magazine, July 1935:

  CRIME SPOTS MAPPED

  A series of murders of young women have taken place in the northwestern part of the country over the past ten years, forming a triangle between Washington, North Dakota, and Colorado, where the body of Miss Ruth Lundy was recently discovered in a shallow grave a hundred miles northeast of Denver. The five bodies that have been found to the present time were all mutilated in the same way, leading police to believe the same person was responsible for all five killings. Police believe they will find the killer soon.

  From “The Reader Writes,” Terror Tales, August 1935:

  Reader Wants More “Worth-y” Stories

  “I think that D. B. Worth’s ‘The Madman Who Collected Women’ in your January issue was one of the best stories you’ve ever published, right up there with corkers by Hugh B. Cave and Arthur J. Burks. But I’ve been waiting for months for another Worth yarn, and there’s nary a one to be seen. Whatever happened to this great author?”

  A Reader in Denver

  Dear Reader,

  We’ve been trying to find Mr. Worth ourselves to beg some more terror tales from his pen, but he seems to have vanished. If anyone knows him, please tell him our editorial doors are open wide to his kind of shocker!

  The Editor

  From “Ask Adventure,” Adventure, November, 1935:

  A good practical question for sportsmen from a long-time reader.

  Request:—I do a great deal of hunting, and have recently been troubled by predators digging up the flayed carcasses of my kills after I have skinned them and taken my trophies. I don’t wish to leave the carcasses to be discovered by others, but since I do not eat wild game, I would prefer to leave the remains in the wild, rather than pack them out. How deep should one bury animal carcasses to ensure that they will not be dug up by predators?

  B. D. Whitworth, Casper, Wy.

  Reply by Mr. Ernest W. Shaw:—It is always advisable to bury carcasses at a minimum depth of three feet in regular soil, and at a depth of four feet when the soil is sandier. For further assurance, place a fallen tree limb or rocks over the area as well, to further discourage digging. With these precautions, the sportsman’s leavings should remain undisturbed.

  From “Lost Trails,” Adventure, March, 1936:

  WHITWORTH, B. D. Looking for my old chum, who has been “bumming” through the northwest for the past ten years or so. Any information of his whereabouts would certainly be appreciated. Address—J. W. SHEPARD, 428 W. 6th St., Denver, Colorado.

  From “MISSING,” Detective Story Magazine, October, 1936:

  SHEPARD, JAMES W.—Formerly of Denver, Colorado. Thirty years old. Five feet nine inches tall, dark hair, gray eyes. May have been in the company of B. D. Whitworth. Kindly advise Grover F. Pierce, 310 S. Harlan Street, Denver, Colorado.

  From “Around the Blotters,” Inside Detective, July, 1954:

  Denver, Colo.:

  Authorities were horrified to find ten masks made out of dried human flesh in the cheap cardboard suitcase of a drifter. The man burned to death in his bed in a Denver transient hotel, apparently after having fallen asleep while smoking.

  The body was rendered unrecognizable by the fire. The only identification found was a nearly twenty-year-old private investigator ID in the name of James W. Shepard, who vanished in 1936. Police are assuming that, in the absence of any other information, the body is that of former investigator Shepard.

  “I don’t know what this Shepard was up to,” said Denver Police Lieutenant Randall Spotwood, “but you don’t carry around dead people’s faces just because you picked them up somewhere.”

  Police further informed Inside Detective that they believe nine of the ten victims are women, and that the single male victim had a bullet hole in the back of the head. Also found in Shepard’s suitcase were a small stack of old magazines and a two-inch square piece of dried human skin tattooed with the image of an open eye.

  Investigation into the positive identification of the corpse, as well as that of the ten victims, will continue.

  “And So Will I Remember You…”

  I don’t recall when I bought the book. It must have been on my shelf for years before I read it and found the inscriptions. How I ever came to have a copy of The Peep of Day; or, a Series of the Earliest Religious Instruction the Infant Mind is Capable of Receiving, I’ll never know. I had to have picked it up from Kerry Baker, the book dealer, since it had his code in it: “$1—” with “xx” below it, showing that he’d paid nothing for it, probably having gotten it in a box lot at an auction. I suppose I bought it on a whim, due to its cheapness and age.

  It sat unnoticed in the lawyer’s bookcases in my bedroom for twenty years, until the evening I lay in bed reading Todd Pruzan’s piece in The New Yorker about Mrs. Favel Lee Mortimer, the author. Perhaps I should say authoress, since that stuffy, tight-laced woman would no doubt have referred thus to herself. She was among the most Victorian of British Victorian writers, was the redoubtable Mrs. Mortimer, slinging moralistic platitudes and nationalistic chauvinism about like some precursor to the Evangelical one-minders who’ve cast a similar blight on the current cultural landscape.

  The simultaneously amusing and nasty thing about Mrs. Mortimer was that she wrote for children. Her withered literary soul found fertile ground among her parental collaborators, who foisted upon their hapless offspring such titles as The Countries of Europe Described, Reading without Tears, and the aforementioned The Peep of Day. When I read her various descriptions of those unfortunate enough to live outside of England— “.…t would almost make you sick to go to church in Iceland” is one of her kinder judgments—I knew I had found a true monster of popular literature, and was assured of it when I unearthed my own copy of The Peep of Day.

  I have a memory for books, if for nothing else, and although Mrs. Mortimer’s name meant nothing to me, the book’s title did. I set down the magazine on the nightstand, muttered a brief explanation to my wife Linda, and starting rummaging through the bookcase on the other side of the bedroom. After several minutes I came up with the sad little
volume. Its cover was worn, the cheap pseudo-cloth covering the heavy paper boards was chipped, and the dark threads and white binding cloth of the spine lay exposed like muscle and nerves under skin.

  I climbed back into bed and found that the edition was published by The American Tract Society, always a promising sign, and gave no author’s name. “Anna B. Huber’s book 1860” was written on the front flyleaf in an ink that time had browned. I turned to the text, hoping for outrage, and was not disappointed.

  The first chapter, entitled “The Body,” describes the same in simple and non-technical terms:

  God has covered your bones with flesh. Your flesh is soft and warm…I hope that your body will not get hurt…

  If it were to fall into a fire, it would be burned up. If hot water were to fall upon it, it would be scalded. If it were to fall into deep water, and not be taken out very soon, it would be drowned. If a great knife were run though your body, the blood would come out. If a great box were to fall on your head, your head would be crushed. If you were to fall out the window, your neck would be broken. If you were to not eat any food for a few days, your little body would be very sick, your breath would stop, and you would grow cold, and you would soon be dead.

  You see that you have a very weak little body.

  Thank you for all your many kindnesses, Mrs. Mortimer. Her eventual point was that the child should pray to God to keep its little body safe from harm. I suppose it’s merely a more explicit version of the old bedtime prayer, “If I should die before I wake,” but I wondered about the effect such a list of horrors would have on an impressionable child of “five or six,” Mrs. Mortimer’s target audience, as revealed in her preface.

  I couldn’t help but share Mrs. Mortimer’s deathless prose with Linda, though she’s never been as fond as I of such literary cruelty. Being an elementary school principal makes her even more sensitive toward the feelings of children, and she was properly horrified and disgusted to the point where she gave a theatrical shudder, closed her own book, and turned off the light on her side, a cue that I should do the same, and one to which I responded as desired.

  Nothing alarms me at night. When I close my eyes in the darkness I’m able to close them on the concerns of the day, even my current inability to create a solid outline for a new novel, which drove me mad whenever my eyes were open. Nor am I affected by any filmic or literary horror I might have ingested before bedtime. In short, I sleep well and heavily, and am awakened only by the twin orbs of the morning sun and my bladder when full. That bladder alarm usually wakes me around four in the morning, as it did on this particular night, so I got up quietly, traversed the darkened bedroom with the assurance of one who knows every toe-stubbing bedpost and nightstand by heart, and made my way to the bathroom.

  When I stepped into the hall on my return, however, I felt suddenly ill at ease, as though if I turned and looked through the doorway into the living room, I might see a dark shape sitting in one of the chairs. It was surprising. Usually I’m as at home in the dark as a cat.

  So I confronted my fear, and turned and looked directly into the room, lit only by the pale glow the street lights cast through the thick curtains. There was nothing there, of course, but I thought that I heard just the wisp of a sigh, high and feminine. I took a few steps to the doorway, reached in and turned on the light.

  Th room was empty. Th sigh had probably been my own sinusitisinduced nose-whistle. I snorted at my own imagination, and went back to bed. Sleep, however, didn’t come as readily as it usually did.

  The next day I was too busy to think about Mrs. Mortimer and her less than salubrious effect on children. My writer’s block, spongy at first, had thickened to the consistency of cement, and I struggled unsuccessfully through another eight-hour day, trying to extricate myself from a muddle of forced motivations and blatant coincidences. When I’d finished, I had another paragraph of my outline done, and knew that I would delete most of it the next day. My anxiety deepened daily, despite Linda’s assurances that I would work my way out of my problems. Hives frequently appeared, and the small X-shaped birthmark on my shoulder itched madly, as it always did when I grew upset.

  That evening, lying next to Linda, I tried to distract myself by once again paging through The Peep of Day. Nothing equaled the awfulness of the first chapter, though that on “The Wicked Angels” came close, with the deathless verses:

  Satan is glad

  When I am bad,

  And hopes that I

  With him shall lie

  In fire and chains,

  And dreadful pains.

  All liars dwell

  With him in hell,

  And many more

  Who cursed and swore,

  And all who did

  What God forbid.

  I wondered if the Anna B. Huber who owned the book had been as enthralled by her bedtime tales as I’d been by mine, and in curiosity I turned to the endpapers to see her name again, then flipped to the back. There was a note handwritten in pencil. Though faded, it read:

  The owner to this book is A. B. Huber. My Father gave it to me for a Present. This is a nice reading book for us if we only try and do as it says in this book and read it through and through. 1862

  I was unexpectedly moved by this touch of humanity in such a harshly written volume, and could nearly see the events of a century and a half before, the father giving the book with pride and affection to his daughter, and, two years later, Anna trying out her new penmanship skills on the endpapers. I looked through the other pages at the rear and front of the book, and found on a fore-title page a main course to which the other inscription had been a mere appetizer:

  This evening I write my name here and that is Anna B. Huber. In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty three and here youns can see my name when I am dead and gone.

  The rose is red the vines are green

  The days are

  Past which I have seen

  Remember me by the dawn of day

  Remember me when far away

  Remember me and so will I

  Remember you till I die.

  Anna B. Huber’s Book 1863

  God, I thought with a smile, how these simple words define a life long past. A little girl wants to be remembered after death, so she puts her name in a book, perhaps the only object of permanence she owns, creating her own time capsule to be opened years later by a middle-aged man who hears her voice and does as she wishes—he remembers her, long after she is dust.

  Remarkable, I thought at first, that she should be so fixated on death. But when I considered what mortality rates were like in 1863, not even taking the Civil War into account, I thought it likely that Anna B. Huber had experienced the deaths of family and friends. It was even possible that her father had died at Gettysburg or Shiloh or Antietam or in some other less famous but no less lethal battle.

  And there was always Anna’s prized volume, in which Mrs. Mort imer constantly reminded her of mort ality and of the many and varied ways in which life might end. No wonder the poor wee thing had death on her mind. Don’t worry, little girl, I thought. I’ll remember you.

  I read a chapter from another book, having had quite enough of the ill-tempered Mrs. Mortimer, and went to sleep with one arm around Linda, but thinking of Anna Huber, wondering what she had looked like, how long she had lived, and whether she had had children of her own to abuse with Mrs. M’s writings.

  It wasn’t the bladder alarm that roused me that night. It was Anna B. Huber, or, I thought at first, my simulacrum of her. And before I realized what I was seeing, I was grateful for the awakening.

  I’d been having a dreadful nightmare, quite a novelty for me. I had been closely watching a little girl in a long dark-colored dress, and, as so often occurs in dreams, was also experiencing what was happening to her. In literary terms, I was both first and third person at once. This collective We were moving through a series of incidents that would have made Lemony Snicket quail.

 
At first I was drowning. Not knowing which way was up, I thrashed about in thick, swampy water, and saw long brown hair twist like snakes on either side of my head, drifting in front of my eyes and blocking my vision. Every time I breathed, I took in a noseful of lumpy viscosity that choked me so that dark flames surged before my eyes.

  Then those flames heated the water until I seemed a piece of meat boiling in a pot. My hands reddened and great blisters started to form, bubbles rising beneath the young flesh as though live things were pressing to get out. The blisters burst, and tattered shreds of skin roiled in the bubbling water like strands of seaweed. The pain increased as something pierced my stomach, and when I looked down a silver beam of light a foot wide had impaled me, and a great stream of blood was pouring from my body as though from a fireman’s hose, and I remember thinking that it looked like the scene at the end of Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, when the blood gushes like a fountain from the dying samurai.

  As the blood roared out of me, I felt myself growing even weaker than before. The heat receded, and the blood slowed its river and stopped altogether, though the sense of being in thick water remained, and I began to fall. Twisting I fell through that thick miasma of dream until I saw a stony plain far below coming up to meet me. I tried to turn away, to slow or even cease my fall, but I could not, and the ground grew closer and I saw myself as a diver, head first, arms at my side, until the stones filled all my view and I struck them. My neck twisted and snapped like a dry branch broken for kindling, and I entered blackness.

  The darkness turned to white, and I was lying on a flat hard plane, but I could see myself, and my face, the little girl’s thin face, was growing thinner. The eyes protruded, the cheeks fell in as if made of pastry dough, and the bones pressed against the wasted skin. I—she—was dying. My breath came slow and shallow, and my body grew colder until the world was full of stillness.