Poppi is dressed in his white coat, but his office is bigger, darker, made of rocks. There’s lots of equipment she doesn’t understand lining the walls, some of it spitting sparks like 4th of July fireworks. Poppi is hunched over a worktable, his back to her, his hands moving rhythmically. The viewpoint moves around him until Stacey can see plainly what he’s doing.
There’s a figure on the table before him, a human figure but one that’s unfinished, lacking. It has arms but no hands, legs but no feet, head but no face. Stacey sees a needle and thread in Poppi’s fingers and realizes he’s sewing, like Mommi used to when Stacey tore buttons off or ripped holes in her pants.
Stacey gets close enough to see what he’s sewing. He’s working on the mouth, which gapes like a blank black hole. There’s a lump of dead grey flesh in his left hand, one end dark with stitches, while his right moves up and down, up and down.
He’s sewing a tongue in.
The Monster is begun.
The next day Stacey’s own tongue is badly blistered. Poppi has treated the welts on her backside and they feel better, but the tongue causes her to be even more closemouthed than usual. Finally Miss Washington, of all people, who works in the cafeteria, sees the tongue and asks her what happened.
Stacey doesn’t want to answer, but the image of Poppi with needle and thread rears up before her vision. Unable to stop, she blurts it out.
“Poppi made me eat something hot.”
Miss Washington, who has never spoken to Stacey before, knows only her face, not her name, asks who Poppi is.
“My daddy,” Stacey says thickly.
Miss Washington, who runs the cash register, hesitates a long while. Then she says softly to Stacey, “Next time you say no, you hear?”
Stacey hurriedly gives Miss Washington her money and flees. She can’t even taste the lunch, can only feel.
A week later Poppi comes home with a bitter smell of beer clinging to him. Stacey is writing a letter to an imaginary penpal, carefully penning the words and labouring over the spelling; the letter is about Poppi. Poppi finds it, reads the first sentence, and tells Stacey if she likes those words so much she can eat them. Poppi tears the page into strips and forces them into Stacey’s mouth, holding it closed until she has no choice but to swallow. She is made to consume the entire page that way, then sent to bed with no other dinner.
That night Stacey sees Poppi at work again. His creation is more fully formed – there are the beginnings of features on the face now. Poppi has cut it up the middle, and he’s lowering in something that looks like a shimmery blue grey balloon full of jelly, with tubes dangling from either end. As she watches, he connects the tubes to those already within the Monster, then begins to sew it shut.
The thing has guts now.
Stacey is in the middle of fourth period the next day when she vomits. She’s sent home immediately; the other students are dismissed on an extra recess while the janitor cleans the mess up. He’s dipping his mop back in to the bucket when something catches his eye, and he leans over. There in the bile is a half-chewed scrap of paper with the crayoned words “then Poppi made” plainly visible.
He considers informing the teacher, then shrugs and goes about his work.
Nearly a month passes without major incident. Stacey is beginning to think Poppi may have given up his Monster when he comes home early actually crying. It would have been Mommi’s birthday today, and Poppi stares at a framed picture of her while he drinks from a bottle of sour liquor. He’s talking but to no one at all, about how he could have saved Mommi from the cancer if he’d been a real doctor instead of a pediatrician. When he sees Stacey looking at him he lunges at her; she unthinkingly puts out her hands to ward him off. Poppi takes her small hands in his and rubs them roughly along his unshaven jaw while he sobs. Finally he releases Stacey, lost in his grief. She flees to her room. Although there’s no physical pain this time, the remembrance of Poppi’s skin under her fingertips is as bad in its own way.
She watches as Poppi attaches the hands. She sees he’s been hard at work – the figure looks almost human now, beneath the bandages. She knows it’ll be over soon.
The Monster is almost done.
They’re working on an art project at school the following afternoon when Stacey’s teacher, Mr Torres, notices that Stacey is not applying her brush to paper but to her own arms. He takes Stacey into the back to talk to her about the strange red marks she has meticulously painted on each wrist. Stacey tells him that’s how Poppi makes sure the hands will stay on. Mr Torres looks around to make sure the other students are occupied, then he takes Stacey outside and sits with her on the steps.
“Stacey,” he asks carefully, “does Poppi ever do things to hurt you?”
Stacey, who has never been asked this question before and so doesn’t know how to answer, just shrugs.
“Would it be alright if we let the school nurse look you over, Stacey?”
Again, Stacey shrugs. Mr Torres gives her a hall pass and sends her to the nurse, but Stacey never makes it. She gets halfway there, then is seized by an inexplicable panic. Her heart groans in her throat; she feels like she’s going to wet her panties. She runs for home as fast as she can and buries herself in her closet, clutching Baloo and Babar and Pluto to her tightly.
Stacey’s own birthday is two weeks later. Poppi buys her a new “eleventh-birthday celebration” dress and takes her out to a fancy restaurant, where Poppi has so much to drink even the waiter in his little short jacket and bowtie questions him. Poppi brushes the polite enquiry off with a wave of his credit card; when he giggles as the man walks off, Stacey actually joins him. Poppi even gives her a little drink of his wine – “now that she’s getting to be such a big girl” – and Stacey feels a surge of affection for Poppi, forgetting the Monster for the moment.
On the ride home Poppi stops by a liquor store and tells Stacey she can have anything she wants from the ice-cream case. She takes a pineapple Push-Up, Poppi gets himself a bottle, and they laugh all the way home about the messy yellow sherbet oozing out of the paper tube.
In the house Poppi takes a long gulp from his bottle, then sees how Stacey has stained her chin and part of the new dress with sherbet. She expects him to become angry, she tenses in anticipation . . . Instead he smiles sweetly and takes her into the kitchen. He wets a paper towel, gently wipes off her chin, then starts on the dress. The dress is beautiful crushed velvet, though, and he tells Stacey he doesn’t want to ruin it, so she’d better take it off. He helps her, right there in the kitchen; she crosses her arms to cover her cold chest.
Poppi asks her what she’s trying to hide – hasn’t he seen her before? She wants to giggle, wants to think this is another birthday game, but the look in Poppi’s eyes tells her this is something else. He pulls her arms away from her chest and begins to stroke her there. Stacey tries to pull away, and Poppi does become angry now. He asks her if she loves her Poppi. She doesn’t answer.
He asks her again . . . only now he’s pushing her down over the table, and Stacey smells his hot breath curling around her ear.
Electricity is coursing through the Monster now, a primal force brought by Poppi. The equipment shrieks and flashes, the Monster under the bandages jerks and spasms . . . then the storm is over and the table is lowered.
A beat, a silent hesitation – then fingers begin to unflex slowly and curl out, the great chest begins to heave, gulping in the first new breaths of air. Poppi undoes the restraining straps and steps back to survey his work proudly.
It lives.
Poppi has staggered off to his room to fall into a drunken slumber, leaving the misshapen wreck that was his daughter on the kitchen floor. She lays there until almost dawn, too terrified and pained to move. She can taste blood in her mouth, feel it running hot between her legs; one eye is swollen nearly shut and something aches in her chest.
When she begins to drag herself out of the kitchen, it’s not to her room but out the back door. She nearly rolls down th
e three small steps to the grass lawn, then continues to pull herself towards the gap in the fence between her yard and the neighbour’s. The sun is up now, but Stacey doesn’t feel its heat, not when she has so much of her own.
She crawls through the space between the wooden planks, ignoring a splinter that digs into her arm. She can see the great blue expanse just ahead of her now, the calm waters inviting her. At last she’s on the tile rimming the pool. She lets herself collapse there, her goal reached. Only her hand still moves, grasping at a nearby rose bush. The thorns tear her fingers, but she comes away with petals to scatter on the water, like tiny boats.
She hears the giant footsteps, and knows he’s coming, coming at last. He will see the petals and know what she’s asking; then, because they understand each other’s pain, he will help.
She sees a shadow on the other side of the fence, and her heart skips a beat. The shadow pauses before the gap, then continues on around to the side-by-side gates. The gate in her backyard opens, then the gate in this yard opens . . .
And the Monster is there.
Stacey smiles in welcome, and throws another rose petal. The Monster staggers forward; Stacey sees he’s returning her smile. He kneels by her; as Stacey looks into his death-glazed eyes, she sees only kindness. He reaches for her, and she feels herself cradled in those giant’s hands.
Then the water is covering her, a soothing blanket, like when Mommi rocked her in that tub so long ago . . .
And through the clear water she looks up and sees Poppi.
She opens her mouth in shock; water rushes in. She lets it fill her, and is surprised there’s no pain or fear. Just floating, a delicious blue floating where no one can touch her and she’s finally safe.
The gentle Monster is waiting for her on the other side.
Karl Edward Wagner
Undertow
Karl Edward Wagner trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a full-time writer and editor. His first book, Darkness Weaves With Many Shades, appeared in 1970 and introduced readers to his barbarian sorcerer, Kane. The character continued through three more novels, Death Angel’s Shadow, Blood Stone and Dark Crusade, plus two collections, Night Winds and The Book of Kane.
The author admits that the following story is probably his favourite of the Kane series, and he explains that “the structure of ‘Undertow’ was based on Alain Resnais’ film Last Year at Marienbad (1962), in which a deliberate distortion of linear time creates a nightmarish sense of shattered reality. When I first saw this film as a college student, the projectionist at the campus theatre ran two reels out of sequence. No one in the audience noticed.”
More recently, he has written an authorised Kane-meets-Elric crossover for the anthology Elric: Tales of the White Wolf, based around Michael Moorcock’s albino anti-hero, and he is preparing a fourth Kane collection, entitled Silver Dagger.
Since 1980, Wagner has also edited DAW Books’ annual The Year’s Best Horror Stories series, he is working on a book-length version of his DC Comics graphic novel Tell Me, Dark, and his contemporary horror fiction has been collected in In a Lonely Place, Why Not You and I?, Unthreatened By the Morning Light, and the forthcoming Exorcisms and Ecstasies.
PROLOGUE
“SHE WAS BROUGHT in not long past dark,” wheezed the custodian, scuttling crab-like along the rows of silent, shrouded slabs. “The city guard found her, carried her in. Sounds like the one you’re asking about.”
He paused beside one of the waist-high stone tables and lifted its filthy sheet. A girl’s contorted face turned sightlessly upward – painted and rouged, a ghastly strumpet’s mask against the pallor of her skin. Clots of congealed blood hung like a necklace of dark rubies along the gash across her throat.
The cloaked man shook his head curtly within the shadow of his hood, and the moon-faced custodian let the sheet drop back.
“Not the one I was thinking of,” he murmured apologetically. “It gets confusing sometimes, you know, what with so many, and them coming and going all the while.” Sniffling in the cool air, he pushed his rotund bulk between the narrow aisles, careful to avoid the stained and filthy shrouds. Looming over his guide, the cloaked figure followed in silence.
Low-flamed lamps cast dismal light across the necrotorium of Carsultyal. Smouldering braziers spewed fitful, heavy fumed clouds of clinging incense that merged with the darkness and the stones and the decay – its cloying sweetness more nauseating than the stench of death it embraced. Through the thick gloom echoed the monotonous drip-drip-drip of melting ice, at times chorused suggestively by some heavier splash. The municipal morgue was crowded tonight – as always. Only a few of its hundred or more slate beds stood dark and bare; the others all displayed anonymous shapes bulging beneath blotched sheets – some protruding at curious angles, as if these restless dead struggled to burst free of the coarse folds. Night now hung over Carsultyal, but within this windowless subterranean chamber it was always night. In shadow pierced only by the sickly flame of funereal lamps, the nameless dead of Carsultyal lay unmourned – waited the required interval of time for someone to claim them, else to be carted off to some unmarked communal grave beyond the city walls.
“Here, I believe,” announced the custodian. “Yes. I’ll just get a lamp.”
“Show me,” demanded a voice from within the hood.
The portly official glanced at the other uneasily. There was an aura of power, of blighted majesty about the cloaked figure that boded ill in arrogant Carsultyal, whose clustered, star-reaching towers were whispered to be overawed by cellars whose depths plunged farther still. “Light’s poor back here,” he protested, drawing back the tattered shroud.
The visitor cursed low in his throat – an inhuman sound touched less by grief than feral rage.
The face that stared at them with too wide eyes had been beautiful in life; in death it was purpled, bloated, contorted in pain. Dark blood stained the tip of her protruding tongue, and her neck seemed bent at an unnatural angle. A gown of light-coloured silk was stained and disordered. She lay supine, hands clenched into tight fists at her side.
“The city guard found her?” repeated the visitor in a harsh voice.
“Yes, just after nightfall. In the park overlooking the harbour. She was hanging from a branch – there in the grove with all the white flowers every spring. Must have just happened – said her body was warm as life, though there’s a chill to the sea breeze tonight. Looks like she done it herself – climbed out on the branch, tied the noose, and jumped off. Wonder why they do it – her as pretty a young thing as I’ve seen brought in, and took well care of, too.”
The stranger stood in rigid silence, staring at the strangled girl.
“Will you come back in the morning to claim her, or do you want to wait upstairs?” suggested the custodian.
“I’ll take her now.”
The plump attendant fingered the gold coin his visitor had tossed him a short time before. His lips tightened in calculation. Often there appeared at the necrotorium those who wished to remove bodies clandestinely for strange and secret reasons – a circumstance which made lucrative this disagreeable office. “Can’t allow that,” he argued. “There’s laws and forms – you shouldn’t even be here at this hour. They’ll be wanting their questions answered. And there’s fees . . .”
With a snarl of inexpressible fury, the stranger turned on him. The sudden movement flung back his hood.
The caretaker for the first time saw his visitor’s eyes. He had breath for a short bleat of terror, before the dirk he did not see smashed through his heart.
Workers the next day, puzzling over the custodian’s disappearance, were shocked to discover, on examining the night’s new tenants for the necrotorium, that he had not disappeared after all.
I SEEKERS IN THE NIGHT
There – he heard the sound again.
Mavrsal left off his disgruntled contemplation of the near-empty wine bottle and stealthily came to his feet. The captain of the Tuab was alo
ne in his cabin, and the hour was late. For hours the only sounds close at hand had been the slap of waves on the barnacled hull, the creak of cordage, and the dull thud of the caravel’s aged timbers against the quay. Then had come a soft footfall, a muffled fumbling among the deck gear outside his half-open door. Too loud for rats – a thief, then?
Grimly Mavrsal unsheathed his heavy cutlass and caught up a lantern. He catfooted onto the deck, reflecting bitterly over his worthless crew. From cook to first mate, they had deserted his ship a few days before, angered over wages months unpaid. An unseasonable squall had forced them to jettison most of their cargo of copper ingots, and the Tuab had limped into the harbour of Carsultyal with shredded sails, a cracked mainmast, a dozen new leaks from wrenched timbers, and the rest of her worn fittings in no better shape. Instead of the expected wealth, the decimated cargo had brought in barely enough capital to cover the expense of refitting. Mavrsal argued that until refitted, the Tuab was unseaworthy, and that once repairs were complete, another cargo could be found (somehow), and then wages long in arrears could be paid – with a bonus for patient loyalty. The crew cared neither for his logic nor his promises and defected amidst stormy threats.
Had one of them returned to carry out . . .? Mavrsal hunched his thick shoulders truculently and hefted the cutlass. The master of the Tuab had never run from a brawl, much less a sneak thief or slinking assassin.
Night skies of autumn were bright over Carsultyal, making the lantern almost unneeded. Mavrsal surveyed the soft shadows of the caravel’s deck, his brown eyes narrowed and alert beneath shaggy brows. But he heard the low sobbing almost at once, so there was no need to prowl about the deck.
He strode quickly to the mound of torn sail and rigging at the far rail. “All right, come out of that!” he rumbled, beckoning with the tip of his blade to the half-seen figure crouched against the rail. The sobbing choked into silence. Mavrsal prodded the canvas with an impatient boot. “Out of there, damn it!” he repeated.
The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) Page 48