The Ultimate Undead

by Anne Rice

  He was suddenly trying to clear his head, and have a better look at the guy, but what had the man just said? It was all very confusing because there was no one there to talk to, no one but her, but yes, he’d just said to the brown-haired man, “Of course, stop the injections …” and the absolute rectitude of his position was beyond doubt, the old doctor—“A fool, yes!” said the brown-haired man—would just have to listen!

  This was monstrous all this, and the daughter in California …

  He shook himself. He stood up on the porch. What had happened? He had fallen asleep in the wicker chair. He had been dreaming. The murmur of the bees grew disconcertingly loud in is ears and the fragrance of the gardenias seemed to drug him suddenly. He looked down over the railing at the patio to his left. Had something moved there?

  Only the limbs of the trees beyond as the breeze traveled through them. He’d seen it a thousand times in New Orleans, that graceful dance, as if one tree releases the breeze to another. Such lovely embracing heat. Stop the injections! She will wake.

  Slowly, awkwardly, a monarch butterfly climbed the screen in front of him. Gorgeous wings. But gradually he focused upon the body of the thing, small and glossy and black. It ceased to be a butterfly and became an insect—loathsome!

  “I have to go home,” he said aloud to no one. “I don’t feel right exactly, I think I should lie down.”

  The man’s name. What was it? He’d known it just a moment ago, such a remarkable name—ah, so that’s what the word means, you are—actually, quite beautiful—but wait. It was happening again. He would not let it!

  “Miss Nancy!” He stood up out of the chair.

  His patient stared forward, unchanged, the heavy emerald pendant gleaming against her gown. All the world was filled with green light, with shivering leaves, the faint blur of the bougainvillea.

  “Yes, the heat,” he whispered. “Have I given her the shot?” Good Lord. He had actually dropped the syringe, and it had broken.

  “You called for me, Doctor?” said Miss Nancy. There she stood in the parlor door, staring at him, wiping her hands on her apron. The colored woman was there too, and the nurse behind her.

  “Nothing, just the heat,” he murmured. “I dropped it, the needle. but I have another, of course.”

  How they looked at him, studied him. You think I’m going crazy, too?

  It was on the following Friday afternoon that he saw the man again.

  The doctor was late, he’d had an emergency at the sanitarium. He was sprinting up First Street in the early fall dusk. He didn’t want to disturb the family dinner. He was running by the time he reached the gate.

  The man was standing in the shadows of the open front porch. He watched the doctor, his arms folded, his shoulder against the porch column, his eyes dark and rather wide, as though he were lost in contemplation. Tall, slender, clothes beautifully fitted.

  “Ah, so there you are,” the doctor murmured aloud. Flush of relief. He had his hand out as he came up the steps. “Dr. Petrie is my name, how do you do?”

  And—how to describe it? There was simply no man there.

  “Now, I know this happened!” he said to Miss Carl in the kitchen. “I saw him on that porch and he vanished into thin air.”

  “Well, what business is it of ours what you saw, Doctor?” said the woman. Strange choice of words. And she was so hard, this lady. Nothing feeble about her in her old age. She stood very straight in her dark blue gabardine suit, glaring at him through her wire-rimmed glasses, her mouth withered to a thin line.

  “Miss Carl, I’ve seen this man with my patient. Now the patient, as we all know, is a helpless woman. If an unidentified person is coming and going on these premises—”

  But the words were unimportant. Either the woman didn’t believe him or the woman didn’t care. And Miss Nancy, at the kitchen table, never even looked up from her plate as she scraped up the food noisily onto her fork. But the look on Miss Millie’s face, ah, now that was something—old Miss Millie so clearly disturbed, her eyes darting from him to Carl and back again.

  What a household.

  He was irritated as he stepped into the dusty little elevator and pressed the black button in the brass plate.

  The velvet drapes were closed and the bedroom was almost dark, the little candles sputtering in their red glasses. The shadow of the Virgin leaped on the wall. He couldn’t find the light switch immediately. And when he did, only a single tiny bulb went on in the lamp beside the bed. The open jewel box was right next to it. What a spectacular thing.

  When he saw the woman lying there with her eyes open, he felt a catch in his throat. Her black hair was brushed out over the stained pillowcase. There was a flush of unfamiliar color in her cheeks.

  Did her lips move?

  “Lasher …”

  A whisper. What had she said? Why, she’d said Lasher, hadn’t she? The name he’d seen on the tree trunk and in the dust of the dining table. And he had heard that name spoken somewhere else … That’s why he knew it was a name. It sent the chills up his back and neck, this catatonic patient actually speaking. But no, he must have been imagining it. It was just the thing he wanted so to happen—the miracle change in her. She lay as ever in her trance. Enough Thorazine to kill somebody else …

  He set down the bag on the side of the bed. He filled the syringe carefully, thinking as he had several times before, what if you just didn’t, just cut it down to half, or a fourth, or none and sat by her and watched and what if—He saw himself suddenly picking her up and taking her out of the house. He saw himself driving her out into the country. They walked hand in hand on a path through the grass until they’d come to the levee above the river. And there she smiled, her hair blowing in the wind—

  What nonsense. Here it was six-thirty, and the shot was long overdue. And the syringe was ready.

  Suddenly something pushed him. He was sure of it, though where he had been pushed he couldn’t say. He went down, his legs buckling, and the syringe went flying.

  When he caught himself he was on his knees in the semidark, staring at motes of dust gathered on the bare floor beneath the bed.

  “What the hell—” he’d said aloud before he could catch himself. He couldn’t find the hypodermic needle. Then he saw it, yards away, beyond the armoire. It was broken, smashed, as if someone had stepped on it. All the Thorazine had oozed out of the crushed plastic vial onto the bare boards.

  “Now, wait a minute!” he whispered. He picked it up and stood holding the ruined thing in his hands. Of course he had other syringes, but this was the second time this sort of thing…. And he found himself at the bedside again, staring down at the motionless patient, thinking, now how exactly did this—I mean, what in God’s name is going on?

  He felt a sudden intense heat. Something moved in the room, rattling faintly. Only the rosary beads wound about the brass lamp. He went to wipe his brow. Then he realized, very slowly, even as he stared at Deirdre, that there was a figure standing on the other side of the bed. He saw the dark clothes, a waistcoat, a coat with dark buttons. and then he looked up and saw it was the man.

  In a split second his disbelief changed to terror. There was no disorientation now, no dreamlike unreality. The man was there, staring at him. Soft brown eyes staring at him. Then the man was simply gone. The room was cold. A breeze lifted the draperies. The doctor caught himself in the act of shouting. No, screaming, to be perfectly frank.

  At ten o’clock that night, he was off the case. The old psychiatrist came all the way out to the lakefront apartment house to tell him in person. They had gone down to the lake together and strolled along the concrete shore.

  Even as the men nearby went on with their conversation, the doctor felt the keening terror he had known in Deirdre Mayfair’s darkened room.

  The man sat perfectly still gazing at him. Not twenty feet separated him from the doctor. And the white daylight from the front windows of the bar fell quite distinctly over the man’s shoulder, illumi
nating the side of his face.

  Really there. The doctor’s mouth was filling with water. He was going to be sick. Going to pass out. They’d think he was drunk in this place. God only knew what would happen—He struggled to steady his hand on the glass. He struggled not to panic completely as he had done in Deirdre’s room.

  Then, without warning, the man appeared to flicker as if he were a projected image, then vanish before the doctor’s eyes. A cold breeze swept through the bar.

  The bartender turned to keep a soiled napkin from blowing away. A door slammed somewhere. And it seemed the conversation grew louder. The doctor felt a low throbbing in his head.

  “… Going mad!” he whispered.

  No power on earth could have persuaded him to pass Deirdre Mayfair’s house again.

  But the following night, as he was driving home to the lakefront, he saw the man again, standing under a street lamp by the cemeteries on Canal Boulevard, the yellow light shining full upon him against the chalk white graveyard wall.

  Just a glimpse but he knew he wasn’t mistaken. He began to tremble violently. It seemed for a moment he could not remember how to work the controls of his car, and then he drove it recklessly, stupidly, as if the man were pursuing him. He did not feel safe until he had shut his apartment door.

  The following Friday, he saw the man in broad daylight, standing motionless on the grass in Jackson Square. A woman passing turned to glance at the brown-haired figure. Yes, there, as he had been before! The doctor ran through the French Quarter streets. Finding a cab at a hotel door, he ordered the driver to get him out of there, just to take him anywhere, he did not care.

  As the days passed, the doctor had ceased to be frightened so much as horrified. He couldn’t eat or sleep. He could concentrate on nothing. He moved perpetually in utter gloom. He stared in silent rage at the old psychiatrist whenever their paths crossed.

  How in God’s name could he communicate to this monstrous thing that he would not come near the miserable woman in the porch rocker? No more needles, no more drugs from him! I am no longer the enemy, don’t you see!

  To ask the help or understanding of anyone he knew was to risk his reputation, even his entire future. A psychiatrist going mad, like his patients. He was desperate. He had to escape this thing. Who knew when it might next appear to him? What if it could come into these very rooms!

  Finally on Monday morning, his nerves frayed, his hands shaking, he found himself in the old psychiatrist’s office. He had not made up his mind what he would say, only that he could stand the strain no longer. And he soon found himself rattling on about the tropical heat, headaches and sleepless nights, the need for quick acceptance of his resignation.

  He drove out of New Orleans that very afternoon.

  Only when he was safe in his father’s office in Portland, Maine, did he at last reveal the whole story.

  “There was never anything menacing in the face,” he explained. “On the contrary. It was strangely unlined. It was as bland as the face of Christ in the portrait on the wall of her room. Just staring at me. But it didn’t want me to give her the injection! It was trying to scare me.”

  His father was a patient man. He did not answer at once. Then slowly he began to talk of the strange things he’d witnessed over the years in psychiatric hospitals—doctors seemingly infected with the neuroses and psychoses of their patients. He’d seen a doctor go catatonic one day in the midst of his catatonic patients.

  “The important thing, Larry, is that you rest,” his father said. “That you let the effects of this whole thing wear off. And that you don’t tell anyone else about it.”

  Years had passed. The doctor’s work in Maine had gone well. And gradually he had built a solid private practice independent of his father.

  As for the specter, he had left it behind him in New Orleans, along with the memory of Deirdre Mayfair, sitting eternally in that chair.

  Yet there remained in him a lingering fear that if such a thing had happened once, it might happen another time for entirely different reasons. The doctor had tasted real horror in those damp, dark New Orleans days, and his view of the world had never been the same.

  DEAD RIGHT

  GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

  ALI danced left, right, but I had his number, I had the unbeatable combination; I hit him where he dodged and dodged him where he hit. Not even the Champ at his prime could stand against me. He danced back—as expected—and I started into the knockout sequence, counting under my breath (Left! Left! Duck!) to keep the timing (Cross! Half pace back!) and there!

  Muhammad Ali froze in mid-punch and the lights’ came on. I took off the glasses and looked at the tally screen: Ali by knockout. “What?”

  Jim Mallok was standing in the door. “You were a quarter-second late on the A3 sequence, and a half second on the C3. A fighter like Ali, you have to be right in the groove; the bandwidth is too tight for anything else.” He flipped a switch, and the video image of Muhammad Ali vanished into the sweat-filled air. A punching bag stood forlorn where he had been. “What the hell you doing fighting Ali, Dave? You got real work to do.”

  “Yeah, I know. Just sharpening up my moves.”

  “Can’t you sharpen ’em up on your own time? This is business, not a video arcade. We got work to do.”

  I shrugged. “Can’t train against this Sobo guy until you get some videos of him fighting.”

  “You can still practice your basics. Forget the fancy stuff; you’re not going up against Ali. Practice knocking down some real human beings like you might see in the ring.”

  “Yow-SUH, Mr. Boss-Man suh! Ah’s working, Ah’s working jes as hard as I can.”

  Jim smiled.

  I used to fight golden-gloves when I was in high school. I was pretty good, but—let’s face it—golden-gloves Minneapolis isn’t quite the same league as golden-gloves New York or Chicago. The kids who hung out at the gym were dead-enders from the projects, kids whose only ways to leave the inner city were with their fists or on a slab. I liked it anyway; the jive talking and no-nonsense attitudes were a welcome change from the suburban intellectuals of high school. And besides, there is a pure visceral satisfaction in going into the gym and beating the hell out of a speed bag, walloping the thing until you fall into the flow, a rhythm that goes on effortlessly, until suddenly you wake up covered with sweat and tired right down to your kneecaps.

  I boxed at the Naval Academy, too, at least until they told me I was too tall to go into flight training and I opted out to finish my degree at Cleveland State. State didn’t have boxing, so while I still kept in shape working out at the Y, I stopped fighting. I didn’t think I missed it. Boxing is a young man’s sport anyway.

  I figured that was the end of my fighting career. Just goes to show how wrong you can be.

  I met Mallok during my first, and last, year in grad school, the year I spent slowly discovering that I didn’t have any desire to spend the rest of my life as an electrical engineer. I used to go over to the west side to the bouts down on Worthing Street every Saturday afternoon. Alone, of course: the girl I was dating considered any hint of macho something unutterably gauche and the fights absolutely barbaric. One of those Saturdays—a welterweight match—I ran into Mallok. I’d seen him around the fights, but never really noticed what he’d been doing. He was sitting right up by the ring, flicking his attention from the fight to his laptop computer and back, tapping frenetically at the keyboard. I came over to watch, and soon we got to talking fights. By the end of the evening Kid Rutano had downed Corregio with an overhand right, and Mallok had invited me back into his place, a gym and computer lab in one, to look over his fight analysis software.

  Until he’d failed to get tenure and dropped out of academia, Jim Mallok had had all the Air Force contracts he could handle. He’d been big in computer conflict modeling, based on a network theory of games. Network theory says that every sufficiently complicated system must have poles and zeros. Put simply, this means that every strategy
has a weakness, every opponent has a blind spot. If he knew the physiology and the tactics of a boxer, Mallok said, he could find a strategy that would put him down as easily as tapping him on the shoulder.

  I tried a couple of rounds with the video-boxing simulator he’d hacked together, and tried some of the combinations he showed me. It wasn’t as realistic as the one he trained me on later, but it was still surprisingly effective. The computer pulled images from a CD ROM library, and twin video projectors put a separate image onto each eyepiece of a set of special glasses. Anybody looking at me would see me circling around a video projector, but to me it looked like the video image had puffed up and started throwing punches.

  We made a peculiar pair, Mallock and I; him short and dapper and full of enthusiasm, dark hair slicked back; me the ex-jock in faded sweatshirts, stocky and slow speaking, but always moving. We complemented one another perfectly.

  We were at the ring, and Mallok still hadn’t gotten any videos of this Sobo. I was ready for him, though, limbered up and ready with a hatful of winning combinations.

  I was dressing down when Sal walked back to the car to get his kit and Jim had gone to talk business with some backers. An old black man in a beat-up felt hat sidled up to me, grabbed my biceps, and looked me earnestly in the eye. “This Sobo, he bad baka,” he said, with an odd lilting accent that it took me a few seconds to understand. “You understand? He not person. No heart. You fight him, he going kill you. Better you drop out, you sick.”

  I yanked away, disgusted. “Thanks, guy. I’ll do okay.” A lot of weird stuff goes on in the fight game. Drugs, legal and illegal, and bribes of all kinds, of course, but not just that. Anything for an edge. Had Sobo’s trainer put this guy up to this, or did he have money on the fight? Either way, I wasn’t going to buy into it.

  “I serious.” His look was intense, almost fearful. Maybe he owed money to the mob, needed to win a bet. “Sobo, he different. You not know his type in America. He once dead man, no can die.”