American Supernatural Tales (Penguin Horror)

by S T Joshi

  I have no cause for fear, however, because this affidavit will certainly establish my innocence. Surely no one can ignore the evidence of my journal (though I can imagine someone of implacable hostility maintaining that I wrote the journal not at the farm but here in the Union Hotel, this very week).

  What galls me is not the suspicions of a few detectives, but the predicament their suspicions place me in. Quite simply, I cannot run away. I am compelled to remain locked up in this room, potential prey to whatever the thing that was Sarr Poroth has now become—the thing that was once a cat, and once a woman, and once . . . what? A large white moth? A serpent? A shrewlike thing with wicked teeth?

  A police chief? A president? A boy with eyes of blood that sits beneath my window?

  Lord, who will believe me?

  It was that night that started it all, I’m convinced of it now. The night I made those strange signs in the tree. The night the crickets missed a beat.

  I’m not a philosopher, and I can supply no ready explanation for why this new evil has been released into the world. I’m only a poor scholar, a bookworm, and I must content myself with mumbling a few phrases that keep running through my mind, phrases out of books read long ago when such abstractions meant, at most, a pleasant shudder. I am haunted by scraps from the myth of Pandora, and by a semantic discussion I once read comparing “unnatural” and “supernatural.”

  And something about “a tiny rent in the fabric of the universe. . . .”

  Just large enough to let something in. Something not of nature, and hard to kill. Something with its own obscure purpose.

  Ironically, the police may be right. Perhaps it was my visit to Gilead that brought about the deaths. Perhaps I had a hand in letting loose the force that, to date, has snuffed out the lives of four hens, three cats, and at least two people—but will hardly be content to stop there.

  I’ve just checked. He hasn’t moved from the steps of the courthouse; and even when I look out my window, the rose spectacles never waver. Who knows where the eyes beneath them point? Who knows if they remember to blink?

  Lord, this heat is sweltering. My shirt is sticking to my skin, and droplets of sweat are rolling down my face and dripping onto this page, making the ink run.

  My hand is tired from writing, and I think it’s time to end this affidavit.

  If, as I now believe possible, I inadvertently called down evil from the sky and began the events at Poroth Farm, my death will only be fitting. And after my death, many more. We are all, I’m afraid, in danger. Please, then, forgive this prophet of doom, old at thirty, his last jeremiad: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

  STEPHEN KING

  Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947 and has spent nearly his entire life in his native state. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970 and the next year married Tabitha Jane Spruce. He began publishing short stories of supernatural horror in magazines in the late 1960s. His first novel, Carrie, appeared in 1974; when it was made into a spectacularly popular film the next year, King’s career as a bestseller was launched. Since that time, nearly every one of his novels has achieved bestseller status and has been adapted for film or television, including The Shining (1977; filmed by Stanley Kubrick), The Dead Zone (1979), Firestarter (1980), Christine (1983), Pet Sematary (1983), It (1986), Misery (1987), and many others. King also wrote six novels, ranging from suspense to science fiction, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, some of which represent his most effective work. He has also written a fusion of the Western with the supernatural tale in a seven-volume series, The Dark Tower (1982–2004).

  Although he has become the most popular author of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century, in his later years King has increasingly departed from the supernatural and written work of a more mainstream character. This tendency began with four novellas published as Different Seasons (1982), and has continued with such works as Gerald’s Game (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1993), and Hearts in Atlantis (1999). He has written two fantasy novels in collaboration with Peter Straub, The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2002). King, although criticized by some for unoriginality in the use of supernatural tropes and for occasionally slipshod or verbose writing, received a National Book Award in 2003 for “distinguished contributions to American letters.”

  King’s early short stories were collected in Night Shift (1978). One tale in that volume, “Night Surf” (first published in Cavalier, August 1974), cleverly fuses the supernatural with the science fiction tale in its account of a flu that has decimated humanity. Other short stories can be found in Skeleton Crew (1985) and Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993).

  NIGHT SURF

  fter the guy was dead and the smell of his burning flesh was off the air, we all went back down to the beach. Corey had his radio, one of those suitcase-sized transistor jobs that take about forty batteries and also make and play tapes. You couldn’t say the sound reproduction was great, but it sure was loud. Corey had been well-to-do before A6, but stuff like that didn’t matter anymore. Even his big radio/tape-player was hardly more than a nice-looking hunk of junk. There were only two radio stations left on the air that we could get. One was WKDM in Portsmouth—some backwoods deejay who had gone nutty-religious. He’d play a Perry Como record, say a prayer, bawl, play a Johnny Ray record, read from Psalms (complete with each “selah,” just like James Dean in East of Eden), then bawl some more. Happy-time stuff like that. One day he sang “Bringing in the Sheaves” in a cracked, moldy voice that sent Needles and me into hysterics.

  The Massachusetts station was better, but we could only get it at night. It was a bunch of kids. I guess they took over the transmitting facilities of WRKO or WBZ after everybody left or died. They only gave gag call letters, like WDOPE or KUNT or WA6 or stuff like that. Really funny, you know—you could die laughing. That was the one we were listening to on the way back to the beach. I was holding hands with Susie; Kelly and Joan were ahead of us, and Needles was already over the brow of the point and out of sight. Corey was bringing up the rear, swinging his radio. The Stones were singing “Angie.”

  “Do you love me?” Susie was asking. “That’s all I want to know, do you love me?” Susie needed constant reassurance. I was her teddy bear.

  “No,” I said. She was getting fat, and if she lived long enough, which wasn’t likely, she would get really flabby. She was already mouthy.

  “You’re rotten,” she said, and put a hand to her face. Her lacquered fingernails twinkled dimly with the half-moon that had risen about an hour ago.

  “Are you going to cry again?”

  “Shut up!” She sounded like she was going to cry again, all right.

  We came over the ridge and I paused. I always have to pause. Before A6, this had been a public beach. Tourists, picnickers, runny-nosed kids and fat baggy grandmothers with sunburned elbows. Candy wrappers and popsicle sticks in the sand, all the beautiful people necking on their beach blankets, intermingled stench of exhaust from the parking lot, seaweed, and Coppertone oil.

  But now all the dirt and all the crap was gone. The ocean had eaten it, all of it, as casually as you might eat a handful of Cracker Jacks. There were no people to come back and dirty it again. Just us, and we weren’t enough to make much mess. We loved the beach too, I guess—hadn’t we just offered it a kind of sacrifice? Even Susie, little bitch Susie with her fat ass and her cranberry bellbottoms.

  The sand was white and duned, marked only by the high-tide line—twisted skein of seaweed, kelp, hunks of driftwood. The moonlight stitched inky crescent-shaped shadows and folds across everything. The deserted lifeguard tower stood white and skeletal some fifty yards from the bathhouse, pointing toward the sky like a finger bone.

  And the surf, the night surf, throwing up great bursts of foam, breaking against the headlands for as far as we could see in endless attacks. Maybe that water had been halfway to England the night before.

  “‘Angie,’ by the Sto
nes,” the cracked voice on Corey’s radio said. “I’m sureya dug that one, a blast from the past that’s a golden gas, straight from the grooveyard, a platta that mattas. I’m Bobby. This was supposed to be Fred’s night, but Fred got the flu. He’s all swelled up.” Susie giggled then, with the first tears still on her eyelashes. I started toward the beach a little faster to keep her quiet.

  “Wait up!” Corey called. “Bernie? Hey, Bernie, wait up!”

  The guy on the radio was reading some dirty limericks, and a girl in the background asked him where did he put the beer. He said something back, but by that time we were on the beach. I looked back to see how Corey was doing. He was coming down on his backside, as usual, and he looked so ludicrous I felt a little sorry for him.

  “Run with me,” I said to Susie.

  “Why?”

  I slapped her on the can and she squealed. “Just because it feels good to run.”

  We ran. She fell behind, panting like a horse and calling for me to slow down, but I put her out of my head. The wind rushed past my ears and blew the hair off my forehead. I could smell the salt in the air, sharp and tart. The surf pounded. The waves were like foamed black glass. I kicked off my rubber sandals and pounded across the sand barefoot, not minding the sharp digs of an occasional shell. My blood roared.

  And then there was the lean-to with Needles already inside and Kelly and Joan standing beside it, holding hands and looking at the water. I did a forward roll, feeling sand go down the back of my shirt, and fetched up against Kelly’s legs. He fell on top of me and rubbed my face in the sand while Joan laughed.

  We got up and grinned at each other. Susie had given up running and was plodding toward us. Corey had almost caught up to her.

  “Some fire,” Kelly said.

  “Do you think he came all the way from New York, like he said?” Joan asked.

  “I don’t know.” I couldn’t see that it mattered anyway. He had been behind the wheel of a big Lincoln when we found him, semi-conscious and raving. His head was bloated to the size of a football and his neck looked like a sausage. He had Captain Trips and not far to go, either. So we took him up to the Point that overlooks the beach and burned him. He said his name was Alvin Sackheim. He kept calling for his grandmother. He thought Susie was his grandmother. This struck her funny, God knows why. The strangest things strike Susie funny.

  It was Corey’s idea to burn him up, but it started off as a joke. He had read all those books about witchcraft and black magic at college, and he kept leering at us in the dark beside Alvin Sackheim’s Lincoln and telling us that if we made a sacrifice to the dark gods, maybe the spirits would keep protecting us against A6.

  Of course none of us really believed that bullshit, but the talk got more and more serious. It was a new thing to do, and finally we went ahead and did it. We tied him to the observation gadget up there—you put a dime in it and on a clear day you can see all the way to Portland Headlight. We tied him with our belts, and then we went rooting around for dry brush and hunks of driftwood like kids playing a new kind of hide-and-seek. All the time we were doing it Alvin Sackheim just sort of leaned there and mumbled to his grandmother. Susie’s eyes got very bright and she was breathing fast. It was really turning her on. When we were down in the ravine on the other side of the outcrop she leaned against me and kissed me. She was wearing too much lipstick and it was like kissing a greasy plate.

  I pushed her away and that was when she started pouting.

  We went back up, all of us, and piled dead branches and twigs up to Alvin Sackheim’s waist. Needles lit the pyre with his Zippo, and it went up fast. At the end, just before his hair caught on fire, the guy began to scream. There was a smell just like sweet Chinese pork.

  “Got a cigarette, Bernie?” Needles asked.

  “There’s about fifty cartons right behind you.”

  He grinned and slapped a mosquito that was probing his arm. “Don’t want to move.”

  I gave him a smoke and sat down. Susie and I met Needles in Portland. He was sitting on the curb in front of the State Theater, playing Leadbelly tunes on a big old Gibson guitar he had looted someplace. The sound had echoed up and down Congress Street as if he were playing in a concert hall.

  Susie stopped in front of us, still out of breath. “You’re rotten, Bernie.”

  “Come on, Sue. Turn the record over. That side stinks.”

  “Bastard. Stupid, unfeeling son of a bitch. Creep!”

  “Go away,” I said, “or I’ll black your eye, Susie. See if I don’t.”

  She started to cry again. She was really good at it. Corey came up and tried to put an arm around her. She elbowed him in the crotch and he spit in her face.

  “I’ll kill you!” She came at him, screaming and weeping, making propellers with her hands. Corey backed off, almost fell, then turned tail and ran. Susie followed him, hurling hysterical obscenities. Needles put back his head and laughed. The sound of Corey’s radio came back to us faintly over the surf.

  Kelly and Joan had wandered off. I could see them down by the edge of the water, walking with their arms around each other’s waist. They looked like an ad in a travel agent’s window—Fly to Beautiful St. Lorca. It was all right. They had a good thing.

  “Bernie?”

  “What?” I sat and smoked and thought about Needles flipping back the top of his Zippo, spinning the wheel, making fire with flint and steel like a caveman.

  “I’ve got it,” Needles said.

  “Yeah?” I looked at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I am. My head aches. My stomach aches. Hurts to piss.”

  “May it’s just Hong Kong flu. Susie had Hong Kong flu. She wanted a Bible.” I laughed. That had been while we were still at the University, about a week before they closed it down for good, a month before they started carrying bodies away in dump trucks and burying them in mass graves with payloaders.

  “Look.” He lit a match and held it under the angle of his jaw. I could see the first triangular smudges, the first swelling. It was A6, all right.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I don’t feel so bad,” he said. “In my mind, I mean. You, though. You think about it a lot. I can tell.”

  “No I don’t.” A lie.

  “Sure you do. Like that guy tonight. You’re thinking about that, too. We probably did him a favor, when you get right down to it. I don’t think he even knew it was happening.”

  “He knew.”

  He shrugged and turned on his side. “It doesn’t matter.”

  We smoked and I watched the surf come in and go out. Needles had Captain Trips. That made everything real all over again. It was late August already, and in a couple of weeks the first chill of fall would be creeping in. Time to move inside someplace. Winter. Dead by Christmas, maybe, all of us. In somebody’s front room with Corey’s expensive radio/tape-player on top of a bookcase full of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and the weak winter sun lying on the rug in meaningless windowpane patterns.

  The vision was clear enough to make me shudder. Nobody should think about winter in August. It’s like a goose walking over your grave.

  Needles laughed. “See? You do think about it.”

  What could I say? I stood up. “Going to look for Susie.”

  “Maybe we’re the last people on earth, Bernie. Did you ever think of that?” In the faint moonlight he already looked half dead, with circles under his eyes and pallid, unmoving fingers like pencils.

  I walked down to the water and looked out across it. There was nothing to see but the restless, moving humps of the waves, topped by delicate curls of foam. The thunder of the breakers was tremendous down here, bigger than the world. Like standing inside a thunderstorm. I closed my eyes and rocked on my bare feet. The sand was cold and damp and packed. And if we were the last people on earth, so what? This would go on as long as there was a moon to pull the water.

  Susie and Corey were up the beach. Susie was riding him as if he were a bucking bronc,
pounding his head into the running boil of the water. Corey was flailing and splashing. They were both soaked. I walked down and pushed her off with my foot. Corey splashed away on all fours, spluttering and whoofing.

  “I hate you!” Susie screamed at me. Her mouth was a dark grinning crescent. It looked like the entrance to a fun house. When I was a kid my mother used to take us kids to Harrison State Park and there was a fun house with a big clown face on the front, and you walked in through the mouth.

  “Come on, Susie. Up, Fido.” I held out my hand. She took it doubtfully and stood up. There was damp sand clotted on her blouse and skin.

  “You didn’t have to push me, Bernie. You don’t ever—”

  “Come on.” She wasn’t like a jukebox; you never had to put in a dime and she never came unplugged.

  We walked up the beach toward the main concession. The man who ran the place had had a small overhead apartment. There was a bed. She didn’t really deserve a bed, but Needles was right about that. It didn’t matter. No one was really scoring the game anymore.

  The stairs went up the side of the building, but I paused for just a minute to look in the broken window at the dusty wares inside that no one had cared enough about to loot—stacks of sweatshirts (“Anson Beach” and a picture of sky and waves printed on the front), glittering bracelets that would green the wrist on the second day, bright junk earrings, beachballs, dirty greeting cards, badly painted ceramic madonnas, plastic vomit (So realistic! Try it on your wife!), Fourth of July sparklers for a Fourth that never was, beach towels with a voluptuous girl in a bikini standing amid the names of a hundred famous resort areas, pennants (Souvenir of Anson Beach and Park), balloons, bathing suits. There was a snack bar up front with a big sign saying TRY OUR CLAM CAKE SPECIAL.