by Shock Totem
Jaye shrugged. “I tasted it. You know. That one time.”
“Oh yeah. Right.” Dawn rolled over on her stomach and stared at Rob, nose to nose. “I’ve always wondered—what’s he like, as a kisser? We sort of always skipped that part.”
Jaye wrinkled her nose. “Hmmm. Not too bad, I guess. Not great. He needs to work on his technique.” She knocked the shovel against the soles of his shoes. “You need to work on your technique.” Rob didn’t respond.
“So,” Dawn insisted, “the smokes.”
“I’m not sure where they are. Check him.”
“You check him!”
“I don’t want the cigarettes!”
Dawn’s brown eyes looked sad. “Oh, come on. Please? It’s Rob. He’s just so...gross, now that he’s dead. Kinda when he was alive, too. I don’t want to touch him.”
Jaye glared at Dawn, and then dropped to her knees beside Rob. “Okay. I understand. But,” she said, when Dawn clapped, “when I roll Rob for his cigarettes, you have to call his wife. It’s only fair.”
“But…”
“Here.” Jaye held out her cell phone. Dawn looked at it as if it would bite her.
“Or I could call and you can paw dead Rob. Your choice.”
Dawn snatched the phone and punched in some numbers. She turned her back on Jaye, who started going through Rob’s pockets.
“Oh, Dawn! He’s starting to get cold!”
“Well, that’s just gross. I’m glad that—hello, Karen? Hi, this is Dawn.”
Jaye pulled a wad of used tissue from Rob’s coat pocket. “Yick.” She threw it over her shoulder, and slid her hand back inside the pocket.
“I’m great, thanks! How are you? Uh-huh. Oh, and Quinn said what? Oh! Isn’t he just a little card?”
Only half-listening to Dawn’s end of the conversation, Jaye scored some change and an open pack of gum from the other coat pocket. She took a piece for herself and flipped one to Dawn. Dawn caught it and opened it neatly.
“Listen, Karen, I called because there’s been a situation with Rob. Yeah. She’s here with me.” She covered the phone with her hand, and whispered, “Jaye, say hi.”
“Hi, Karen!” Jaye yelled. “How’s Quinn?”
Dawn popped the gum into her mouth and chewed loudly. “Quinn’s good, Jaye. He said something hysterical. I’ll tell you later. So, Karen, listen. Jaye here hit Rob on the head with a shovel. Pretty hard. Uh-huh. Oh, I don’t know. Five or six times, I’d say. What do you think?” she said to Jaye. “Five or six times?”
“At least.”
“Yeah, about that much.” Dawn listened on the phone. Jaye pulled out Rob’s wallet and flipped through it.
“Yeah, it was pretty amazing, Karen! She just went to town. She had a shovel out here ‘cuz she was planting something.”
“Geraniums.”
“Geraniums, she says. And she just went to town all over his freaking head. It was wild.”
Dawn caught Jaye’s eye and winked. “Karen says you’re a freaking Amazon.”
Jaye snorted and continued rifling through the wallet.
“Yeah, he was after me. I told him I’d just found out that you two were married and I wasn’t into that scene. I mean, you guys got married when, Tuesday? And it’s like, what, Friday now? I mean, really.”
Jaye pulled a nude picture of Dawn out of Rob’s wallet and raised her eyebrow. She passed it to Dawn, who tucked it into her bra.
“Yeah, he got mad, Karen. Chased me all the way to Jaye’s. I mean, if it weren’t for her and her daffodils—”
“Geraniums.”
“—geraniums, I’d probably be toast!” Dawn listened. “Yeah, he’s pretty dead. Sorry.”
Jaye straightened up on her knees and looked at Dawn. Dawn shook her head. “Uh-uh. We haven’t. No, she’s right here, going through his clothes for cigarettes. I dropped mine, and I don’t want to touch him. Oh. Why would he do that? Thanks. I see. Okay, cool.”
Dawn pointed at Rob’s legs. “She says he keeps a few loose ones in his socks. He feels cool reaching down to get them.”
Jaye shook her head and pulled up Rob’s pant leg. She took three loose cigarettes from the top of his tube sock. She tossed them to Dawn along with her own lighter.
“You’re such a pyro,” Dawn whispered, and lit up. She took a deep drag. “Mmm. Thanks, Karen,” she said into the phone. “That was very helpful. Okay, I’ll tell her.”
Jaye was checking Rob’s other sock. She pulled out a comb and a badly written love poem that bordered on obscene. She showed it to Dawn, who grimaced.
“I hope it wasn’t for me. Karen wants to know if he has a heartbeat.”
“Of course not! He’s cold.”
“Chillin’ like a villain,” Dawn said, giggling. “Anyway, would you listen? She wants to make sure.”
“I’m sick of touching him!”
“Oh, come on. Necrophiliacs do it all the time. Besides, you did kill him.”
Jaye growled in frustration. “Okay. Fine!”
She unbuttoned his shirt and put her ear to his chilled chest. The curly hair tickled her cheek. She didn’t hear a sound.
“Sick. Now I’m going to have to wash my face!”
“Nope, no heartbeat,” Dawn told Karen. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Will do. Still up for a movie tomorrow? Okay, see you then.”
She snapped the phone shut and gave it to Jaye, who was now standing, brushing dust off her knees.
“She says we should probably call the police soon, and not to worry because she’ll testify about his temper and stuff. But let’s eat first. I’m starving. How about chicken salad at Irelands? My treat.”
“No, Rob’s treat,” Jaye said, flashing the twenty from his wallet.
“Best thing he ever did for us. All right, let’s go,” Dawn said. She poked Jaye hard in the side as they walked away. “Don’t forget to wash your hands before you eat.”
“As if.”
Mercedes M. Yardley wears red stilettos and writes whimsical horror. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including John Skipp’s Bram Stoker Award™-winning Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed, and A Cup of Comfort for Parents of Children with Special Needs. Mercedes lives in Sin City.
Visit her at www.abrokenlaptop.com.
FIRST LIGHT
by Les Berkley
Sarah Tallbirches pushed back the collar of her oilskin coat, and untied her paint pony from the rail. “Spirits walk loose tonight. I’d take care going home.”
“‘For tonight is Hallowe’en, the morn is Hallowday’,” I said, quoting from an old Border ballad. Behind us, the sunset’s reflection faded from the window of the Hot Java Café. “I’m not much afraid of the dead. It’s the living that scare me.”
“Clint Taulbe’s been talking wild the last few days.” Sarah’s dark eyes were unreadable.
“Probably just a bad batch of moonshine. Did he mention me?”
She shook her head. “Mostly ranting about Johnny Monaghan, how Johnny took his girl.”
“Claire never looked at Clint Taulbe.”
“He looked at her. Come to think on it, she looked at you more than once.”
“Not the way she looked at Johnny.”
I gave Sarah a leg up into the saddle. “Obliged,” she said. “Not so spry as I was. If you see Johnny, tell him to look sharp. You do the same. I like you. Did the first time I saw you. You’re not one of the new people who want to change everything. You like being where you can tell night from day.”
I smiled and patted the pony’s neck. “Anything special I should know?”
“Fog’s coming in fast. I heard two shots about an hour ago, when I rode by the old dairy. Watch your back, Professor.”
I nodded. “I will, promise.”
Sarah was the first one in Coryell County who’d spoken to me like a friend. I always listened.
• • •
The road home ran along the Little Winde
r Creek; its waters hurried to join the Auralia where it spills down from Hawk Mountain. The valley’s always dark, and the thin moon just pierced the fog that rolled up from the creek. Nashville Cat, my big Tennessee Walker, didn’t mind much. I kept the reins loose, and he bent down and sniffed his way now and then, his long pale straw mane brushing the ground.
Time’s a strange commodity in the County. Moving out here struck me like coming home, if home was a couple centuries ago. We hang on to the past as though it was worth something. Roads stay unpaved so they can’t develop things, and we mostly take care of our own problems without recourse to outside authorities or laws. The .357 Colt Python in my saddle holster reminded me that this way of living comes with its own dangers.
I’d seen the corpse-light—ignis fatuus—on this path a few times before, passing the graveyard of the Faith Healing Holiness Church. I knew the physical reason for it (they don’t embalm much out here), but that didn’t make it any less spooky—blue flames of the damned lighting the way to Hell. I kept Sarah’s warning in mind, but I saw no one—living or dead—until I reached my own gate. Fog hung thick when I got there. Late in the year, the mist carried the faint smell of rotting leaves, death and fecundity.
Took me a while to get Cat settled and make him a nice warm mash. I went inside and lit the fire I had ready, good birch and cherry logs over fatwood kindling. Once the flames settled down, I parked myself on the couch with a textbook for my intro course on ancient Egypt.
No one comes for trick-or-treat on my road, so I reached for the Colt when I heard the measured clip of hooves on the hard ground. With the fog, it took a while ‘til I could see the rider coming. I put the gun back in the holster, annoyed but not surprised to see my hands shake just a little.
• • •
I had met Claire Vaughan a week after I came to the County, when I gave a talk on local Indian sites. In retrospect, I’m amazed it took me longer than five minutes to fall irrevocably. There’s lots of Welsh blood here, and she held that deadly combination of black hair and blue eyes, so startling that you can’t help staring until you’re lost.
Didn’t take long to find out she could outride and outshoot most men. I’d see her out with the Coryell Hunt, and we’d sometimes have “dates” chasing a farmer’s dairy herd when they got through a broken fence. Once or twice it took us a while to run them down, and the quicksilver moon would surprise us out in the field, frosting Claire’s big gray mare with silvery icing. Then we’d race home, and lean out in our saddles for a goodnight kiss. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close.
Clint Taulbe looked at it another way. He wanted Claire because someone else did. Thought he was head buck in the herd. Came looking for me one day at the Café where I sat with my laptop grading papers. He said something foul about Claire and me, so we went outside. I knocked him flat, and when he came up with a knife, I shoved the barrel of the Python in his face. And that was the end of it. Of course, he didn’t realize he’d gone after the wrong man.
I didn’t go to the wedding, but I understood why Claire chose Johnny Monaghan. Wild called to wild, and I knew no answer for it. It ran in Johnny’s veins, and kept him in trouble all the time. But unlike Clint Taulbe, he never said less than a decent word to me. After a while, he and I’d have a few cold ones and a laugh. By unspoken agreement, we never mentioned Claire.
Now she came down the road, with the dew beginning to freeze on the grass, the gray mare’s breath thicker than the fog. At the fence, she pulled up and swung her long legs free. Slipping a halter over the bridle, she tied the mare to my gatepost and started down the walk.
Somehow I waited to open until she knocked. “Mind if I come in? That fire looks purely wonderful. I’m bone-cold tonight.” She wore a long, green Irish cloak, and her hair poured free when she threw back the hood. Above her collar, the pale moon showed the clean line of her throat.
I pulled my best chair in front of the fire, and another for myself. Birch burns hot, but Claire held her hands out to it, and I imagined them transparent so I could peer down to the inmost blood and bone.
“I had to see you,” she said, and I held so still it was almost painful, lest the spell break and she vanish. She nodded at my guitar on its stand. “Play something. I’ll sing for you.”
“What would you like?” A question that could be taken many ways.
Her lips curled into the tiniest of smiles, they way I’d seen them do often when I first courted her. “Play ‘Young Hunting.’”
I tuned the guitar and lightly strummed a few chords.
Come in, come in, my love Henry;
Stay all night with me,
And you shall have all of my gold,
And my fires burning bright.
O, O burning bright…
Her voice took me to another place; a place of stars and lonesome pines and forsaken desires.
Fly down, fly down, pretty Polly, said she.
Don’t go telling tales on me.
Your cage shall be of beaten gold,
With bars of ivory.
O, O of ivory…
Blue eyes so deep looked into mine. “I should have come to you.” She inched closer to the fire, while my heart sang an inward hosanna. “This damn cold has got into my blood.”
“I’ll keep you warm.”
“Not now.”
“What’s wrong?” I wanted to put my arms around her, but I needed to know. “Is there trouble? Has Johnny done something?”
“Johnny’s dead.” A rush of cold air across the floor, in spite of locked windows and flaming wood. “Clint Taulbe killed him, yesterday morning. He put out that it was a fair fight, but I know better. Johnny had blood all over the back of his head. Pistol-whipped, maybe. Taulbe bushwhacked him; that’s what happened.”
“Doesn’t matter if you want me to or not,” I said, pushing up out of my chair. “I’ll take care of this.”
“I already did. Taulbe killed Johnny on account of me. This afternoon, he came to claim his prize. I had Johnny’s rifle, and I shot him.”
“Sarah Tallbirches heard two shots. I’ve never seen you need a second.”
“I didn’t. His was the second. Snakes never do die quick enough.”
My heart’s blood thickened. Spirits walk loose.
She said it again. “I should have come to you.” Her cloak fell to the back of her chair, and she took me in her arms, her hands cold as frost in the branches of the hawthorn trees.
I would have dared Hell and kissed her, such power dwelt still in her eyes. Beyond the fire-lit room, only the gray world waited. No chore called. No future promised. Only drear and endless mist.
“I should have come to you.” She said a third time, to make the charm or break it. She put up her hand between us. “I did not do as I ought, and now you must bid me hence. Else you must come where I am bound, where all yearnings fail.”
“Will you wait for me?”
“There is no waiting, only the long forgetting until we return to clay.” She pulled free of my arms. “I will not see you again, until the trumpets sound. Maybe not even then.”
I stepped toward her, but the look in her eyes stopped me. “No, don’t. You need to live and let be what must be.” There was no power in her now, only unreachable sorrow.
She draped her cloak over her shoulders again, hiding all the delicate fineness of her. “Tomorrow is All Saints’. Come first light, you send Sarah and the tinker’s wife. See I’m washed and laid out like a proper woman. I left a letter for you; wrote it when I knew Taulbe was coming. You’re to have my gray mare. No one better than you with horses and women.”
I wanted to look at her, just look at her, but I knew what that would bring. Voice choked, I said what I had to. “Claire Vaughan, in Jesus’ name I bid you go from my door, and may He have mercy on your soul.”
She opened the door without a word and went out into the lonely, scented fog. I dared not watch her, lest I should follow to where her road diverged from the earthly pat
h. Instead, I listened until the mare’s footfalls faded utterly. I looked at the Colt for a moment, then turned away to put more wood on the fire.
Obligations reach past death. I would dig Claire’s grave where no corpse-light could burn. Then I would ride her mare under the fainting moon and remember.
Les Berkley grew up—although not very far up—in northern New Jersey, a fact which may explain his taste for horror and the macabre. He attended a prestigious institution of higher learning and received a degree in Theater Arts. On his graduation, he was taught the secret phrase given to all in his major: “Would you like fries with that?” He has been a non-fiction writer for about twenty years, producing music and audio criticism. Obviously, he also has a day job. He lives in a western suburb of Philadelphia with his hyper-literate wife and the obligatory cat.
NO SUPERHEROES HERE
A Conversation with Alan Robert
by K. Allen Wood
The name Alan Robert may not ring many bells within the horror community, but if my measure is correct, that will change soon. Robert first made his mark with the hardcore-metal hybrid Life of Agony, specifically with their 1993 debut album River Runs Red, now considered an all-time classic. Six years and two albums (Ugly, Soul Searching Sun) later, the group disbanded. Robert’s then formed Among Thieves, a modern alternative rock band that should have gotten more attention than they did. The band released a few demos, followed by a full-length and live album (both available only as imports), and, then, they also disbanded.
In 2003, Life of Agony returned—to the stage, anyway. But after some successful reunion shows and a live album, the band officially reformed and released Broken Valley two years later. Life of Agony still goes strong today, and Robert’s newest band, Spoiler NYC, is preparing to release the follow-up to 2006s Grease Fire in Hell’s Kitchen. Life is good.