I filled up the Nash at Jed’s Gas, free of charge. I imagine a lot of other drivers did the same that night. I didn’t want to waste money on the pay phone, so I went inside to make one last call.
She didn’t answer for a long time, and when she did I could barely hear her voice.
“It’s me,” I said.
Silence.
“I just wanted to let you know that Hank won’t be coming for you.”
Silence.
“I think it’s over. Maybe he’s gone. The people he made me kill . . . well, I can’t believe what he made me do to them, but I think they might have deserved it.” I paused. “Anyway, I think his spirit will rest in peace now.”
“God, I hope so,” she whispered.
I hung up, wondering who Ellie would call first. I wondered how many gawkers lived in Fiddler. How long would it take them to learn of Hank Caul’s ghostly rampage? And once they’d found out, how soon would they forget that a carny roustabout had anything to do with it?
I drove south.
The fog cleared around Earlimart. I flipped on the radio and found a late night station out of Fresno. Between bursts of static, Bo Diddley asked the musical question, “Who do you love?”
I looked into the rearview mirror. Not a headlight in sight.
Bo Diddley sang about a house made of rattlesnake hide.
I liked that.
I don’t know what kind of story I’ll make up. I’ll have to ditch the Death Car, of course, but I’m tired of that story anyway. It’ll be nice to make a change.
It’s funny. I started off wanting revenge, and for a while I wanted money. Somewhere in there I even wanted Hank Caul’s house. Now I only want a good story. That’s all a guy like me really needs. Something new. Fresh. Something that will nail the gawkers to the wall.
I close my eyes, just for a second, and say goodbye to the Death Car story. Suddenly I hear screaming . . . an engine made of bone . . . but then I realize that it’s only the woman in the trunk.
I hope that she’s warm enough.
I open my eyes. Moonlight washes over the cherry-red hood.
She can wear her mink coat. She can wear Larry’s skin.
The gawkers will like that.
The Mink Lady story.
I press the gas pedal to the floor and the Nash roars forward.
The Mink Lady screams.
I remember her lips. They tasted of cherries.
I imagine a house made of rattlesnake hide.
A dynasty of fear.
I’m thinking big.
WILLIAM F. NOLAN
Blood Sky
WILLIAM F. NOLAN has operated a miniature railroad for children, raced sports cars, acted in motion pictures, painted outdoor murals, served as a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, taught creative writing, and plotted Mickey Mouse adventures for Walt Disney.
However, he is better known for his work as a novelist, editor, biographer, essayist, screenwriter and as the author of more than 120 short stories. His Logan’s Run was made into an MGM movie and a CBS-TV series, and along with the two sequels has been collected in Logan: A Trilogy, with illustrations by the author.
He is currently adapting Peter Straub’s novel Floating Dragon for MGM/NBC-TV as a two-part miniseries, and Clive Barker’s “The Inhuman Condition” as the second half of an ABC-TV Movie of the Week, Devil’s Night. Meanwhile, David Cronenberg is adapting Nolan’s book Yankee Champion for Warner Bros, as a vehicle for Mel Gibson, which Cronenberg will also direct.
His ninth novel, Helltracks, was recently published and he is currently working on ten more books. Amongst his many honours, the author has twice won the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award for contributions to the mystery genre.
“Blood Sky” is a terrifying glimpse into the mind of a serial killer, made all the more disturbing by the author’s matter-of-fact treatment of the subject.
SOMETIMES, SLEEPING HERE ALONE IN THESE strange Montana motel rooms, I have some weird dreams, so I figured I’d put some of them down in my notebook to give insight into them.
Like the carnival dream. I’m a kid in the dream, maybe ten or eleven, and my Grandpa (on my Mom’s side of the family) takes me to this carnival. It’s one of the cheap road shows, run-down and seedy, with holes in the tents, and with most of the rides in bad shape, and with the Ferris Wheel all rusted and unsafe looking. The clowns look sad and the hoochy-kooch girls have sagging bellies and dead-fish eyes and wear lipstick like slashes of blood across their lips. They try to look sexy, but they’re just pathetic. They make you sick.
Gramps says let’s try some of the games and he buys two tickets for us to try the shooting gallery. I miss most of the painted ducks but Gramps hits every one, knocks them all down, and the guy in the booth, real fat and mean in a dirty white shirt all stained under the armpits, hands Gramps his prize. It’s a live chicken. (In dreams, I guess you can win prizes like that.) Gramps takes the bird under his arm and we go into this water ride called the Tunnel of Terror. You get in this creaky dark green boat and it takes you around corners in the dark where things jump out at you, and horns blare and you hear people screaming. (I hate being confined in dark places.)
Suddenly, in the middle of the ride, the boat stops dead still in the water and we’re sitting there alone, just me and Gramps. It’s real quiet. Just the water lapping at the sides of the boat and the two of us breathing there in the dark. Gramps takes the chicken and holds it out in front of him. Then he starts to chuckle and next thing in the dream he’s got his hands around the bird’s neck and he strangles it. Then he hands me the dead chicken, with the head lolling loose. The chicken is wet and mushy, and I tell Gramps I don’t want to hold it. Worms are coming out of it.
I throw the dead chicken into the water and when I turn back to Gramps his face is all lit in red, the Devil’s face, and he has fur on his tongue and his eye sockets are empty, like the sockets in a skull. He puts his hands around my neck and begins to squeeze.
Good boy, he says, my good, good boy.
And I wake up.
Now what does a dream like this really mean?
A week later . . .
Another bad dream. Really bad. In fact, I’m writing this entry at 6 a.m. in the morning (there’s a blood sky outside my motel window) because the nightmare woke me up and I can’t get back to sleep, thinking about it. So I might as well write it down.
It started real ordinary. The scary ones all seem to start that way, easy and natural, and they gradually slip into the awful parts, taking you along into a dark area you don’t want to get into, that you get terrified of, and would never go to if you weren’t dreaming.
This one began in warm yellow sunlight, with me walking along a road that cut through this piney wood. (There were other kinds of trees there, too, but I don’t know much about different trees so I can’t say what they were.) Anyway, there were plenty of trees, with a mass of pine needles under my feet, and with thick green foliage everywhere.
There was the crisp smell of sunlight and the church smell of the pines and the cheeping of birds. All straight out of a kid’s picture book, and that’s what I think inspired this part of the dream, because I remember when I was seven, that Gramps bought me this picture book of forests around the world, and I just got totally lost in that book, trying to imagine what it would be like to walk through those magical-looking forests, with the tall trees all around me.
And that’s how it was in this dream—just me alone at age seven, in this pine forest, enjoying the peace and quiet. But then it started getting dark. Fast. A lot faster than in real life. All the birds stopped singing and the sun dropped out of the sky like a falling stone. The path I was on narrowed, and the trees seemed to be pressing in closer. And it got cold. A wind had come swirling up, with voices in it, crying Run, Eddie! Something bad is coming, Eddie! Better run, boy! Catch you if you don’t run fast. Run!
And I took off like a wet cat. Started booting it along that path with tree branches whip
ping at me, slashing at my face and cutting my shirt like swords. I was crying by then, and really scared, because the whole forest seemed to come alive and the trees all had mouths full of sharp teeth, like daggers, and now they were leaning over to bite at my flesh. I felt pain, and blood was running into my eyes, blinding me.
Then I saw a cabin. Just ahead, with the path going right up to the door. It was open. I ran inside, slamming the door behind me and leaning against it, sobbing and shaking all over.
Suddenly I wasn’t a seven-year-old kid anymore. I was me, now, at my age, and I was buck naked. My flesh (no cuts or blood!) was puckered with the cold as the night wind sliced through the cracks in the cabin’s roof and walls.
Then I realized (the way you do in dreams) that a big deeply-upholstered chair (we had one back in Kansas) was directly in front of the fireplace and I hunched down in that chair, pressing against the cushions for warmth, shivering, with my arms crossed over my chest. There was no warmth from the fireplace—only dead black ashes.
That’s when I heard the sound of something coming out of the forest toward the cabin. Clump, clump, clump. Heavy footsteps. Heading for me. Coming for me. Something awful.
And getting closer every second.
I was sweating. As cold as it was, I was in a sweat of fear. My eyes searched for escape. There was no back door to the place, no windows. What could I do? Where could I go?
Then the door bulged. Like it was under a terrible pressure. Something was bending it inward. A deep voice, old and raspy, cried out. Let me in, Eddie! Open the door!
I jumped from the chair and ran to the far wall, pressing my back against the rough wood, my eyes bugging as the door just exploded open.
And Gramps was there. Just like in the carnival dream. Only instead of carrying a chicken he had a long dark green coat over his arm. He was smiling at me.
Nothing to be afraid of, boy. It’s just me an’ your mom.
And that’s when I saw that it wasn’t a coat over his arm. It was my mother’s body, loose like a sack and dark green with grave mold. Dark green and rotting.
Your mama’s hungry, boy. I brought her here for a feed. She needs to eat.
And he walked over and grabbed me by the neck and kind of draped my mother’s body around me, with her rotted arms hanging over my shoulders and her moldy legs pressing against my naked skin. The stink that came off her was the stink of the grave, of deep earth and things long dead.
I was helpless. Then, slowly, her head raised itself and her dead face was right in front of my face, maybe an inch away, and she was smiling a broken-toothed idiot’s smile and her eyes were filmed with red, wormy veins, and I could see her tongue moving like a fat dark snake inside the rotted cavern of her mouth.
Eddie . . . my little boy. Didn’t I always take care of you, sweetie? Now it’s your turn to take care of your Mommy . . .
And she buried her teeth in my neck, ripping out a huge gobbet of my flesh and starting to chew . . .
Which is when I woke up here in the motel, covered with cold slimy sweat. My muscles were twitching and I could hardly breathe.
It was one of the worst nightmares I’ve ever had.
Now, why would I ever have a dream about being devoured by my mother’s corpse? She’s not even dead, for one thing. Why should I dream of her being dead? There’s no reason on earth I should have a dream like this. No reason.
The science people tell us that if we don’t dream every night we go crazy. That our minds need to let off steam, as it were, and that dreaming is natural for everybody. Maybe. But I hate having dreams I can’t control and being a victim to them. Having dreams is supposed to keep you from going nuts, but what if they make you nuts? I mean, if I had dreams as bad as this every night I’d go insane. And I very much want to retain my sanity.
I had the dream about my mother two days ago and I think I’ve figured it out. For one thing, I consider myself on the level of a professional shrink (which is why I’d never go to one). I’ve always been able to study people and what makes them tick, and I am quite good at reading beneath the surface of a person.
So I analyzed my dream in relation to my inner self. I think there must be a deep-buried part of me that thinks my mother was kind of smothering me, that she fed off me emotionally after my father began treating her so bad, beating her up and everything. Not that she was the huggy-kissy type. Not at all. I’ve mentioned in this notebook before how she didn’t like any open affection, no outward displays. But, inside, I think she turned to me as a kind of replacement for my father. It was subtle, but it was there, and I sensed it somehow, even as a kid.
For example, she didn’t like sharing me with anybody. When Gramps would come over (even Mom called him that) and he’d want to take me home with him for the weekend, take me to the park for ice cream and a ride on the merry-go-round they had there, she always said no, I couldn’t go with him to his house because I had to do chores over the weekend. Once every summer she did let me go out to a cabin Gramps had rented near a lake in the woods (the cabin in my dream looked a lot like it) and I had some great times swimming out there and eating the fresh peach ice cream that Gramps made himself.
I have one bad memory connected with the lake. It was what I did to a litter of pups, six of them. I put them all in a cardboard box and then took them to the edge of the wooden dock and then pushed them under the water. When the bubbles didn’t come up anymore I knew they were dead. I can’t remember exactly why I did that except for the power feeling it gave me, that charge I get as I’m taking a life, that’s still with me, even today. When I strangle someone, when I drive my thumbs deep into their neck, when I feel them kick and struggle and then go limp like a loose sack in my hands, it’s a very satisfying kind of thing. Fulfilling, really. It’s not a sexual thing, not like the wet dreams I used to have as a kid, and it doesn’t give me a hardon. It’s more like what I’ve heard from people who take drugs—a sudden high, a rush of pure pleasure. You kind of tingle all over.
Killing has always given me that. Which is one reason it’s so hard to quit.
But getting back to the dream . . . I suppose it came from my subconscious, based on that deep-down feeling that Mom used me as a kind of emotional food when I was a kid. The dream makes some sense on that basis.
I feel better now, having figured it out. It was still terrible, having it, and I hope I don’t have any more like it, but at least I’ve got it analyzed.
And I’m proud of myself for that.
There’s a feeling in Montana that you’re back in the Old West. Lots of the men wear cowboy hats and walk around in fancy cowhide boots. Every town you go to is full of Western artifacts and every area has its Western ghost town. It’s kind of like the Civil War is in the South. You go there and it seems the Civil War just ended about a month ago. People still talk about it and there are souvenirs and Confederate flags and banners. In Montana, it’s the Old West which is very much alive. Real John Wayne country. Including a lot of rodeos.
There was one going on here in Conrad, just a mile or two beyond the main part of town, and I decided it might be fun to go see it. Get my mind off what the papers were saying. I’d never been to a rodeo. Had read about them and seen movies. In fact, I remember one with Steve McQueen in it. He played a guy named Junior somebody and I enjoyed watching that one.
I found out that a rodeo was a lot like going to a circus. Everything is noisy, with bucking horses and cowgirls in flashy spangled outfits and bright-painted clowns for the bulls to chase and big grandstands full of people eating popcorn and drinking Cokes. (Is there anywhere on this whole planet where people don’t drink Coca-Cola? I’ve seen photos of Coke signs in the deserts of Arabia and the jungles of Africa—and you can bet that when they build a city on Mars the first thing they’ll be shipping in is truckloads of Coca-Cola. Me, I’d like to have just a tiny percentage of the profits from these zillions of Cokes they sell all over the world every day. I’d be a rich man for sure.)
&n
bsp; I got a pretty good aisle seat in the main grandstand and nibbled on some roasted peanuts and watched these whooping cowboys get tossed off these fierce-looking bulls. They’d roll their eyes, these big bulls would, with white froth looping from their mouths, and just shake off the riders like water off a dog’s back. The second a cowboy hit the dirt a clown would jump out to lure the bull away from the fallen rider—and when the bull went after the clown he’d jump into a barrel and the bull’s horns would bang into the wood while the cowboy got up and limped back to the chutes. Not all of them limped, but most did. I couldn’t figure why anybody would want to try riding a bull or a wild, crazy-eyed bucking horse. Even when you won, the prizes weren’t anything to write home about. There are plenty of broken bones and skull fractures in a rodeo. Dumb way to make a living.
I read somewhere that they use a real tight strap around the balls of the bull to make him jump harder and higher. And they do other things just as bad. This article I read told all about it. I like getting the inside scoop, because there’s always more to everything than you see on the surface. (There’s sure a lot more to Yours Truly than most people ever guess at!)
The calf-roping was fun to watch—and these boys could ride and rope like the rest of us breathe air. It was something to see the way they competed against the clock, making every move count. Makes you realize how much time we waste in our lives. What I need in my life right now is a goal to work toward. Not just getting control of the compulsion, I mean having a solid future in mind. But when I try to think of the future it’s all blank, like a sheet of white paper. Like getting a fortune cookie in a Chinese cafe and breaking it open to read your fortune and finding out there’s no little slip of paper inside. Just an empty cookie. That’s how my whole life seems these days. Like that cookie.
I was thinking such thoughts when I felt a hand touch my left shoulder.
Hi, pardner, you look a mite thirsty. How ‘bout a beer?
I looked up at this attractive cowgirl in a short, fringed skirt, white boots decorated with silver stars, a spangled blouse and red bandanna, topped by a wide-brim Western sombrero. A beer tray was balanced from a strap on her shoulder. I don’t like beer, I told her.
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