The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

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  * * * *

  Pieces

  RAY GARTON

  I’ve been coming to pieces lately. It seems that the more things come together in my mind, the more I come to pieces.

  I’ve been in therapy for a long time, but it really hasn’t seemed to help. Oh, sure, it’s made me break down and cry a few times - something that men, in our society, aren’t really supposed to do, no matter what Phil Donahue says - but it hasn’t improved things any. I wasn’t even sure why I was there in the first place, except that something just seemed . . . wrong.

  Just a few days ago, it hit me. It was like a lightning strike, like a sixties acid flashback, or some sort of memory flash a Vietnam vet would have. My father hovering over me in bed in the dark of one rainy night, telling me that we were just playing a game, that’s all, but a secret game, a secret game that no one else could know about, so I would have to keep it a secret, a deep dark secret, and tell nobody. But the game hurt. It hurt bad.

  It came to me while I was sitting alone one night on the sofa in only my underwear reading a magazine article about child abuse, and it seemed to come out of that part of my brain that was only black, with nothing in it, like a blind spot in my eye. In fact, it exploded from that part of my brain and, at the same time, the fourth and fifth toes dropped off my left foot, which was dangling loosely from my knee, and fell to the carpet with soft little tapping sounds.

  Of course, that wasn’t my only problem at the time. My wife had just left me because, as she put it, ‘You are un-understandable. There’s something about you that is unreachable and untouchable and it seems to make you just as angry as it makes me sad. I can’t take it any more.’

  So she left. A few hours later, my right earlobe broke away and peeled off like a piece of dead skin.

  But I guess that’s getting off the subject, isn’t it? Back to the secret games. I’m not sure when they happened or how long they went on. I’d never brought it up with my therapist. I’d stopped therapy some time ago because I figured I could sit home and cry for a hell of a lot less money, and the memory flashes did not start until my appointments stopped.

  I had six weeks of vacation coming at work - I’m a shift manager at a power plant - and after my wife left me, I decided to take them all at once. I had nothing in mind, just . . . rest. A relief, I guess.

  I remember something my wife told me. She said, ‘There’s something inside you that you know nothing about and you have got to take a break, just take a vacation from your life and find out what it is!’

  That wasn’t my reason for taking the vacation. I was just tired. I mean, your wife leaves you, you get hit with some memory you hadn’t conjured up since you were a kid . . . you deserve a vacation, right? So I took it.

  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t that concerned about my earlobe or my toes. I tossed them into the trash. No big deal, really. It hadn’t hurt, there was no bleeding and I didn’t even have a limp. But I admit I was surprised by the suddenness of their departure. But so what, right? A couple toes? An earlobe? Big deal.

  So, I took the vacation. I had nothing in mind but to sit around the house and relax, do nothing. Watch TV. Watch movies on the VCR. Read. Sleep. Relax.

  Then I got broad-sided by that memory, that. . . thing.

  I put it out of my head, went out of the house and browsed through a video store and picked up half a dozen movies to watch. The video store was in a mall and, to pass the time, I decided to do some window-shopping.

  It was outside a store called Art 2 Go that the next memory hit me. In the window, I saw a painting of a little boy who looked so innocent . . . and yet, there was something in his eyes that seemed so adult, so grown up and mature, and so very, very haunting.

  My mind suddenly filled with the memory of my father holding me down on his lap and I remember the hard, throbbing thing beneath me.

  My left hand dropped to the floor.

  I stared at it as if it were an ice cream cone dropped by a child.

  A fat woman with red-dyed hair began to scream. She screamed loud and pointed at the hand and dropped her brown paper bag.

  I swung the plastic bag of videos under my left arm, picked up the hand, and hurried away, hoping no one else had noticed. The woman’s screams faded behind me.

  I took it home with me, that hand, and put it on the coffee table, staring at it as I sat on the sofa. Suddenly, I didn’t want to watch any of the videos I’d got.

  But I put one in anyway, just for the noise. I sat on the sofa, mostly staring at my hand on the coffee table. Occasionally, I looked up at the movie. At one point, I saw a screaming little child being chased down a hallway by a man whose big hands reached out like mitts to clutch the child’s hair and—

  —I suddenly remembered the time my father had done the same to me. The memory had come from nowhere, slamming into my face like a slab of concrete;

  My right arm disconnected itself from my body and slid out of my shirt sleeve, falling to the floor with a thunk.

  The child on television screamed, and was dragged backwards to the bedroom.

  My eyes widened until they were bulging.

  My left arm plunked to the floor.

  I began to cry uncontrollably. I couldn’t help myself. The tears flowed and my body - what was left of it - quaked with sobs.

  My father had done that very thing to me. He had done many other things to me, things that pranced around at the edge of my memory. I wanted to remember them, to bring them up...and yet, I did not, because they were horrible, far too horrible to hold up before my mind’s eye for inspection.

  I looked at the coffee table and saw my hand. I thought of my earlobe and toes. I looked down at the floor and saw my pale, disembodied arms.

  And suddenly, I felt sick.

  I rushed, armless, to the bathroom and vomited for a while, then hurried into the bedroom, assuming I had little time left.

  In the bedroom, I had an electric typewriter set up on a small table. I managed to place a piece of paper firmly in the carriage with my mouth, then lean down and use my mouth to reel the paper in. Then, I began to type this with my nose. It has taken a long time.

  But in that time, my mind has been working frantically with the memories that have been conjured up like bloated corpses from the bottom of a bog. In fact, just a few minutes ago, I remembered my father saying to me once, ‘Just pretend it’s a popsicle, that’s all . . . just a popsicle...suck on it like it’s a popsicle.’ And then my right leg, from the knee down, slid out of my pantleg like a snake and thunked to the bedroom floor.

  I’ve been trying not to think about it, trying to concentrate on what I’m doing, typing this as fast as I can with my nose, to tell whoever finds me what happened.

  But another memory comes to mind, this one far worse than all the others, more painful and more horrible and

  * * * *

  Ray Garton’s most recent novel, Shackled, is his fourteenth book. His other novels include Seductions, Crucifax Autumn, The New Neighbor, Lot Lizards and the movie novelizations Invaders from Mars and Warlock. Live Girls, first published in 1987, will be reissued in a limited hardcover edition from Cemetery Dance Publications; the new printing will include a CD of music inspired by the novel, composed and performed by Scott Vlad Licina, plus sound effects and snatches of dialogue. The same publisher has recently issued Garton’s latest novel, Biofire, with a mass-market paperback due early next year. His short fiction is collected in Methods of Madness and Pieces of Hate. ‘I saw a woman on a daytime talk show - I think it was The Jerry Springer Show - who claimed to have been molested as a child, but she had buried the memory for years,’ reveals the author. ‘It had suddenly returned to her as an adult in the form of nightmares and vivid flashbacks. She said repeatedly that as her memories became more coherent, she began to “break down”, to “fall apart”, and to “go to pieces”. But everyone she knew, especially her immediate family, thought she was crazy. I wondered how her fri
ends and family would have felt - and how she would have felt - if those memories had made her “go to pieces” literally. A little later, I wrote “Pieces” and put that thought to work.’

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  * * * *

  Aunt Libby’s Grave

  MELANIE TEM

  Libby glided from the sitting-room to the bedroom. She sat in both, slept in both and on the dusty floor of the roughly pentagonal central hall off which they and three other rooms opened like petals. No matter how unclear the functions of things were, it was important to have names for them.

  She crept from the bedroom to the study. Papa brought her books and she did indeed study them, her mind’s alchemy transforming the information into her mind’s own thing.

  She sped from the study to the nursery, which was empty, which had in it pale lovely light and motes of dust like old lace. It was not really a nursery; she only called it that to gather in one place her desolation and resolve. Another room might gather tedium, or joy.

  Pulling her pink sweater more tightly around her, she sang so they would hear her - in the rest of the house, moving behind walls; in the wide world, drifting from window to window; in days gone by and days to come.

  * * * *

  Aunt Maureen was poised to tell a story - the story which Cecelia guessed now, too late, was the reason they’d come to the cemetery. Cecelia didn’t want to hear it. She had a strong sense of danger, a physical feeling of dread.

  But she liked her Aunt Maureen. She’d always liked her, and now that her mother had died, taking with her any hope that they could be close or that Cecelia would ever be brave enough to ask her why they weren’t, her desire for Aunt Maureen to like her had intensified into a childish yearning.

  That was why she’d taken the long train ride from Denver to Detroit to visit - hoping for guidance, maybe; hoping for approval, or just for contact. That was why she’d not had to feign interest in the news of Aunt Maureen and Uncle Everett’s grown children, her cousins whom she knew little and liked less, although it had been necessary to conceal her jealousy as their mother talked fondly, worriedly, proudly, knowingly about them. It was why she’d found herself worrying at odd moments about whether she was carrying on a conversation sufficiently polite, about how the things she told of her life were sounding to Aunt Maureen, about whether there was cat hair on her clothes since assuredly no fur-bearing animal had ever set foot in Aunt Maureen’s house.

  Wanting to please Aunt Maureen was also the main, though perhaps not the only, reason she’d acquiesced in coming here and standing on this hill in this bright cold autumn afternoon and looking at grave markers neatly embedded in the family plot. Dark grey metal rectangles with raised inscriptions she assumed to be bronze, they were all partially obscured now by leaves skittering in a breeze she couldn’t yet feel but would soon enough. Aunt Maureen pointed out those for Cecelia’s grandparents, Harry Harkness, whom she remembered without much emotion one way or another, and Martha Harkness, who had died young in childbirth. Those for Elizabeth and Frances Harkness were next in line, separated from the rows for the next family by a blank space which Cecelia found a trifle unsettling.

  She couldn’t refuse to listen to the story Aunt Maureen had to tell her, nor even let her attention wander for fear her aunt would notice and disapprove. But apprehension made her pulse skitter like the leaves.

  ‘When your Aunt Libby died,’ Aunt Maureen declared, ‘I was the only one at her funeral. I stood right here, where we’re standing now, and I watched the funeral procession come up that hill, and there was just the hearse and the undertaker, and I was the only mourner at the graveside.’

  ‘Why didn’t my mother come? Aunt Libby was her sister, too.’

  ‘Dad said Helen and Libby were close when they were girls, but once they were grown they didn’t get along.’ Aunt Maureen shook her head briskly, as though dismissing the squabbles of her two much-older sisters. But something about the set of her shoulders or the cast of her glance piqued Cecelia’s attention.

  Maureen was a tiny woman, even shorter than Cecelia’s mother had been, considerably thinner, and equally formidable. Cecelia thought she remembered Aunt Libby, the eldest of the Harkness girls, being taller and lean, gaunt to Maureen’s wiriness and the stocky sturdiness of her mother Helen. But Aunt Libby had died when Cecelia was no more than three years old, so she hardly remembered her, and she’d discovered that her images of her mother shifted from time to time. She thought about her a good deal and, of course, remembered her vividly, but what she remembered changed. It wasn’t as if she’d forgotten what her mother had looked like, but as if she’d never exactly known.

  ‘It was a chilly fall day like this,’ Aunt Maureen continued, and as though to illustrate pulled her navy blue sweater tight around her and crossed her arms over it.

  Cecelia caught her breath. Her mother used to make a habitual gesture like that. It had been a bright pink sweater with embroidery on the collar, and she’d pull it snug around her just like that and cross her arms, tucking her hands in. The memory, which had been buried until this moment and had the feel of very early childhood, pierced and hummed like an arrow that had hit its mark, as though it meant something.

  The air wasn’t moving, but in it was the anticipation of chill golden wind and sleet. The grey-gold sun through layers of hardwood leaves, compressed this late in a Michigan October, had a metallic sheen, a wet-metal taste. Cecelia fumbled for a comment so Aunt Maureen wouldn’t think she wasn’t interested. In truth, she wasn’t particularly interested in Aunt Libby’s death and funeral, but she didn’t want Aunt Maureen to stop talking to her.

  ‘I stood up here on this very hill and I watched Libby’s funeral come towards me—’ Cecelia looked where she was pointing, at the winding dirt road below them and beyond. There, in fact, she caught sight of an oncoming funeral procession, a boxy black hearse, one other dark car nearly as tall at the hump as it was long, and - oddly, she thought, though she couldn’t quite have said why it was odd - several pedestrians.

  The road was apparently much further below them than she’d realized, for the figures stayed tiny, movements blurred by distance and perspective. She blinked, glanced at her aunt beside her, looked back. The sad little parade of miniatures was no closer, although it was still in forward motion.

  * * * *

  Uncle Clyde’s flesh was mostly pale pink, darker pink in some places Libby could not think about, and smooth, hairless. If he’d been hirsute, darker-skinned, or covered with warts, she’d have found his body no more nor less revolting.

  When she was little and Uncle Clyde would come to get her, she’d sometimes open his shirt and feel around for his nipples, like little stones in the ocean of his soft smooth flesh. Then he’d whisper to her, or say out loud if he was sure they were alone, ‘You like this, too, don’t you, sweetie? You like your Uncle Clyde.’

  Libby did like how his nipples felt under her fingertips. They gave her something to fasten her thoughts on to. Sometimes, too, she’d imagine that she could slit him open by tracing a line from one of those hard pinkish-brown dots to the other and his pink heart would tumble out into her hand. That never happened.

  All the women in the family knew about Uncle Clyde. As girls grew up, they learned what to say about him. ‘Oh, that’s just Clyde,’ Grandma said nervously the single time Libby - thirteen years old, scrubbing clothes on the washboard in the big black tub - told her about the kisses he stole from her in the pantry, which was not the worst she had to tell. Her little sister Helen was peeling potatoes on the back porch, out of sight but not out of earshot, and Maureen, crawling, was under everybody’s feet, with Mama eight months dead.

  ‘Clyde is a good man,’ she was instructed sternly. ‘Clyde is a man of God,’ and Libby, observing, could see that this was true. Uncle Clyde performed many acts of charity. He was a good husband, a good father, a good neighbour. Everybody loved Uncle Clyde. For a little while, she tried it on, like somebody else’s frock,
feeling chosen.

  ‘He does it to me, too,’ Helen informed her from the other edge of the billowing sheet as they changed his bed the next Monday morning. ‘Maureen’s next, you know,’ and that was when, for the first time in her life but by no means the last, Libby was aware of making up her mind to do something hard, something she was afraid to do. She would tell her father, Helen’s father, too, and Maureen’s, a man newly bereft of his wife and Uncle Clyde’s brother. She would tell. Frightened as she was, full of dread as she was, her resolution buoyed her, made her feel grown-up and strong, gave her something better to fasten her thoughts on to.