Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World's Greatest Horror Writers

by Del Howison

  Justin is tall, well-built, with a face that might be handsome one day, but is now softly rounded. He wears a permanent scowl. Responded to questions with sarcasm, one-word responses, or silence. Asked him who he was angry at and he laughed. “Who am I NOT angry at! Everyone I ever dealt with. My parents, my family, my teachers, other kids. Everybody treats me like I’m nuts.” I asked if he was “nuts.” He laughed again. He appears to enjoy the thought that he is “getting” at me or has a secret I want that he isn’t going to give up. I repeated the question. “No, I am fucked up.” I pointed out that we all were. He asked about me, how I was fucked up, and I turned it onto him—how does he think I am fucked up. He was extraordinarily accurate! Issues with control, power, inadequacy. I smiled and told him that when a patient tells me how I am crazy, it reflects on his or her own issues. Justin seemed to want to tell me how he was different from my take on patients. He gave me the silent treatment for the next ten minutes. I must have looked bored because he shouted at me to give him my attention. I asked him to tell me about his childhood. He proceeded to tell me one dramatic tale of horrific abuse after another. I am skeptical. They have a staged sound to them. When asked if he was content to see me again, he looked at me for a moment and I saw the child in him, sensing someone cared, then it was gone. He replied, “I don’t have a choice if I want to get out of CYA.”

  Daniel remembered. It all came back. The anger dotted with moments of fear, the lies peppered with truth. He never connected with Justin and decided the boy was a sociopath. When the mandated period of visits ended, Justin’s parents asked Daniel to continue with him. To Daniel’s surprise, Justin agreed.

  He reread all the notes he could manage before his 7:45 P.M. client, then went back to them later. He searched for clues, not knowing what to look for. Was Justin gay? Was he acting out, fearing his homosexuality wouldn’t be acceptable, so he created a wall of hostility? If so, how could he not see it? He found the parents’ phone number and dialed. It was late. He hoped they would be awake.

  Wrong number. They moved. It was nearly twenty years ago Justin stopped coming. Daniel called his friend Gil at LAPD and asked for help finding the parents, Esperanza and Frank Cook. He wouldn’t hear anything until morning.

  Justin’s file was spread over his glass desk. Emotionally, it was hard to read. Justin’s assaults, his harm to animals and children, were terrible. He reread the last visit.

  Visit 221—Justin Cook 5/14

  Justin seems listless, bored. I’ve seen him like this only a few times. He is less resistant. Great time for questions. I asked him about the baby-dropping incident at the mall. He grabbed a woman’s baby when she told him off for talking to the salesgirl, keeping her from her duties. He ran to the second-floor mall railing and held the baby out. He screamed at the woman to apologize. She was in shock, capable only of wailing. Mall cops tried to intercede, so Justin dropped the baby. It landed in a planter below on a bed of mulch and was only bruised and scraped. Justin shrugged. “If people thought they could lose something valuable for being a bitch or an asshole, they’d wouldn’t do half the shit they do. I was just letting her know her attitude earned her potential baby loss.” I asked if he knew he was dropping the baby onto a softer surface. He smiled. My turn to guess. I said I knew he had figured it out. He just wanted to teach people and animals a lesson, make a point. He liked my hypothesis. I was fishing. I asked him why he never inflicted pain on himself, why only others. He found this question uncomfortable and squirmed! I finally touched a nerve. I asked him what he was feeling. He didn’t know. Maybe hurting others was the only way for him to feel anything. He was so shut off inside. I praised him for the insight. Then he asked me what he should do to himself. Should he pay himself back for all the harm he’d done? I pointed out that it all comes back to us in other ways eventually. He’d paid in CYA custody for three and a half years. Missed high school, his prom. Maybe someday someone would do to him what he’d done to others. He changed then, turned ugly, vicious. “No one is going to do anything to me again. I won’t let it happen.” I asked him how he could assure himself of that kind of protection, that no one was immune from the “slings and arrows” of life, of other people. He looked away, ashen, as if a horrid thought had just occurred to him. Accountability? The session ended with that. I look forward to the next.

  When Justin didn’t show up the next week, Daniel had called his home. His parents told Daniel that Justin had run away and if he returned, they would make sure he came back for help. But they never called. And Daniel hadn’t followed up. His practice was growing, and he was about to move into the first of several finer office spaces.

  Rayla was asleep when he got home. He crawled in beside her and kissed her exposed shoulder. She stirred. He whispered, “I love you.” He smiled at her, hoping she’d stay asleep. She rolled over and sighed, still deep asleep. He laid back and stared up at the ceiling.

  He was dreaming again. It seemed real, lucid, like the night before. Dream Daniel stood in a filthy bathroom near a beach. He could smell the salt air and wet sand besides the stench of piss and shit. He was wearing beach shorts and thongs, a towel over his bronzed shoulders. Real Daniel would never wear thongs or expose his bony feet. In the dream he grinned at this.

  “Hey, Doc!” Daniel turned to the voice. Justin was standing on a toilet seat, a noose around his neck. He was nude, covered in sand and dirt, as if he’d fallen in it coming out of the water. Sand on his eyelashes glinted in the harsh exposed bulbs of the restroom.

  “What are you doing to yourself, Justin?” Dream Daniel spoke with benign resignation.

  “Making sure nobody messes with me anymore. I’m assuring myself.”

  “I can teach you ways to deal with people that don’t hurt them and that protect you. Let me do that.” Then, as an afterthought, “Why here?”

  Justin’s feet slipped off the wet toilet seat and he hanged himself. His eyes bulged and his tongue jutted from his mouth. Daniel watched without feeling, noting Justin wetted and crapped himself, and his cock was hard as he died.

  Daniel turned to go. Justin spoke in a rough voice. “Hey, Doc! You sad fuck. You missed it all along. I loved you. I wanted you to love me. You needed someone to love you as much as I wanted to love you, but you couldn’t see it.” Daniel looked back at Justin. His black tongue licked his pale lips. Daniel shook, suddenly, overwhelmed with guilt and horror.

  “Is this why you’re stalking me?” He didn’t know what else to call it.

  “Stalking? Noooo. Think of me as a permanent client, Doc. I’m riding along for the duration, as they say.”

  “I don’t get it, Justin. I don’t understand.” Daniel was helpless; tears fell and he dropped to his knees in the filth. “Help me understand.”

  Justin tugged at the noose until it loosened and he dropped to the tile floor. He patted Daniel’s head, cooing there now’s. “Stand up, Doc, and give us a hug.”

  Daniel stood, allowed Justin to put his arms around him. He continued to weep. He was so sorry. Sorry for Justin, sorry for himself. If he missed this essential diagnosis in Justin, what else had he missed and in who?

  “Poor Daniel … poor sad Daniel.” Justin pressed his naked body to Daniel’s. “See, this was all I wanted. You never asked me if the abuse my parents heaped on me was anything but violent or sexual. You assumed. Doc, they never touched me. Never looked at me. Maybe my mom touched me to diaper me when I was an infant, but I don’t remember that. If I cut my knees playing rough, Mom put the antiseptic and bandages on the counter. ‘You fix it,’ she’d say. I had a fever, I had to put the thermometer in my mouth and take it out and read it myself. I had to feed myself as far back as I remember. I never felt loved, or cared about.”

  “They seemed like such nice people.” Daniel tried defending them.

  “Nice people can be neglectful and cold. You know that.” Justin forced Daniel to look at him then, holding his cheeks in his hands. “That’s you all the way. Ever hold your o
wn son? Hold your wife’s hand when you take a walk … ever take a walk with her?”

  Daniel shook his head. The head he lived in. Had he ever touched a woman in a merely affectionate manner, without it being sexual? No.

  “You’ll wake up and probably forget this dream, but I’m here now. Stop fighting me. Love me. Let me be.”

  Rayla pushed at him. “Daniel, wake up!” He sat up with a start.

  “What!?”

  “You were crying and shouting ‘No!’ Are you having a nightmare?”

  He wiped his face. It was wet. “I must have. God. What’s wrong with me?”

  * * *

  Gil left the phone number for Justin’s parents on Daniel’s voice mail. Before his first client, Daniel sat back in his Donghia chair, took his Cross pen in hand, put paper on his desk, and took a deep breath. Then he dialed. The number had an unfamiliar area code.

  The woman who answered bore a trace of an accent, as Esperanza Cook had.

  “This is Daniel Fredericks. I was Justin’s therapist back in 1983. Do you recall that?” His heart was slamming in his chest. He hadn’t considered what he was going to say. “It was when Justin was with—”

  “California Youth Authority. I remember very well, Dr. Fredericks.”

  Was she upset? Angry? Her voice gave him nothing. “I was going through some of my old files and Justin’s was so big. I started reading and realized he’d just stopped coming. It made me curious. I wondered how he was doing now.”

  “Now?” Her voice told him her mind was working hard to fathom what that meant. “Well, he’s been gone almost twenty years.”

  “Gone. Moved out? Or is he incarcerated?”

  “Gone. He’s dead. He hanged himself. He wrote you a letter. I sent you a copy.”

  Sudden hysterical giggles spilled out of Daniel. They weren’t his giggles. He struggled to speak. “I never … knew … I never got …”

  Then his voice wasn’t his. “Moms, I’m here. I finally got what I need from the doc. Hell, I’m in him. Ya!”

  “What is this sick joke? How dare you call and say this to me! Do not call here again!” She hung up.

  Daniel felt warmth rise up from his toes into his legs, his groin, his abdomen, like a blush. It was Justin on a cellular level, now—not just in his head—stealing his body and his mind.

  “What did I ever do to you to deserve this?” He whimpered, frightened.

  Justin’s voice came into his head as clear as if he was thinking the words himself. The dream was waking now.

  “You wouldn’t just love me. Be close to me. Touch me.”

  “I’ll get rid of you. I have a life to live.” Daniel stood, angrily grabbing his head as if pulling his hair would pluck out Justin.

  “Get used to me, Doc. I’m here for good. We’re going to have more fun. Like what we did to your shrink. Only now you’ll get to enjoy it while I’m at the wheel. And hey … you know how you couldn’t stand how I wouldn’t let you in? Well, now you’ll know it all, every bit of it, just like I know every bit of you! That’s a plus for you.”

  Daniel closed his eyes. He wondered about Justin’s childhood, his early puberty. Years and images and thoughts washed through his head. Fascinated, he let it come. It rocked him and surprised him and awed him. Justin was so much more than he’d let on.

  Justin broke in. “Hey, hey, man, slow down. We got a lot of time to play.”

  Daniel smiled. “Yes, we do.” Justin had been the one that he could never crack, never help the way he wanted to. Now he could. And maybe he might one day be able to do what Justin longed for. Love him.

  His cell went off in his pocket bringing him back to the moment. He checked caller ID. It was Rayla.

  “Hi, Ray. What’s up, baby?” Justin was there with him.

  “Baby?” He could hear Rory crying and male voices. “Look, Danny, there are two detectives here. They’d like to speak to you about some complaints. And … about Francine.”

  Justin’s voice was loud in his head. “We make a run for it now, Dan. Yeah, that’s what we do. No way I want to spend the rest of your life in a cell as somebody’s ho!”

  “Francine. She filed a complaint?”

  “No, Danny, she committed suicide. They said something about her note …”

  “I’ll be right home.”

  “Hurry, Danny. They’re scaring me.”

  “Sure, baby. I’m on my way.”

  Daniel flipped the phone shut and dropped it into his gabardine trouser pocket. Justin wondered if the car had a full tank of gas. Daniel realized they would have to fill up on their way to wherever they were going now. Justin laughed. Daniel grinned.

  “I just have to grab this one file of mine….” Daniel went for The Sanity File in his locked cabinet. Justin waited inside, humming like a well-tuned car, ready for whatever came next.

  MY THING FRIDAY

  BRIAN LUMLEY

  Voice Journal of Greg Griffiths, 3rd Engineer on the Albert Einstein out of the Greater Mars Orbital Station

  DAY ONE:

  Probably the 24th Feb 2198 Earth Standard, but I can’t be sure. The ship’s chronometer is bust—like everything else except me—and I don’t know how long I’ve been out of it. Judging by the hair on my face, my hunger, the bump on the back of my head, and the thick blood scab that’s covering it, it could have been two or three days. Anyway and as far as I can tell it’s now morning on whichever day, which I’m going to call Day One….

  What I remember:

  We passed through the fringes of an old nebula; a cloud of gas that looked dead enough, but it seems there was some energy left in it after all: weird energy that didn’t register on instrumentation. Then the drive started acting up and quit entirely maybe four or five light-years later. When we dropped back into normal space, I put on a suit, went out and for’ard to check the fuel ingestors. They were clogged with this gas that was almost liquid, and dust that stuck like glue; it couldn’t be converted into fuel and had hardened to a solid in the scoops … weird as hell, like I said. Ship’s Science Officer Scot Gentry said it could well be “protoplanetary slag”—whatever the hell that’s supposed to be!—and a total pain in the backside. And down in engineering we scratched our heads and tried to figure out some way to shift this shit.

  Then the sublight engines blew up and we saw that the dust was into everything. The antigravs were on the fritz but still working, however sporadically, and by some miracle of chance we were just a cough and a spit off a planet with water and an atmosphere: a couple trillion-to-one chance, according to Gentry. But by then, too, we knew we were way off course—light-years off course—because this protocrap had got into the astronavigator, too.

  As for the planet: It had continents, oceans, but there was no radio coming up at us, no sign of cities or intelligent life-forms. Well, if there had been, it would have been a first. The universe has been looking like a pretty lonely place for a long time now. And to me, right now, it looks lonelier than ever.

  Coming in to make landfall the antigravs gave up the ghost … so much for a soft landing. Six thousand tons of metal with nothing holding us up, we fell from maybe a hundred feet in the air. Higher than that and I probably wouldn’t be recording this. I was in a sling in a gravity tube, trying to burn slag off the gyros, when this uncharted planet grabbed us; the sling’s shock absorbers bounced me around but saved my life.

  As for the other crew members, all fifteen of my shipmates, they weren’t so lucky—

  —Or maybe they were. It all depends on what this place has in store for me. But right now I have to fix my head, eat, give myself shots, then get all the bodies off the ship or the place won’t ever be livable….

  DAY TWO (MORNING):

  Yesterday was a very strange day … and by the way, I think the days here are just an hour or two longer than Earth Standard. I reckon I was right about coming to fairly early in the morning, because it seemed like one hell of a long strange day; but then again—considering what I
was doing—it would.

  I had started to move the bodies out of the ship.

  No easy task, that. And not only for the obvious reasons. I cried a lot, for the obvious reasons. But with the old Albert E. lying at thirty degrees, and her (or his) once-round hull split at all the major seams, buckled and now oblate, and leaking all kinds of corrosives, lubricants and like that … no, it was no easy task. Don’t know why I bothered, really, because I see now there’s no way I can live in the Albert E. Ship’s a death trap!

  Perhaps I should have left the bodies as they were, sealed them in as best I could right there where they died; the entire ship with all these bodies—my buddies—in it, like some kind of big metal memorial. Rust in peace …

  But it’s way too late now, and anyway there’s lots of stuff I have to get out of there. Medicines and such; ship’s rations; a big old self-inflating habitat module from the emergency survival store; tools; stuff like that. A regular Robinson Crusoe, I be—or maybe a marooned Ben Gunn, eh, Jim lad? Oh, Ha-harr! But at least there’s no sign of pirates.

  I thank God for my sense of humor. Just a few days ago on board the Albert E., why, I would crack them up so hard—they would laugh so hard—they’d tell me I’d be the death of them! Well, boys, it wasn’t me. Just a fucking big cloud of weird gas and dust, that’s all. But it cracked us up good and proper …

  LATER:

  I managed to get more than half of them out of there before the sun went down, and I’ll get the rest tomorrow. But tonight will be the last night I’ll spend on board ship. It’s nightmarish on the Albert E. now. Tomorrow I’ll fix up the habitat I unloaded, get a generator working, power some batteries, set up a defensive perimeter like the book says. And whatever those things are I hear moving around out there in the dark—probably the same guys who were watching me from the forest while I worked—fuck ’em! I do have a reliable sidearm. Shouldn’t need to use it too much, though; once they’ve had a taste of the electric perimeter—that’s assuming they’re the overly curious kind—they won’t be in too much of a hurry to come back for more.