by David Nickle
The breathing stopped, and there came a hard wet cough.
“Let me stay!”
The voice was reedy and high, straining as though shouting but not much louder than a whisper. Something in it made Rupert decide it was a man’s. As he stepped further into the room, his eyes confirmed it — a long beard like nettles trembled against the pale light of the blind, as the fellow tried to sit up.
“I won’t be here long,” the man continued. “I ain’t well.”
Rupert kept the gun up, all the same. There were other things in this room. At the foot of the bed was what looked like a long duffel bag. On the floor, scattered here and there, were empty cans; along the windowsill, the silhouette of three more cans.
It was dark on the floor beside the bed. The man looked down there, and the darkness moved.
“My dog,” said the man. “Jack. Named him after my brother. Jack’s been on the road with me five year now.” A cough. “He ain’t doing well either. Came in hurt today.” The man shifted onto his side. “That a gun you have?”
Rupert squinted. The dog began to resolve itself from the shadow. It was lying on its side. It was breathing fast and shallow — as he looked, Rupert could make out the twitching of its rib cage. Its head was down, and there was a little shine from its eyes — and a bloody glistening, on the raw side of its head. Where, Rupert was sure, the rock he’d thrown had hit it this morning.
“You come here to drive me out, boy?”
Rupert looked up at the man, and shook his head.
The man covered his mouth with a shaking hand and coughed. Now that he was closer, Rupert could see more of him. His hair and beard were dark, but he looked very old.
“But you got a gun.”
“A Webley,” said Rupert, and the old man nodded.
“That’s a kind of gun,” he said. “You know how to use it?” When Rupert didn’t answer, the old man said, “Thought not.”
Rupert bent to get a better look at the dog. The floor was covered with a fair bit of blood. The dog’s fur around its head was matted with more blood. Its tongue lolled. It looked back at Rupert, and a soft whimper came out, a sound like a leak in a tire.
“If you ain’t here to drive me out,” said the man, “could you do me a favour?”
“What?”
“Shoot my dog.” The man in the bed coughed, and made a sound like a whimper himself. “Jack don’t deserve to suffer, watchin’ over me like he has.”
Rupert looked at the gun in his hands. It was heavy, and slippery with sweat. He thought about the noise it would make if it went off. A noise like that would draw the neighbours, the police. Even if it didn’t . . . the Captain would see a bullet had been fired.
“Give it to me, if you won’t. It won’t . . .” he coughed “. . . it won’t take a moment. And I’ll give it right back.”
Rupert looked at the dog. Back at the old man. “The gun doesn’t belong to me,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Please, kid.”
Rupert stood straight, lowering the gun to his side, and stepped out of the room.
“I can’t,” he said.
The Waite sisters and Wallace had made it as far as the porch. When Rupert came out, Nancy commented on the smell and Joan said, “Well?”
“There’s no body,” said Rupert.
“I knew it!” said Nancy. Wallace looked at his feet.
“But there’s a fellow in there,” said Rupert. “That’s maybe what Wallace saw.”
“Someone lives in there?” said Joan.
“He’s not well,” said Rupert. “He told me to get off his property.”
“What about the dog?” said Wallace.
“Here’s the gun,” said Rupert, and handed the Webley over, butt first. “Take it back home. I won’t tell the Captain you took it.”
Wallace snatched the gun back and held it close to his chest. He looked over Rupert’s shoulder, and back at Rupert. “What about the dog?” he said again.
Rupert just shook his head. Wallace took a step toward the house and stopped and turned around.
Joan Waite put her arm over Nancy’s shoulder and held her close. “I can hear it,” said Joan, and Nancy said she could too: “It’s everywhere.” But Rupert couldn’t hear anything — and neither could Wallace, although he strained to.
On 24th September, 1939, the town had a dance for Wallace Gleason and some others, at the Fenlan Rotary Hall. That summer, Wallace had signed up in the 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade. He was to ship out to Belleville for his training — and from there, perhaps a boat down the St. Lawrence and all the way to England.
Rupert attended reluctantly. He had not yet made up his mind to enlist and had been seeing less of Wallace and the Gleasons the past few years in any event. But his brothers were going — Paul, the second-eldest, had shipped out in the summer, and the whole family had gone to his party — so Rupert relented. He put on a jacket and tied his tie, slicked down his hair and perched on the wheel-well in the back of the Ford.
It was a warm night for September, and they threw the doors to the hall open, so the fiddle music wafted through the twilit streets almost to the edge of town. Autos were parked two deep along the sidewalk, and everything was bathed in the orange glow of electric lanterns strung along the sides of the hall, and over the main entry hung a banner: “IN THE ARMY NOW.”
“Paul should have waited,” said Leonard as they passed beneath it and into the dance. “What a send-off!”
The Storey boys split up after that: Leonard, to lift a glass of beer with some fellows he knew from the reopened sawmill; Philip, to get a closer look at the fiddler. Rupert spotted the Captain, a widower two years now, so sitting by himself, watching as his son Wallace and a town girl raised dust on the dance floor.
“Why, Rupert Storey!” said the Captain. “It’s been some time! How’ve you been keeping?”
Rupert sat down and brought the Captain up to date. He had been accepted at the University of Western Ontario, and expected to be starting classes in a week, and hoped to gain admittance to the medical school there eventually. He allowed as he might also enlist, as Wallace had, but wanted to see how higher learning suited him first. The Captain stopped him before he could be accused of babbling.
“One way or another, you’re leaving town,” he said. “Good, though we’ll miss you. But you’ll find your way. That’s what young men do.”
The conversation cut short when Helen and her husband arrived. She being six months with child, Rupert offered her his chair immediately. She smiled hello and patted his hand and told him he was a gentleman. Rupert thanked her and excused himself.
It seemed as though the whole town was crowding into the Rotary Hall. Rupert wasn’t fond of crowds, and kept to the periphery. He was too young for beer and not much of a dancer, so he set up near the punch bowl. Wallace greeted him briefly there between dances — clapped him hard on the shoulder and produced a steel hip flask of rum. Rupert took a dutiful swig and Wallace took one too. Then he nodded, hit Rupert’s shoulder once more and headed back to the dance floor where his girl was waiting.
It wasn’t long after that that Rupert spotted Nancy Waite approaching the punch bowl. She was wearing a long green frock, and her blonde hair was pushed back with a white ribbon, holding an unlit cigarette high as she danced and shimmied through the crowd. Rupert found a box of matches in his pocket, and by the time she arrived he had one lit and ready to offer her. She blinked and laughed and leaned into the flame.
“I was coming for the punch,” she said, and Rupert poured her one of those too. They clinked glasses and sipped their punch and Rupert told Nancy about his university plans. “I’m going to school too,” she said, “in Kingston. With Joan. In a year. I hope.” She set down her glass and crossed her fingers.
“Are you going to ask me to dance?” she asked.
He smiled and dipped his head. “I’m not very good at dancing,” he said.
But she didn’t give up, and finally h
e did ask her.
They didn’t dance for very long, just barely a song, before Nancy admitted defeat. “I’ll never doubt you again,” she said. And as they left the dance floor, Rupert thought: That’s it. But Nancy surprised him.
“It’s hot in here,” she said and she was right.
Ducking through the thinning edge of the crowd, they made their way through one of the side doors and into the parking lot that backed onto a stand of trees. The music grew quieter — quiet enough that Rupert could make out the chirping of crickets. He pulled the matchbox from his pocket, but Nancy shook her head and took his hand instead.
“Do you remember,” she said, turning to face him, her eyes themselves seeming to dance, “what we did that day?”
Rupert felt a small twist in his gut, and his nostrils flared at a half-remembered smell, and he started to look away.
But with her free hand, Nancy touched the nape of Rupert’s neck — and she stood on her toes — and she drew his mouth close to hers — and Rupert just said, “Yes.”
When he kissed her, she tasted of everything.
Acknowledgements
Nobody writes a decent story by themselves.
These stories, decent and otherwise, wouldn’t exist without the wisdom of the members present and past of the Cecil Street Irregulars workshop and the Gibraltar Point sf workshop; without the guidance of ChiZine’s editors/publishers Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi most recently, and editors Don Hutchison, Michael Rowe and Robert Morrish earlier in the game. And they’d be no good without family. My parents Lawrence and Olga offered nothing but love and support in a long sequence of thumbs-up to these stories; if they wondered about the content, they — mostly — kept it to themselves. My brother Peter read, and reads, them dutifully. My long-lost cousin Joe tracked me down just last year, and unwittingly spurred me on to write “The Webley.”
It is true. Nobody writes a decent story by themselves.
Copyrights
“The Sloan Men” originally appeared in Northern Frights 2, Mosaic Press, 1994
“Janie and the Wind” originally appeared in Cemetery Dance #38, Spring 2002
“Night of the Tar Baby” originally appeared in Northern Frights 5, Mosaic Press, 1999
“Other People’s Kids” is original to this collection, 2009
“The Mayor Will Make a Brief Statement and Then Take Questions” originally appeared in ChiZine #33, July-September 2007
“The Pit-Heads” originally appeared in Northern Frights 4, Mosaic Press, 1997
“Slide Trombone” is original to this collection, 2009
“The Inevitability of Earth” originally appeared as “Ground Bound” in On Spec, Spring 1999
“Swamp Witch and the Tea-Drinking Man” originally appeared in Tesseracts Eleven, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2007
“The Delilah Party” originally appeared in Cemetery Dance #56, 2006
“Fly in Your Eye” originally appeared in Horrors: 365 Scary Stories, Barnes & Noble, 1997
“Polyphemus’ Cave” originally appeared in Queer Fear 2, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002
“The Webley” is original to this collection, 2009
All stories copyright © David Nickle.
About the Author
David Nickle
David Nickle lives and works in Toronto, Ontario in the company of his partner Karen Fernandez, and not far from an old filling station where his grandfather John Nickle briefly pumped gasoline in the 1930s. David was born somewhat later, in 1964.
Since then, he has authored numerous short stories and one published novel, The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder — all while cultivating an unfortunate singing voice and a tragic affection for the music of Tom Waits.
He is not finished yet.