The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 1: Nightmare Seasons (Necon Classic Horror)

by Charles L. Grant

  And as soon as I decided there was none, I rose again and took out a handkerchief to blot at my face while I made my way through all the first-floor rooms.

  I had not been in Stephenson’s house a good many times, as many people have supposed because of our closeness, but as far as I could tell everything was as it should have been. Except Rex was not here.

  Upstairs it was the same.

  By the time I returned outside I was swallowing hard for air, and even the oven that called itself the outdoors was preferable to what I had left behind. My legs were somewhat wobbly from all that climbing and ducking, so I dropped onto the low stoop and let my hands sag over my knees. I could not move for several minutes; my eyes burned, my throat scratched, and I must have gone through every trick in the book to keep myself from passing out before I noticed, between slow blinks, the puddles drying out on the walk. I leaned to my left and pressed a palm against the ground: the grass was brown and dry, but the earth beneath was waterdark and spongy. I stood and backed away toward my car; I could see diamond droplets on a few of the windows, the stone beneath the sills streaked wetly and fading. It was the same all around the house, and when I looked in one of the rain barrels, there was fresh water glinting in the bottom.

  I couldn’t help checking a hose I found coiled beneath a spigot; the dirt at the nozzle was caked hard and old.

  I did not attempt to construct an explanation. Not yet. I was still reacting to Rex’s frantic call, to the deserted silence of the house and grounds, and to try to make more of damp earth than that it constituted an invitation to a pre-noon bout of drinking. Let the thinking come later, I told myself as I headed quickly back to the car; right now I had to get away from the dead-eyed windows that reflected things I just as soon didn’t want to see.

  Ten minutes later I found a place to park, in front of the venerable grade school on High Street. I walked to the comer slowly, glanced blindly up and down Centre Street, then ducked into the luncheonette, where I had a long, tasteless meal. Lots of coffee. A few hesitant smiles from the waitress, who, I knew, wanted to razz me about eating here instead of my own place. When I was done, forgetting immediately what had been placed before me, I headed back past my car and through the iron-spear gates that led into the park.

  I sighed. Though Oxrun was exceptional, even it needed a place where one could hide if needed, could imagine there was nothing in the world but children playing and lovers courting. Could imagine that a heavy rainstorm in one place didn’t necessarily mean it had to be the same in another.

  I meandered along the blacktop paths that branched out from the entrance, oases of greylight slanting through the gaps of hickory, ash, red maple and oak. I shivered in response to the sudden drop in temperature, had to shade my eyes to look beyond the boles and thick shrubbery to the playing fields beyond. There I could see singles, couples and families already gathering for the biweekly band concert, picnic baskets and sun umbrellas in hand, the places where the slow-shifting light would eventually flee already staked out by those willing to take the heat now for a promise of later relief. There was only one baseball game in progress, and it was desultory, a winding through the motions because Saturday afternoon wouldn’t be a true Saturday afternoon without it. The moment the first note was struck in the huge gazebo, however, everything would stop, duty done, permission given to lie down and doze.

  I moved on, however, in no need of company, rounding the kiosks and small pavilions that sold snacks to the youngsters who had conned their parents, newspapers for those who had conned themselves. The ground rose gently and I followed it upward, heading for the summit of the low hill that centered the park. Just before I reached it, I cut through the underbrush to the grassy slope on the other side, using the twisted, drooping limbs of an ancient weeping elm as a screen for shade while I perched on my favorite root and gazed down. At the gazebo where the band in its crimson was already setting up, at the ball fields lifting faint red dust into the useless breeze, at the sweep of trees on the left that surrounded the pond. Generally, that spring-fed, L-shaped body of water was too cold for swimming, but now I could hear gusts of laughter, of shrieks, the crack of bat-and-ball, the admonition of a mother to a child playing with a stray dog; the wind was right, and I would be able to hear the music without leaving the shade.

  It wasn’t that I disliked people or their company; I just didn’t feel like doing any talking just yet. I wasn’t about to go to the police; young Abe Stockton, or one of the other patrolmen, would only take me back to the house to show me what I’d missed, the perfectly reasonable explanation for the desertion, and the rain. Which is why I also hadn’t called Paul Hollander, either. I was, frankly, feeling a little bit stupid, working myself into a hot-weather lather over something I knew had the most simple of answers; and what I didn’t need then was someone pointing it out before I’d discovered it myself. Pride, I suppose. And I knew if I had any brains I’d call Hollander now and get it over with before the rest of my day was ruined with inaction.

  And I had just about decided to get up and go when the band began playing, having obviously come to the conclusion there was no better way to pass a July afternoon than with Gershwin. Nobody, not even my sheepish stupidity, could move me with an enticement like that, a web of muted brass that settled over you like a shawl of indolent gossamer, that magnified the sounds of the swimming and the playing; it ignored the clock, it ignored the sun, and anyone who moved a muscle for more than the banishment of a pesky fly was more crazy than I, worrying about Rex.

  I dozed, feeling the music and not caring about the grin I felt on my face.

  I daydreamed—about the Cock’s Crow, about Grace, about Grace and me, about the livin’ that was easy for Grace and me . . . about Rex telling me frantically he didn’t mean it. Didn’t mean it. The hissing, the crackling, and suddenly the dead line.

  I opened my eyes and almost strangled on a choked, startled cry.

  Elizabeth Corey was standing in front of me, the girl-child clinging to her pleated white skirt and sucking her thumb.

  Too embarrassed by my reaction to speak, I sat up quickly and motioned them to sit by me if they wished. The girl sat between us, knees drawn up and hands gripping them loosely. Elizabeth stretched out her legs and folded her hands in her lap. Though I kept glancing over the little one to her, there was no response at all, nothing but a calm, almost blank gazing down the slope to the band.

  But she was beautiful, and I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it that clearly the first night. Haloed with leaves, touched by the sun, framed by a background of white birch, she seemed a bas-relief from some unknown Monet, a ghost of Renoir, specks and dots and whispers of pastels that congealed into something that could only be shattered if disturbed.

  It grew hotter, but I did not move to wipe the perspiration from my arms, my chin, the sides of my neck. As Gershwin wove, I nodded while my hands fluttered to accompany the dream.

  There was no sound but the music.

  Finally, when the band lowered its instruments for a refreshment break and the small crowd stirred as if newly awakened, I turned to Elizabeth and asked her if she knew why Rex hadn’t been home earlier this afternoon. I’d meant to ask the reason for their spat, but the words had somehow rearranged themselves when I noticed her eye-clear, unblemished, not a cell damaged or a mote of discoloration visible. Paul strikes again, I thought somewhat sourly, and Rex is vindicated, at least of abuse.

  She turned to me and lifted her shoulders in a faint shrug.

  “Paul called me, you know,” I said. I forced a laugh. “I hope he doesn’t go storming over there and demand a duel or something. He’s like that, you see. Rex may be the poet, but Hollander is the chevalier.”

  The quiver on her lips may have been a smile.

  “I know,” I said, absently brushing at the little girl’s sunwarm hair. “That doesn’t sound like a cop, does it—or rather, a guy who used to be a cop. But as you’ve already no doubt noticed, this place i
sn’t your run-of-the-mill community, either. I have a friend I used to work with when he first came on the force, Abe Stockton. I think he’s the only member of the force who hasn’t gone to college.” I laughed again and shook my head. “Like the last election. I could give you five dollars for every man you meet who voted for Truman, and I’d still have enough left over to buy a Cadillac. Crazy.” I waited. “Crazy.” Waited again. “Is ... that is, are you staying with Paul-never mind, never mind, it’s none of my business. I just wish I knew where Rex had gone. He tends to the histrionic now and then.”

  I couldn’t help it. I knew how I sounded, and I just couldn’t help it.

  I tried to be tactful, “Look, I hope what cropped up between you two isn’t going to ruin the engagement.” A glance at her hand; there was no ring, or signs one had been there. “I mean, Paul was a little hysterical when he caned me this morning, to tell the truth, and I’d think . . . well, if you don’t mind me saying so, you really don’t look all that broken up about it. Most women I know would be after the man with a cleaver, or crying their eyes out, you know what I mean? Of course, Rex has a habit of seeing things that aren’t there, and maybe you two weren’t—”

  Suddenly, the little girl jumped to her feet just as the band started the second half of its program. She grinned down at me, took a feigned swipe at my chin and raced into the trees behind us. Elizabeth looked over her shoulder, a hand nervously to her lips.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll get her back.” I wanted to add a reassuring pat to her arm, her back, but I didn’t. Instead, I shoved aside a branch and gave grinning chase. I didn’t call out, either, primarily because I felt sorry for the little girl; so quiet and gentle she was, and here she was dragged around like some kind of doll while her mother played this man against that, moved from this place to that . . . What kind of a life is that for a kid? Small wonder she wanted to play.

  So I played with her.

  After a few moments we were into an improvised running game of hide-and-seek. She would duck behind a trunk, I would creep up as loudly as I could and leap around it with a threatening grunt, only to find her darting away. She was fast, her arms catching shafts of sunlight like glints of warm steel; and more than once her energetic flailings would bring her perilously close to a fall on her face. Yet she never lost her balance. She pranced, she twirled, she wove across the hilltop like a zephyr seeking rhyme.

  I tried to follow, but it wasn’t long before I was feeling the pressure. Though the farther we ran the cooler it became, it was hard for my lungs to keep pace with my heart. Finally, calling out in laughing surrender, I sagged against a boulder and gulped for a breath.

  She poked her head around a gnarled chestnut and grinned. I waved at her. She ducked back. And when I thought my legs could stand it I staggered after her. But she was gone.

  A breeze came up, fluttering leaves and weeds.

  She scrambled to the top of a flattened rock and put her hands on her hips. Grinned. A dart of sun caught her shoulder, and the violets still pinned there numbered just three.

  I chased her, and she jumped silently down the other side. When I lunged around the rock, no more than five seconds behind, she had vanished.

  The breeze to a wind. There were shadows of massing clouds that swept like wings over the woodland.

  She popped up again, behind a brightly green laurel. And my vision was slightly blurred now, as if a glass had been set between us and had been coated with water.

  “Hey!”

  She didn’t answer; she vanished.

  We had already topped the summit and were making our way down the other side, an untouched stretch of woodland that spread to the flanking roads and would stop only when the first of the beyond-the-park estates threw up its stone wall. I was getting angry. She was making a fool of me, a mockery of the game, and if this was the way she was going to treat me when all I wanted to do was help and have some fun, she could take her goddamned violets and shove ’em down her throat. I considered leaving her then and heading back for her mother; surely the woman must be a panic by now. But it was easy to get lost in here, and she might come out on one of the roads and not know how to find her way back. It would serve her right, I thought then; the little bitch deserves a good scare.

  “Hey!” It occurred to me suddenly that I didn’t know her name. “Hey, Corey!”

  A giggling. I looked up and saw her swinging from a low branch. I lurched into a run and she dropped instantly behind a bush. When I charged through it, hands outstretched, she had moved to another rock. Another tree. I felt as if I were struggling through air turned viscous, though my brain kept telling me I was moving at normal speed.

  Leaves kicked into my face.

  A giggling.

  She was there on my right when I whirled around, there behind me when my eyes couldn’t find her.

  It was cold. Wind, shade, the touch of the ground and the brush of the shrubs.

  I wanted to stop, but she was there on my left, and over there in a shimmering of stormlike grey. Ahead of me now, just within reach; and gone . . . always gone when my fingers reached for her neck, punched toward her shoulder, clawed for her eyes.

  She was there, and she was grinning. God damn her for grinning!

  There. Over there.

  Grinning, always grinning.

  And gone.

  I couldn’t find her. I staggered around in an erratic circle and couldn’t find her. I swallowed, hugged myself, imagined myself slipping a hand around her throat and bulging her eyes, blackening her tongue. I shuddered violently, and the sensation passed as quickly as it had come. Gasping, then, I surrendered; she may have thought it great fun to tease the restaurant man into exhaustion and a fit of unreasoning anger, but I had other plans for the day, and they did not include strangling bitchy little girls or dying of exposure. But before I could take my first step back up the slope it started to rain—a slashing, sheeting rain that had me drenched within seconds. It was dark, almost twilight at two hours past noon, and though I didn’t want to do it I began retracing my steps up the hill without the girl. A lesson if she got lost, I thought bitterly; a lesson not to take advantage of her elders.

  I kept telling myself that when I finally reached my weeping elm and discovered Elizabeth gone. Great, I told myself with a punch at the tree; that’s just . . . great.

  With hands on my hips I staggered down the slope toward the gazebo. The musicians were putting away their instruments, and the crowd had already scattered. As I came up to Patrick Jameson, the postmaster and band leader, I managed to tell him between gulps and groans how much I’d enjoyed the medley. “To be honest,” I said, “I never thought you guys would be able to handle stuff like that so well. I’m really impressed. You outdid yourselves today.”

  He looked at me oddly, lifted a page of sheet music from a stand and stared at it, back to me with a curious squint. “What in hell’s so hard about Sousa, Tom?” he said.

  I gaped, cleared my throat, wiped a hand over my face and finally shook my head.

  “Must be the pond water,” he said, smiling knowingly. “What?”

  “You’re soaked, in case you hadn’t noticed, friend. You find a little cutie in the water?”

  I looked at him, hard. At the ground—dust, dry grass, a haze in the air. The sky was blue, the sun furnace-white.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You should’ve seen her.”

  It was the heat, of course, and not just the day of it but the week of it. Sullen, enervating, a presence unmoved even after the light was gone, it caused the mind to stagger, to lurch from one thought to another without the grace of reason. And it combined with one’s emotional state into a practical joke that had no idea at all where mirth ended and pain began. I should have recognized the symptoms from the beginning; god knows, they were familiar enough from my days on the beat when shadows in trees looked like trapped little children, and the instructions of the chief came out garbled and harsh.

  As it wa
s, I imagine I seemed rather clumsy and even drunk to poor Patrick. He was a fine man. He refused to allow Time to be his foe in spite of the years that had settled on his shoulders. And he refused to allow fools like me to spoil what had obviously been a fine day for him. He grinned at me, poked me, told me with my tin ear it was no wonder Gershwin sounded a lot like Sousa. And I accepted the ribbing because I deserved it.

  It was the heat, and I wasn’t thinking, and I was so pleased that he had driven me back to the real world that I promised him and his men a free round or two whenever they came to the Cock’s Crow for lunch. Then I did what I should have done before: I hurried back to my car (noting as I did so that almost an hour had passed since the little girl had lost me) and took Park Street out past the cemetery to Hollander’s set-back Dutch Colonial. All this nonsense about black eyes and desertions was beginning to sound as though my gal Sunday had left her little mining town in the West and had come East instead. Lies, deceptions, rivalries—the men I had been friends with were suddenly men I did not know.

  I had almost worked myself up to a point of active disgust when the house itself interrupted me.

  I made a slow U-tum and parked in front of it, glanced at similar homes to either side before slipping out from behind the wheel and making my way up to the front porch. All the windows I could see were solidly closed, and the bulky air-conditioning units I knew should have been there were gone. The door was ajar. And the ground damp. I did not look up to check the sky.

  As before, I moved inside with a call—an angry one, this time—shivering as a breeze slipped past me and touched at the dust I saw in the middle of the central hallway, swirling it away as though it were a desert floor and not pegged oak. The air stifled. I felt as if I’d stepped wide-eyed into the middle of a dream. I did not call again, nor did I search all the rooms; and I did not pick up the shriveled violet I spotted near the stairs. As soon as I understood I was alone, not about to be joined by anything living, I retreated to the Hudson and drove off.