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

by Charles L. Grant

  There had been a momentary temptation to ask questions of the neighbors, but it passed when I realized with a start, and a painful one at that, that I wasn’t a cop any longer and had no authority to bother people about what was rapidly becoming an irritating fancy.

  And that irritation must have brought a flush to my forehead and cheeks because, when I reached home, Grace was waiting for me on the stoop, and when she saw me climb out of the car she immediately threw up her hands and hurried inside. I had a spare bedroom on the second floor, carved out of an attic where I stored most of my books and old magazines. She had occasion to use it now and then for changing, especially into her hostess dress when a vagrant mood swept over me and I was in no shape to play the genial innkeeper for a while, if not longer. She didn’t mind it; it meant a few extra dollars in her paycheck, a chance to needle me unmercifully, and offered her the hope that tonight might be the night when I finally stopped treating her like one of the boys. Only a handful of people knew of this arrangement; Righteous, because he wasn’t blind, and Rex, Paul and Sandy, because to keep it from them would have made me feel guilty.

  I didn’t follow her up. I went directly into the kitchen, poured myself a full inch of bourbon and sat at the table with the ugly black telephone set between my hands. It made me nervous. I tried a little chiding to get myself to dial, but that didn’t work. I could not help seeing Rex last Friday night, hearing Paul’s voice this morning, watching the girl-child taunt me into exhaustion. I could barely touch the receiver; it was too much like the moment before a storm, when the air congealed and the wind died and all the lightning in the world waited to strike—that moment when nothing was as it appeared to be, when everything was wrong and you knew it and could do nothing about it.

  It occurred to me that Elizabeth and that child had one hell of a walk from Rex’s house to Paul’s. From Paul’s house to the park. From the park to . . .

  I dialed.

  Neither Hollander nor Stephenson answered.

  I tried the school, the Chancellor Inn, the Town Hall, a few mutual acquaintances, the hospital, the library, even the train station, where I was told that no one had taken the express into Hartford, nor the locals to intervening communities. Finally, with a deep breath that did nothing to help my nerves, I called the police and had my first bit of luck: Abe Stockton was catching messages that shift. He, at least, knew I seldom got worked up over things immaterial. And after listening to me for several minutes he quite rightly informed me that nothing at all untoward had happened; rather, nothing alarming enough to call in the Marines.

  I didn’t tell him about the rain, or the grinning game in the woods.

  “Since when have you been Lonelyhearts around here?” he asked me then.

  “Since I stuck my nose in where it didn’t belong,” I said.

  “God, you’re a grump.”

  “I’m hot, I’m tired, and the day I transpose Gershwin for Sousa is the day I’d better check myself into a private home someplace.”

  “The heat, Tom, it’s the heat.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You take care.”

  A polite way of saying get the hell off the phone so the real trouble can start.

  I nodded at the receiver and rang off, sat back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. I was feeling so confused now that my eyes wouldn’t focus, and I didn’t hear Grace come in until she’d spoken to me twice.

  “Sandy called,” she told me, heading for the refrigerator and my stock of iced water.

  “Oh, beautiful. He’s not coming in, right? Just what I need. Did he give an excuse? No, never mind—Marie’s paining again, right? Damn.”

  She turned with a coy swirl of her dark green skirt, the ruffles of her white satin blouse veiling and exposing the push of her breasts. Her hair had been contorted mysteriously into something not quite a bun just above the nape, and a few untrapped wisps trapped enough of the sun’s last light to stand out as though charged. And I knew then as I watched her the difference between this woman and E. Corey: Elizabeth’s beauty, if beauty it was, challenged the watcher to pinpoint the source; Grace, on the other hand, had an aura of absolute reality about her. Touch her and she giggled or winced or slapped your hand. I had the feeling if I’d tried to pinch Elizabeth she wouldn’t even notice.

  “No,” Grace said. “It’s not Marie he was talking about. It sounded to me like he’s got a little something planned on the side.”

  “Sandy? Our Sandy? The one who cuts my liquor and thinks I don’t notice? That Sandy?”

  She nodded.

  I shook my head. “Nope. Nope, never in a million years, Gracie. Never happen.”

  “I can only ten you what he sounded like, Tom.” Then she stared at me for a disconcerting moment and asked if I’d had anything to eat today. I surprised myself by realizing that my lunch might as well have not been eaten at all, and I told her so. Immediately, she began slapping pots and pans around for a quick meal to tide me until I could get Righteous to do me one of his specials later in the evening.

  And as she worked, I protested Sandy’s infidelity. “Besides,” I added, “this is his big night. He makes more in tips now than he does all week, almost. It’s got to be that he had a fight with Marie. Again. It must have been a bad one, though, the worst yet. He wouldn’t cheat her, though. Not him. He hasn’t got the guts, much less the opportunity. That woman keeps a hold on him like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Tom, I’m not arguing. I’m just telling you what—” She stopped, turned away from the stove and brandished a skillet at me. “What’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Thomas,” she said, her voice lowering dangerously, “I’m not kidding. I was going to ask you later, but you should see the look on your face.” She waited for me to respond, scowled when I didn’t. “Listen, Harry Jackson called me today, just around noon. He said you weren’t home, and he wanted to know if I knew where he could find Elizabeth Corey. What is it with those guys?” She set the skillet on a burner and adjusted the flame. Dusted her hands. Looked back at me sternly. “He made me curious, Tom. I called around after he hung up. You know, there isn’t anyone in town, no one that I talked to, who’s even heard of this woman. Her kid hasn’t been registered in school and . . .” She lifted her hands in silent question.

  I debated telling her what had happened, for some reason not wanting her to think I’d been working too hard and the heat had finally gotten me. That’s all I would need—a mother hen who thought one of her chicks had suddenly gone addled. But I lost. My confusion was such that I couldn’t even decide if this should be a secret or not. And so, between bites and swallows and a few of her whispered comments that were maddeningly neutral, I started with Hollander’s call this morning and continued until the point when I found his home empty. No. It was deserted. As soon as I said that I knew it was right. Deserted. Neither Rex nor Paul had gone to some ludicrous rite of chivalry. They were gone. Their homes were abandoned, and when I looked up to Grace I knew she agreed.

  Suddenly, the food lost all its flavor and I pushed the plate away, wishing I were a drunk so I could smother all this under a cloud of booze. “I should have gone to Paul’s right away,” I said angrily, punching at the table for the marvels of hindsight.

  “He wouldn’t have been there.”

  I didn’t ask her how she knew; I only knew she was right.

  Then I glanced at the clock and uttered a few choice oaths that didn’t turn a hair on her head. It was nearing four and if we didn’t hurry, Righteous would be pounding on the door, wanting to know at the top of his voice if we were opening today or moving to Boston. Grace, however, insisted we wash all the dishes first, and before the last ones were dried and stored she had convinced me to take the battered Hudson and do a little snooping around. Try Sandy, try the houses again, take a tour of the streets to see if I could find Elizabeth and her daughter.

  “If they aren’t staying anywhere,” she said, “they h
ave to show up sometime. And this time you can ask them just where Paul and Rex are.”

  “But what if they come here?”

  “They aren’t ax murderers, you know.” She made a play at flexing her muscles. “And I ain’t no chicken, either.”

  I couldn’t laugh and she knew it, and she laid her hands on my shoulders and put her cheek to mine. “I wish I had an answer for you, Tom,” she whispered.

  I took hold of her waist. “So do I. And there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”

  “I know.”

  She kissed me, pulled back and squinted. “You’re a little frightened, aren’t you.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “But that isn’t the worst part.”

  She nodded. She knew so much I almost crushed her in a hug that as it was left her breathless. Then I grabbed my jacket from the hall closet and was gone.

  peekaboo

  Paul’s house seemed diminished, squalid. I didn’t even bother to get out of the car.

  i see you

  I drove past the park, slowed opposite the gates, and tried to imagine Elizabeth and the child coming out, meeting Rex, seeing Rex play his role to the hilt and sweeping an arm around both to take them first to dinner, then into his home.

  hey, tom, i’m in love

  The car moved at a virtual crawl, and I kept one hand at the wheel, draped over the rim at the wrist, and the other on the doorframe. It was like the old days, I thought without a trace of nostalgia, back in the patrol car; the only things missing were the voices buzzing from the radio. I had to shake my head vigorously to rid my mind of the superimposition, to concentrate on what I was seeing instead of what something thought I should see.

  I looked in the alleys between the houses, between the businesses on Centre Street; I looked around the corners of hedges, of porches, of low brick walls capped with sleeping felines and sluggish, barely moving birds. From the back all the women began to look like Elizabeth and all the children wore violets pinned to their shoulders. Twice I had motorists blare impatiently at me and swerve awkwardly around the Hudson with a shake of a fist; and twice I nearly struck dogs that had ambled off the curb.

  The sun was still full, balancing on the horizon, yet the day felt like a midnight that would not yield to dawn. A midnight in July when the heat refused to crawl back into the shadows, when the air stilled and the cicada buzzed, when sleep was impossible and moving around just as bad.

  On impulse I took Williamston Pike out into the valley, thinking they might have headed for one of the farms out there. But I saw no one walking, no one running, nothing at all on the shoulder of the road.

  At one point I stopped. Dead. In the middle of the road. Thinking that perhaps it was time for me to see one of those new mind doctors. After all, I told myself as I stared at the trees, what had really happened? Nothing. Just because people weren’t in their homes when I called or stopped by, just because people knew the same people I did, just because . . . but there was Crace and the look she had given me. She was not a fanciful woman; she had anchors that kept her feet on the ground in the highest of winds, the most turbulent of storms. Yet she too sensed a curious (for wan t of a better word) force in motion here in the Station. A force that had been somehow generated and fed by Rex Stephenson and Paul Hollander and, for all I knew, Sandy Fielder, too. It did not make any difference to the most literal of minds that such forces, whatever they were and wherever they came from, did not exist and do not exist. That was not the point. It had happened, it had begun, and until I could prove to myself otherwise, I could not help but believe it was true.

  Later, when I had Rex’s explanation for his hysteria on the phone and Paul’s explanation for the lie about Elizabeth’s eye . . . then and only then would I be able to see the logical thread that connected them, the points where I missed my connections and thus conned myself into thinking I was dealing with . . . forces.

  Later. Later, when the alarms I had developed during those years as a cop stopped their incessant, infernal, frightening clamor.

  Later, I thought as I pulled into the train depot, got out and had myself a few gulps of tepid water from the platform fountain.

  Later, I thought as I pulled into Stephenson’s driveway and stopped with the motor still running in front of the house. I stared at it, daring me to tell me a secret, to give me a hint, to unearth me a clue. But the more I looked the more deserted it seemed, the more forlorn, the more . . . hollow.

  And it was then that I knew there would be no later.

  No rational explanations, no brilliant feats of logic.

  there was no black eye, and the girl-child wore violets

  But even within the realm of the impossible there had to be something, a connection to be made that I was still missing. Rex and Paul and possibly Sandy. Two bachelors and a married man, all three of them smitten by the beauty of a wraith. My fingers drummed on the steering wheel while I watched the still-open front door hold darkness inside. Three men. Three . . . lonely men; lonely in spite of the people they had around them, lonely, and vulnerable to whatever Elizabeth had offered them, and had withdrawn.

  But why withdrawn? Had they each said something to her that had kindled her anger—or had they tried to put their hands on her and that had sparked some safety valve, some trigger, some barely hidden mechanism that turned her vengeful.

  Harry Jackson, said Grace, had been looking for her, too. And I supposed that if I knew him better I would find he was the same.

  But damnit, I demanded silently, who the hell is she?

  A shadow drifted over the sloped hood of the car, darkened the face of the house for an instant and was gone. I craned my neck awkwardly and looked up, saw a cloud, several, taking the last light from the sky. They were large and they were boiling, and I almost had the window rolled up before the first drop slapped into my face. The stirring of thunder. The elms down the drive gave a dead voice to the wind, a roaring above their crowns that soon funneled to the ground. Leaves in dervishes, scorpion twists, and I had just turned the vehicle around when the rainlashing began.

  Hailstones that pounded, a thrumming that bellowed, and when I put a hand to the key to start the ignition my fingers curled away from a stinging bitter cold.

  Lightning walked over Oxrun Station, and the light that it gave me was dead flat and white.

  My hands rose to the steering wheel and I saw them trembling, and I no longer bothered to tell myself I was dreaming, it was the heat, I had heard Gershwin only in my mind. The absolute wrongness of it all had finally worked its way completely through, left its residue behind. It was all wrong, and it felt right, and before I knew it I was barreling down the street toward Sandy Fielder’s home.

  As I veered sharply into a lonely sidestreet, thumped to a stop at the curb and killed the engine, I allowed myself one small smile of satisfaction: the storm was a real one, not simply centered over any one house. All the streets, all the buildings, all the trees were getting drenched, and I saw with my own eyes a half dozen people racing for shelter with newspapers tented uselessly over their heads.

  It was a small consolation.

  Sandy’s front door was open, and all the windows closed.

  Prudence should have kept me in the car, should have had me restart the engine and drive straight to the police station, where I could have made so much noise that someone, anyone, would have come with me to find what I was sure would be inside that house. But prudence also told me that ravings about a woman who came out of the park and was strolling around the Station killing off my friends would only land me in a cell until Grace came to take me home, to tuck me in, to fill me with soothing nothings about the rights and wrongs of the world until I fell into a fitful sleep.

  So I did then what I had not done since the day I left the force: I thumbed open the glove compartment and took out the oiled holster that held my revolver. I didn’t bother to examine it and search for memories, nor did I bother to load it; the sight of that barrel poking toward your s
tomach is enough for most people to lose what lunch they’d had, anyway. I slipped it into my jacket pocket, slid across the seat and opened the door. A deep breath to brace myself against the cold of the rain, and I was out and running, tripping up the steps and onto the porch, where I leaned against the wall and waited until my heart caught up with me.

  The streetlamps had been turned on, but all they did was tum the air to a faint fog, illuminate the rain to darting streaks of silver, make the gloom more intense as I blinked the water from my eyes and moved inside.

  There was no entrance hall or foyer; I was on the extreme right of the living room, the archway to the dining room directly beside me. There was no one in either; magazines on end tables, a radio against the far wall, table setting in the dining room winking against the lightning. I walked slowly across the carpeting toward the radio, toward a doorway that, at a glance, was apparently Marie’s bedroom. I could see a dresser, a chest of drawers, laced curtains on the rear window, the foot of the bed. I sniffed, my nose wrinkling against the clear scent of disinfectant, but when I stepped over the threshold there was no one inside. Only the bed, with rumpled sheets a faded, soiled white. The window was open slightly from the top, and a gust of wind pushed at the curtains, nudged the sheets, drifted to the floor a long streak of grey dust.

  I closed my eyes tightly, backed out and walked into the dining room, into the kitchen behind it, where I found a chair kicked back against the fire-scorched edge of a porcelain stove. There was dust underneath the chair, and on the hard-cushioned seat. This time, however, I knelt down and put a finger to it. Coarse, thick, not dust at all. Ashes. And they were still warm.