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

by Charles L. Grant

  I had almost decided to leave when I heard a faint thumping outside. Quickly, I moved to the window over the sink and parted the curtains there. It was Sandy; he was standing on the bottom step of the back porch, whirling around as though the rain were the most wonderful, most delightful thing that had ever happened to him. I smiled . . . and killed it the moment I caught a good look at his face.

  His eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring, and the arms I had thought were thrown up in pure joy were actually warding off some attacker I couldn’t see. I rushed to the door and flung it open, just in time to see him leap to the ground and sprint across the back yard. I have no idea where he thought he was running to, but he never made it; a shearing wind slammed into him and toppled him, dropping him to his knees, where he stayed for a second, another, before looking up toward the back. Then the air split with thunder, and a glare of blue-white made me turn my head away.

  But not before I saw it, the lightning that moved so interminably slowly that a crawling baby could have escaped it. A baby, but not Sandy. He was struck in the center of his spine, and his head snapped up, his mouth open in a scream drowned by the rain. Then he shuddered, slumped, fell prone to the ground.

  I couldn’t move. There was no question he was dead, had been the instant he’d been touched by the whitefire. Yet still I couldn’t move to kneel beside him, to check him. Because, while I watched, streams of fog lifted from beneath him, his clothes burst into flame, and in the pouring rain he was transformed into ashes. Into dust. And despite the rain, and the nausea that was launching itself from every corner of my stomach, and the cry that had somehow become trapped in my throat, I could see quite clearly the space where his left hand had been, and I could see quite clearly the shriveled blackened violet.

  How fast she moves, I thought as I stumbled back through the house: from the park to Paul’s and now here to Sandy’s. How fast she moves when she doesn’t have a car. I had better tell Grace about how fast she moves. Suppose she wants to come to the roadhouse again? I won’t have to give her a lift, of course. She moves fast. Without a car. She must carry the child under her arms, unless the child runs with her, so terribly fast that no one can see them, thinks they’re nothing but the breath of a wind.

  I sat behind the wheel listening to my mind babbling, waiting for it to catch up with the reality of what I’d seen. It was as though there were two people in the car: one was drooling slightly from the comer of his mouth, trying to force away the image of a man not burned but seared to death, trying not to imagine the way the lightning crept through the house to strike Marie in her bed and the boy in his chair, trying not to imagine what Sandy had said to Elizabeth and the child that made Elizabeth strike out with such indiscriminate fury; and the other, a saner, more rational creature not quite a man, waiting, just waiting, as though he had run a mile ahead and was resting while the rest of the pack caught up with his distance. Waiting. Just waiting.

  Then I heard a clicking. Rhythmic, pulsing, filling the car until the storm was blotted out. I looked down and to my right, and saw that I had taken out the gun and was pulling the trigger. Again, and again, and again, and again, until I could feel the cramp begin to pull in my hand. It took most of my strength to pry the gun loose, and more to grab hold of the steering wheel once the engine had started.

  It occurred to me then that I ought to call Harry Jackson, to warn him away from Elizabeth before she gave him a flower. But the only thing that was working for me was the part of my mind that told me to go home. The thought about Jackson vanished, and I pulled away from the curb.

  There’s no sense attempting to explain the convulsions I suffered during the next two hours. I can only remember fragments of the drive, moments of rain, the grumblings of the storm. I can barely remember pulling up in front of my house and staggering inside, where I found the bottle of bourbon still on the kitchen table. I was tempted to drink without a glass, but caution somehow managed to get the first hold. I poured. I drank. I poured again, ran into the bathroom and vomited. Washed my face and poured a third time. Now the liquor stayed, and the cold from the storm drained off and was gone.

  I returned to the bathroom and stripped. Showered. Toweled dry as roughly as I could. By the time I had dressed and was ready to face the roadhouse I had caught up with myself, and I knew with a sickening certainty that it was, at last, over. If Jackson was so eager to get hold of Elizabeth, it meant that she had somehow latched on to him during the previous night, or perhaps this morning. And if she had, if she had taken him as she had taken Rex and Paul and miserable little Sandy, then it was fairly certain she had given him the last flower. And as horrid as that made me feel, I knew too there was nothing I could do about it. The first time he angered her he was a dead man. It was as simple and as horrifying as that. A dead man. A dead man.

  I walked around the house, then, for yet another hour. I was attempting to convince myself that I was in no danger. That there was no reason for me to try Stockton again and tell him my story, Four flowers, four deaths, and Elizabeth and the girl-child would walk back into the park.

  Oddly enough, my biggest problem was how to tell Grace. I could picture her sitting in her regular place at the bar, her hair in its twirl, her blouse with its ruffles, her face with that curiously amused, intent look. I could hear her asking me what I thought Elizabeth was, and I could hear me saying that she was a spirit of some kind. Maybe, if such things existed, an extension of a sprite, a faerie . . . though that last rang hollow since all that I’d read of faeries and their realm had been things of gentle, almost otherworldly beauty. What cruelty invaded it came from the land of men, not from themselves. But it was a thought, I could hear myself telling her; a thought better than nothing at all, since I had nothing at all on which to base my speculations.

  Nothing, I thought sourly, but the dustgraves of five people.

  Finally, close to ten o’clock, I knew I was stalling. I grabbed a raincoat and raced across the ground to the roadhouse’s back door. Righteous was sitting on a stool near one of the ovens, his back to me, his hands holding a magazine whose contents must have been infinitely more interesting than my entrance since he didn’t look up once, not even when I spoke his name in greeting.

  In front the place was nearly empty. The storm and its abrupt rising had, as storms usually do, taken its toll on the voice of my cash register. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t sure I would be able to pull off the innkeeper role with the aplomb it deserved, not after what I had just seen, what I had been forced to believe. And Grace, bless her heart, took one look at my face and didn’t ask a single question. Instead, she motioned for the substitute bartender—Patrick Jameson, in fact—to bring me a drink and sat me on my seat where I could survey my domain.

  And so the night passed.

  Slowly, quietly, every few minutes dropping a word to Grace about what I had not found. As soon as the first word had come to my tongue I knew I couldn’t tell her. If she believed me mad, I would not be able to withstand her pity; and if she believed me, I would not be able to stand her terror. So I mentioned that the houses were still empty, that Sandy seemed to have taken off with his family, and that I was probably going to catch pneumonia from the drenching I’d taken.

  At the last, however, I found myself walking more and more frequently to the door, staring out at the parking lot and the woodland across the road. Looking. Waiting. Unable to shake the feeling that once Harry Jackson had been taken care of, Elizabeth and the child would come back here. Not necessarily to me, but to meet someone else. Anyone else. It apparently made no difference who it was.

  And that, I discovered when the last customer had left and Grace and Patrick were cleaning up the mess, was the real horror of this nightmare turned real: there were no odd markings on the victims to sign them as prey, no ancient family curses, no deep personal secrets. The men who had been taken were lonely, nothing more. And in their loneliness they had tacitly or otherwise accepted Elizabeth’s presence, and that acceptan
ce, that willingness to shed the feeling of being lonely, was the trigger for the storm.

  I turned away from the door. It was mad. I was mad. All this talk of faeries and curses and markings on victims ... I almost sobbed in self-pity.

  To die the way Sandy had was most definitely preferable to a dying of the mind.

  Patrick left with Righteous.

  Grace came up to me, her coat over her shoulders, and she kissed me. “You all right?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “That talk we had before, it didn’t bother you?”

  I frowned. “Sure it bothered me.” You’re really a cold fish, Paul had told me. “I’m just not used to tailing after a jinx, you know. It’s something I never learned on the job, and it sure as hell isn’t something I expected to find here, of all places.”

  “All right, all right,” she said. “You don’t have to snap off my head.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “See you Tuesday?”

  I smiled, kissed her, watched her hunch her coat over her head and race for her car. It sputtered a few times, and I couldn’t help grabbing the doorknob and thinking maybe I should ask her to stay with me. The Cock’s Crow had suddenly grown too large and too empty, but by the time I had made up my mind she had left me. Once again, I thought, you have taken the bull by the horns, Thomas you ass. My hand reached for the outside lights . . . and froze.

  Across Mainland Road, on the slightly sloped verge before the forest began, were two figures blurred by the rain. A tall one, a short one, standing there without cover, without coats, unaffected by the storm. Their faces were pale, their hands clasped, and there was no doubt at all who they were watching.

  I backed away and stumbled into a table. I pushed at it, and kicked aside a chair. Shadows from the dim wall lights. Murmurings from the kitchen. A dripping from a faucet behind the bar. They were out there, framed by the door’s center pane. They were watching, they were watching, and I didn’t stop moving until I fell against a barseat that jabbed sharply into my spine. I spun around, hands out and ready to grab . . . and saw it.

  In the middle of the bar.

  A tiny fresh violet; violet number four.

  I refuse to believe it even now. I have the Cock’s Crow and the Hudson, I have my friends on the force and my friends in the schools, I have memories of Rex’s poetry and memories of Paul’s laugh; I have Grace, goddamnit, and there’s no possible way one could say I was lonely. Being alone is not the same, being alone in my case is entirely by choice.

  They step onto the road. Hand in hand. And there is thunder.

  I make a fist of my right hand and smash the violet into a pulpy smear I wipe off with a rag. I pull from the back of the register drawer the handgun that Sandy kept there in case of trouble. This one is loaded, and I pull back the hammer and stare at the door.

  Lonely? Sometimes, I suppose, but surely not enough to set off whatever moves them. They’ve made a mistake this time and there’s no way to tell them; they’ve made a mistake, but now they’ve met someone who knows what they’re doing. I have no idea if bullets will stop them, but in the form they’ve taken I refuse to see why not, especially since it’s the only thing I have at the moment, the only way I can prove I’m not losing my mind. Aim . . . and shoot Elizabeth straight through the heart. I can do it. I’m an expert. Straight through the heart, just as easy as that. Then the little girl will start screaming and go back where she came from. I can’t see the flaw, though there’s a trembling in my arm.

  But there is one, damnit. I can feel it. I know it. I can sense it on the back on my neck, like the prickling that tickles before the first drop of rain.

  There’s a flaw. And I’m blind.

  And the door opens, and I see it.

  The little girl is grinning—damn, she’s always grinning!—and she releases Elizabeth’s hand . . . and I see it. Oh god, I see it.

  It isn’t Elizabeth; it’s the girl. That sweet little girl with the sweet little smile. With the dark eyes and long lashes, with rounded pink knees. Elizabeth, whatever she is, is only the lure, and the girl is the trap that directs all the dying. And for no reason at all, then, I remember Rex, and his Shakespeare, and the story of Oberon and Bottom, and most of all . . . Puck. A faerie, perhaps, but look closely and you’ll see a streak of mean there that is centuries wide and blooded deep red. A vicious, tearing streak that hides not well under the guise of a prank.

  It’s the girl. It’s the girl.

  And I can see in her eyes a sudden fear of the gun that aims at her head. What it will do to her I don’t know, but I do know she fears it, that it will destroy her somehow. It’s the time, then, and I’m ready . . . it’s the time when I’m ready to shoot down a little girl. A grinning little child. A gentle little child who played with me in the park, who sucked at her thumb, who looked at me with loving the way only a little girl can.

  My god, it’s the girl.

  The lightning is coming. I don’t know if I can.

  The black outside turns white, and shimmers.

  I don’t know if I can kill that little girl’s smile.

  If I do it, and I win, I know then I’ll never see the sun bright again.

  The windows all shatter, and the wind thrusts me back. My arm is up and aiming and . . . god, Tom, can’t you see it’s only a little girl?

  A sweet little girl, a smiling little girl, a lovely little girl with a nosegay of fresh violets pinned to her shoulder . . . a nosegay of fresh violets too many to count.

  Part III: Autumn, 1960 — Night’s Swift Dragons

  6:45 P.M.

  The air was sharp, like the sudden snap of two fingers at memory’s goad; the sun bled crimson to the tree-spiked horizon, and the shadows it cast were knife-edged and long. Foliage flared, and the few naked branches were jagged cracks in a sky that was cloudless and darkening. The streets throughout the Station were empty—a split second of desertion when all the pedestrians were still paused in doorways, and automobiles waited for the cold thrust of the key. On Centre Street a neon light was brittle and sputtering, buzzing like a summer fly trapped between two panes; on Devon a shutter banged, a wooden hand clapping for the onset of dusk; and on Fox Road a garbage can teetered at the edge of a cracked curb. There was no train at the depot, no movement in the park, and a crow by the hospital studied the remains of a long-dead squirrel.

  The air was sharp, and the streetlamps winked on, doubling the shadows and multiplying the gloom.

  The air was sharp, and it did not move.

  A caught-breath silence that waited for a scream.

  6:50 P.M.

  The Oxrun Station branch of the Post Office was closed. Set back from Williamston Pike all the corner of Centre Street across from the library, it accepted the dusk as it had for a century—a dark-brick building with broad and tall white-framed windows and a center-peaked roof that spread to form perfect nesting eaves for sparrows and grey doves. Four concrete steps edged and split by a wrought-iron railing led to arched double doors—one In, one Out—faceted perfectly into sixteen small panes.

  The lobby itself was building-wide, hushed, lighted softly by four white globes on age-dark chains, globes that served as graveyards for black-shadowed insects. To the left of the entrance was an unmarked paneled door with a brass knob unpolished by the touch of a hand. Directly ahead, the lobby’s rear wall was divided into two unequal sections: the first—about ten feet long—soared almost to the vaulted ceiling fourteen feet above, was plain thick oak to the height of a man’s waist, frosted glass above that, and wood again to the top. The glass was split into three brass-caged windows: the first for stamps and special mailings, the second for packages, the third for General Delivery and complaints about the service. The remaining and largest portion of the rear wall was a warren of glass-fronted, lettered and numbered boxes, small ones on top, medium in the middle, large along the bottom. All of them worked by means of a key.

  The rest of the lobby was a gleaming white marble
floor that was broken only by high tables with pens on chains, stands for pamphlets, dampened sponges for those who didn’t trust their tongues.

  There were faint cobwebs in the high corners.

  There were echoes even at midnight.

  Yet in spite of its austerity it was constantly filled with voices, albeit voices that were subdued even when the lobby was filled to overflowing. The old men who met there to pick up their mail and plan their day always spoke in deferential whispers, as if aware of the dusty portraits of the five Presidents on the walls; mothers held their children in loose restraining grips to keep them from playing tap dancer between the legs of the grown-ups; and there was soft, constant chatter with the employees behind the cages—comments on the weather, on the upcoming presidential election, dollops of gossip for embroidery and expansion. Exclamations and explanations, however, were reserved for the library, the streets, and the autumn-chilled porches; here you were given only the icing, not the cake.

  Behind the building was sanctuary—a small parking lot, and a concrete-aproned loading dock tipped with iron long since worn smooth by the sales of boots and the drop of mail sacks. Thickboled trees cut sight and sound, visitors were unwelcome, and twilight came early no matter the season.

  And no matter the season, Patrick Jameson always sat in his fan-backed wicker chair under the overhanging roof and waited for his postmen to return with the last pickup of the evening. He was alone. He enjoyed it. It provided him the first opportunity of the day to enjoy his cigar without someone grimacing at the aroma and making cracks about the ancient white holder he used to keep the tobacco away from his lips. He was a slight man even beneath the bulk of his blue windbreaker and white, roll-necked Irish sweater, his face not quite gaunt against the assault of sixty years. His hair was full and white and combed back in gentle waves from his forehead, his eyes large and brown, and when he spoke he used only one side of his mouth, as though he had been brushed by a stroke that had spared him for a while.