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

by Charles L. Grant

Patrick sat behind the desk and rubbed his palms hard over his face from forehead to chin. His vision was beginning to blur, and though he had taken four glasses of water in the last half hour his mouth felt as if it had been packed with cotton. When he cleared his throat, Karen snapped a hand to her neck, smiling weakly, foolishly, while Harv moved to stand behind her and lay a palm on her shoulder.

  “Before anyone says anything,” Patrick said then, astounded that his voice betrayed none of his apprehension, “I want you all to understand that what we’re doing here is real.” He held up the wrist with the cigar burn. “It’s real, no matter how insane it may seem. Just don’t ask me what it is because I don’t know.”

  “It’s a dream,” Karen said, ignoring what he’d told her. “I’m sure of it. See, I was reading in the Reader’s Digest about dreams and things like that, and they said that you can have a dream that’s so real you can’t tell the difference between your sleeping and your walking around. You can even tell yourself it’s a dream and you won’t believe it as long as you’re dreaming.” She stopped, frowning to herself. “Does that make sense?”

  “It does to me,” said Harv, “but who’s doing the dreaming?”

  “I am,” she told him. “See, I’m having this dream and you’re all in it.”

  “Then how come I can think?”

  “You only think you can, but you can’t, not really. It’s all me, you see. Everything that happens is because of me.” She smiled brightly. “And as long as I stay inside here, nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Where are you sleeping?” Jack asked, disbelief apparent.

  “Home, where else? The day ended, I drove home, probably fell asleep on the couch the way I do sometimes, and . . .” She spread her arms to finish the thought. Then: “I just wish it wasn’t so damned scary.”

  Patrick had covered his eyes with the heels of his hands while she talked, grinding pain into his mind to keep himself from believing such a seductive explanation.

  “We could all be crazy, you know,” Harv said then, moving away from Karen’s chair to the middle of the room. “I saw a movie once, these people were all in this cave, see, and they couldn’t get out. So one by one they started to go crazy, seeing things that weren’t there. Some guy turned into a monster, but he didn’t, really. It was just that the other crazies thought he had, so they killed him. And when he was dead he changed back and they knew what they’d done. But they was still all crazy.”

  “What happened at the end,” Jack said in the middle of a sigh.

  Harv looked sheepish. “I don’t know. I fell asleep.”

  A silence prolonged, and Patrick lowered his hands to find them watching him. Slowly, sadly, he shook his head. “It’s nice to think that,” he said, “but . . .” He shook his head again.

  Suddenly, Harv jerked his head around and stared at the shade.

  “What?” Patrick said.

  Harv shrugged. “Don’t know. I thought I heard my name.” “You’re crazy,” Jack said, smiled quickly, and Harv laughed. Karen leaned forward to the edge of her chair. “If this is . . . if it’s right, Pat, then who are they out there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Demons,” Harv said, though he looked at nothing but the breeze-stirred shade. “There was this movie about them. They come from the devil and they do really rotten things to people because they sold their souls to the Devil.”

  “What have you sold besides stamps,” Patrick demanded.

  “It was just a thought,” Harv said.

  A thought to pass the time away, he decided, seeing that talking was better than just sitting . . . or trying to break through something that would not shatter. And if they talked long enough, loud enough, even stupidly enough they might even hit upon the reason for their being tormented this way. He glanced at Jack and received neither encouragement nor support. The man simply stood by the window and stared pensively into the corner. Again he could not help the feeling that Fawn knew more than he was saying—which was nothing at all aside from skewering opinions—and again did not want to know if the man knew anything at all.

  He folded his hands in front of him and nodded. “The way I see it,” he said, “these . . . whatever the hell they are out there, they’re not perfect. Even those demons, Harv, weren’t perfect: there were ways to beat them at their own game.”

  “What are you going to do,” Jack said. “Play the trombone at them? Joshua at the gates of the United States Post Office?”

  “Shut up, Jack!” Karen said. “At least he’s trying.”

  Jack subsided into a corner, a shadow in shadowland that waited for its summons.

  “Go on,” she urged gently.

  Patrick nodded, but allowed himself a moment for his strength to return. This was insane, he told himself; you’re an old man, for god’s sake, not the damned general of a fort.

  “What I meant was,” he said at last, “is that they’re after something. I don’t believe in coincidence. They’re after something that’s right here in the building.” His tongue touched at his lips. “One of us, maybe, or something that belongs to them that’s here in the mails.”

  “We can’t open the mail,” Harv protested. “Pat, that’s against the law!”

  “I didn’t say anything about opening the mail. I was just making a suggestion.”

  “A good thing, ’cause I don’t want any part of it.”

  “Harvey, please, just let me finish.” He took a deep breath, sniffed, exhaled. “The point is, like I said before, they’re not perfect. That means they can be beaten. What we have to do is study them, find out something about them and use it against them.” Karen opened her mouth to interrupt, but he closed it with a wave. “No,” he said, anticipating. “We haven’t really studied them. We’ve been just looking at them. There’s a difference.”

  “I must say, you’re talking about this as though it were like a problem in math,” Karen said. Her face had gone pale again, and her lower lip trembled.

  He wanted to tell her that he had to. If he fell into the panic boiling somewhere inside him, he knew he would never climb out sane. He had to force himself to treat this as if it were little more than an ordinary problem, one that obeyed all the rules of logic and reason, no matter how illogical and unreasonable it seemed at the time. He had to. There was no question that he had to. It was bad enough dealing with his own fear; he didn’t want to have to carry the others’ as well.

  “So?” Harv looked at him hard; then, without waiting for an answer, he strode to the window and yanked up the shade. His hands gripped the sill. His head jutted forward and his shoulders were squared. “Bastards.” He snapped around and glared at them. “That’s what they are, y’know. Punks. Creeps. They think they can come into my place and take over like they own it.” He ground a fist into one palm. “What they need is a lesson, y’know, And I didn’t go through hell for this country just to be made a damned fool of.”

  “Now wait a minute, Harv,” Patrick said, half rising from his chair, his heart pounding, blood swirling. “Don’t be an idiot. Good god, man, you’re damned near my age!”

  Harv leaned back slowly, drawing himself up to his full height. “Damned near— What the hell are you trying to say, Pat? That I can’t take care of myself anymore?”

  “For crying out loud, Harvey, I didn’t mean that at all.” But the words as he spoke them lacked any conviction.

  “Yeah,” the janitor said. He looked to Karen, who looked away; to Jack, who had left his comer and was smirking by the window; to Pat, whose gaze searched the office for a clue to reason. “Yeah, I’m an old man who talks too much about the good old days, right? Put my money where my mouth is, right? Ain’t that what you’re saying, Pat? Put my money where my mouth is?” He lifted a fist made smaller and uglier by the loss of three fingers. “Never knew you thought so little of me, Patrick. You and your stupid goddamn trombone.”

  “No!” he said; but Harv was already out the door and moving across the lobby. W
ith a strangled appeal for support he rushed around the desk and followed the big man to the front door. He was too late. Harv was already standing outside on the top step, hands on his hips, one foot tapping the concrete impatiently.

  Patrick moved to join him, but the door would not open.

  Tony’s body still lay there, its dead hand beseeching.

  Harv grabbed the center railing and pulled himself down as though moving through a gel, avoided Tony’s body and headed for the riders. Suddenly he doubled over, and Patrick’s hand went to his own stomach in sympathetic pain. But the janitor straightened painfully and took a second step, a third, before he was struck again. His head twisted slowly from side to side, his chin outthrust, his shoulders rolling. Another pace, angling now away from the motionless leader toward the rider immediately to his left. Patrick felt himself leaning forward, his hands to the near panes, willing Harvey strength while railing silently at the bikers.

  It almost seemed then as if the man felt the connection. His head snapped away from an invisible blow, but his left hand reached out and grabbed the biker’s wrist. The Harley wavered (it moves! Patrick thought triumphantly), the janitor struggled, and before Patrick could utter the cheer forming in his throat Harv had wrenched the black figure out of its seat.

  It struggled, then (dear god, it moves! it moves!), and thrashed wildly in Harv’s grip, legs trying to reach stomach and groin, hands reaching out for eyes and mouth.

  Patrick heard Karen whimpering; she was watching after all. The other riders seemed to stir. It was little more than a shimmering of concentrated blackness, but the sourceless light appeared less distinct, less threatening. He was sure he saw a head move in Harv’s direction, wasn’t quite as sure he saw a hand flexing in a glove.

  The figure was down on its knees, its face pressed hard into the janitor’s abdomen, its arms limp at its sides, its legs no longer kicking. Its cap had fallen into the gutter.

  “Yes,” Patrick whispered, almost jumping in place. “Yes, yes!” With a sudden, disdainful shove, Harv tossed the rider into the street, and the bike toppled over onto its thighs. There was no cry, no crash, just a slow tumbling and a raising of dust. Then he moved to the next one, good hand out and ready to grab.

  “Yes,” Patrick whispered, louder than before.

  Harv stopped, frozen, and Patrick sensed some confusion.

  “Do it, you idiot,” he said, and kicked at the unmoving door frantically. “Damnit, Harv!”

  The outstretched arm dropped slowly, and Harv sagged to his knees on the curb. He shook his head as though trying to clear it, put his hands to his ears and lowered them again, stared at them . . . and turned.

  In the office, Karen screamed.

  Patrick fell against the door when his knees buckled, his cheek pressed to a pane, one eye opened and staring.

  Harv’s face was gone. Flesh, muscle, cartilage had vanished, the skull gleaming brightly as if it had just been washed. The hands too had been stripped, and his clothes hung on his frame loosely, rippling in the breeze that stirred Tony’s hair.

  Patrick could not look away.

  He could not avoid the gradual collapse of his friend, nor the sensation more than the sound of the skull striking concrete.

  And he could not help hearing the silent scream of the man’s eyes still wide in their sockets.

  12:05 A.M.

  He leaned over the basin and doused his face, his head with sharply cold water. He sputtered and splashed himself again, half hoping some of the water would find its way into his lungs and drown him as he stood there. He had thought about dying before, when he had gripped the sides of the toilet bowl and emptied his stomach, when he’d wept as the acid boiled into his mouth and between his lips, when it was done but his stomach refused to cease its tireless convulsions—when he had lurched to his feet and saw his face in the mirror, the face of an old man whose hair had matted over his forehead to somehow and perversely give the impression of age falling away. He had been too tired to glare at it, or wonder at it; all he could do was stare at it and question the sanity that persisted in those eyes. He took to the water again, not caring that it was staining his trousers, darkening his shoes, puddling on the floor and making it slippery; anything, even the simplest of displeasures, was better than seeing Harv being murdered again, or rushing into the office once he could use his legs to find Karen slumped in the far corner while Jack stood at the window and watched the riders. He knew he had shouted something, but he couldn’t remember what it had been; he had shouted, and he had run from the room, careening toward the back and toppling sacks and warrens and tables and chairs without feeling a thing. Now there was an aching where his thighs had taken their beating, where his fingers had gripped and had been stripped away, where his lungs had expelled the air and sucked in fire. And the water wasn’t doing him a damned bit of good, though at the moment he could not think of anything else to do.

  Finally, he stopped and took hold of the basin’s slick sides. He lowered his head and spat, spat again and reached blindly for the paper towels. They were rough on his face, and he scrubbed harder, slowing only when he began to fear he would draw blood from the pink surface. Not that it mattered. Bleed now, bleed later, what was the difference when those . . . those things out there were going to kill him anyway. Sooner or later. And the customers would come to the post office in the morning and find Tony’s head in the gutter and Harv’s skeleton beside it and whatever was going to happen to him here in the building. It would be hell on the day’s deliveries. Assuming Jack and Karen were going to die, too, and why not. What was so special about them that they would be spared. The only question was in the method of the dying. And no matter how it happened there would be an investigation and a report and a solemn mass funeral in the Memorial Park and his life would be relegated to hushed stories by the fireplace, in the bars, in the luncheonette and the Inn; and people would say, please, not while I’m eating, and the tellers would grin and go into more detail, all the while protesting they were only giving the facts.

  An investigation. A report. A ghost story by the hearth.

  He brushed an errant drop off the end of his nose and checked his reflection again.

  Then, abruptly, he spun away and stalked out of the restroom. He had seen something in that fool mirror; something that should not have been there. In the eyes. In those large brown eyes that would not flinch as he watched them.

  Back in the office he paid no attention to Jack, nor did he give more than a perfunctory glance to the scene outside the window. Instead, he knelt beside Karen and put a hand lightly on her shoulder. She was lying on her side facing the wall, her knees drawn up toward her chest, her hands clasped under her chin. He had the feeling that it would not be long before she was sucking her thumb. He shook her gently, but she did not open her eyes. Harder, and her head lolled on the floor. Quickly, he placed a hand over her heart—a slight twinge of guilt as he felt the bulge of her breast—and waited without breathing until he could detect the steady thump of her heart.

  He exhaled his relief loudly and rocked back on his heels, concern for her welfare abruptly replaced by a swift, short-lived surge of anger. She was supposed to have been one of the strongest among them: she had raised three children alone, had set them on their way to college, had endured slanders and snickers and had maintained her integrity. Now she was retreating into a world where neither he nor Jack was welcome. Missy, he thought incongruously, would have disapproved. Missy, who was taller than her mother and full-breasted and determined that no one short of God was going to bring hell to her life. Missy, who, when he saw her, made him wish he were twenty years younger and ten times more virile. The slope of her pale throat, the push of her blouses, the flare of her hips, the way she walked along the pavement as though the world were her court and she the Virgin Queen.

  Damn!

  He stood quickly and wiped his hands on his trousers. What was he doing, thinking like that when there was draped around his shoulde
rs a chilled cloak of fear.

  He blinked rapidly. Swallowed. Supposed that his mind was trying to find an outlet for that very same fear, working to concentrate on anything but the tightening of his skin across his shoulders and the loosening of his bowels and the certain knowledge that this was one adventure he was not going to escape simply by turning away, or telling himself he was not the type to indulge in such fancies.

  Fear made some men cowards and other men angry, and here he was thinking of a tryst with Melissa Redmond. A child. But when he looked back to Karen he couldn’t help but feel angry.

  1:50 A.M.

  The silence was beginning to shred at his nerves. He had tried to get Jack to talk to him several times, but Fawn would only grunt and stare out the window. Karen was stirring, but she would not respond when he shook her, nudged her hard with his toe, once slapped at her shoulder harder than was necessary. So he walked out of the office and began stalking the back room, slamming down books of regulations, throwing letters and packages, just to hear them pass through the air.

  Several times he considered methods of escape.

  First he attacked the rear door with the metal chair to his metal desk. When the back crumpled and one leg dislodged, he tossed it aside contemptuously, hurried after it and kicked it all the way to the front, stopping only when he could no longer catch his breath without feeling dizzy.

  Then he gathered as much mail as he could and heaped it in a pile against the plaster wall. As he dug into his pockets for a match he found his holder and jammed it into his mouth. Chewed on it furiously. Found the match and lighted it and held it near the paper. When the flame reached his thumb he dropped it with a start and stared at the black cardboard that had once been a match. No fire, he decided. Before it worked its way through the wall or ceiling he would have suffocated because, he felt, none of the smoke would escape through the windows he would have broken in front. Assuming, of course, he could have broken them in the first place.