The Universe of Horror Volume 2: The Dark Cry of the Moon (Neccon Classic Horror)

by Charles L. Grant

  Soon, he promised himself; soon it would be all over. Soon he would have his revenge on those who had tried to take what was rightfully his away.

  They would be surprised, and perhaps they would be shocked, and perhaps they would even attempt to take his life. And he cackled again, almost wishing they would. In fact, he thought as he returned to his room, he might welcome the chance to get them face to face.

  Poetic justice, with just a touch of horror thrown in for good measure.

  The house was dark, not a single light showing save for a tiny candle at the bedside. Charlotte sat on the edge of her bed and brushed her golden hair down over her soft round shoulders. The candlelight burnished it, released the sparks trapped within, and she hummed merrily to herself all the songs she knew from the variety halls she’d been taken to before she’d married that dunce, Charlie.

  She was, in a word, happy.

  She had made up her mind-tomorrow she would put on her best dress, her best bonnet, carry her parasol over her shoulder, and walk boldly to the house where her future lay: Charlie would question her, and she would tell him the truth-that she married him only because she thought he’d make good his promise and take her to Boston. He hadn’t. He had fallen under the spell of that ugly giant, Lucas Stockton, and it was clear he would never leave the Station at all.

  She, on the other hand, would.

  With a Drummond at her side she would bid farewell to this miserable little place and find her rightful position in Boston’s society.

  And if Drummond refused her, she would tell all; she would fill the Station’s ears with everything she knew, and Drummond would spend the rest of his life in prison.

  She was, at last, completely in charge. Nothing was going to stop Charlotte Notting now.

  The house was dark, the only lights glowing were in the kitchen where two gas lamps flickering dimly on the walls, and one hanging from a braided brass chain over the table. Lucas sat at the table’s head, Johanna on his right, Charlie on his left, Maria directly opposite. Ned had been rousted from his bed and was in the front room with Jeddy Tripper, doing his best to make the grim-faced lad smile, or cry, utter any sound at all.

  From the moment Jo had brought him into the office, he had not spoken a word.

  That was when Lucas said, “It’s time to see Maria.”

  Their faces were bathed in shadow as the flames swayed in their amber chimneys, none more than the old woman whose hair, for the first time since Lucas had known her, was loose and unbraided, hanging in a thin white curtain down around her berobed shoulders. He could see nothing of her eyes except deep black sockets, saw no movement except an occasional twitch of her hands clasped on the table.

  After arriving from the stationhouse and seeing Ned to the boy, they listened patiently as Charlie described in sobbing fits and starts what he had seen in the valley. No one questioned him; no one expressed a single word of disbelief. They listened while he gulped at the brandy Lucas poured with a free hand, watched as his face alternately flushed and paled, held their tongues when he broke down once and sobbed his terror.

  And just as he finished, the rain began.

  A faint scratching at the kitchen window’s pane, unsure, almost timorous, before it gathered its courage and slammed in great sheets against the side of the house. It was loud, and visible only when lightning turned it to quicksilver, thunder banished it to ebony.

  One lamp flared, and winked out.

  Johanna rose to relight it, and took the opportunity to look into the front room. Ned, his nightshirt billowing around his scrawny legs, had Jeddy on his lap and was telling him a story. The boy stared open-mouthed into his face, one arm around his neck, the other limp in his lap. Ned looked up and gave Johanna a reassuring smile without missing a word. His eyes told her it wouldn’t be long before Jeddy would be talking.

  Lucas, jacket off and shirt unbuttoned at the collar, took a deep breath when Charlie was done, reached out and gripped the man’s wrist and held it, shook the arm once in understanding, and nodded when Charlie finally put down his glass. Then he looked to Maria Andropayous.

  “1 need to know,” he said tonelessly. “If you have anything to give me, 1 need to know.”

  A wisp of white drifted across her face, hung there like a spider’s web in front of her black, demanding eyes. He could feel her gaze measuring him, weighing him, boring into his skull to root at his mind.

  “Do you?” she asked, her voice almost angry, her accent heavy and rolling. “Do you really need to know what I know, in here?” And she thumped a fist against her frail chest.

  He did not hesitate; he nodded.

  “Be sure, Lucas Stockton. Be sure in your heart you want to know what I know.”

  He looked to Jo, to Charlie, and finally back to the woman who had kept him sane and his son healthy all these years.

  “I must know,” he said firmly. “I must stop the dying.”

  She sighed soundlessly.

  A minute passed.

  Another.

  Johanna chewed fitfully at her lower lip; Charlie sucked at his.

  Five minutes, ten, before her right hand slipped off the table and into her lap. When it returned the hand was closed, and she stretched out her arm, pulled back the sleeve of her robe. They leaned forward as one, eyes on the boney fingers, the translucent flesh, the collapsing veins that trailed past her wrist across her arm. Then she turned the hand over and let her fingers fall open.

  A blossom, white and fragrant, sat on her palm.

  “Wolfsbane,” she said, startling them all with the harshness of her voice.

  “It’s . . . it’s beautiful,” Johanna whispered.

  Maria shook her head emphatically. “It is the devil’s eye, my child, and beautiful only in the way a deadly snake is before it strikes.”

  Charlie leaned away as if to deny its existence. His eyes were wide, his chest rising and falling while he tried to catch a breath.

  “What does it mean, old woman?” Lucas said quietly, intently. “What does it have to do with . . . with Jerad Pendleton, and the others, with what Charlie here told us?”

  It was obvious the old woman was struggling with sorrow; not a grieving sorrow, but one that afflicts those who see the onset of unavoidable death. A death she had witnessed too many times before, one she had prayed never to have to face again.

  “It is a sign,” she said.

  Lucas tried to smile. “Like the tea leaves?” And he wished immediately he had not spoken.

  Maria glared at him so harshly he jerked away as if from a stinging blow, and the ancient hand closed swiftly over the blossom. The fingers tensed, then crushed it, and the room was suddenly flooded with a rotting-corpse stench that made them all gasp and cover their mouths and noses. Lucas buried his watering eyes in the crook of his elbow. Johanna coughed loudly. Charlie staggered to his feet and flung open the back door; rain splattered at them over the threshold while he retched and choked.

  When the old woman opened her hand a second time, she stared directly at Lucas and gave him a mirthless smile. He could not believe his eyes — the flower was whole, and the stench was driven from the room by the wind.

  Charlie returned to his seat, shivering so much that Johanna put an arm around his shoulders and rocked him absently, not seeing the gratitude that washed over his face.

  “It is wolfsbane,” Maria said again, looking only at Lucas. “It is a flower found in many parts of the world, a very special flower that I have brought with me.” She poked a finger at it, drew away as if seared by some invisible flame. “It opens only at night, and only when there is something to tell.”

  “Tell what?” he said, more respectfully now. “What does it tell you, Maria?” She stared at him without responding, until he remembered what she had seen in the tea leaves the night before. “The wolf walks on two legs, is that it? Some sort of killing beast?”

  She nodded.

  “But none do,” Johanna protested mildly.

&nb
sp; “Child,” Maria said kindly and patiently, “I am an old woman. But I am not so old that I lose what I have in my mind.” Her hair drifted again across her face, and she brushed it away slowly, as though parting a veil. “I have come to this country like others like me . . . to get away from those who fear us and would do us harm.”

  “Afraid of you?” Charlie said incredulously, looking from Lucas to Johanna in hopes they would laugh. “Maria, who . . . why would anyone possibly be afraid of you?”

  She sat back in her chair, let the blossom fall into the circle of light in the center of the table. Her face was hidden by shadows that parted and closed, climbed and fell away, and none of them could look at her for long without shivering.

  “They fear my people, they fear me,” she said, not without a trace of long-suffered melancholy, “because I know things. Not like you find in your books, not in your churches, not in your schools. I know different things. My people know different things. Things of this world and not of this world that none of you can possibly imagine, and things you never want to imagine. Things that would keep you from your sleep for the rest of your life. Things no: man should ever have to know.”

  Her voice had strengthened, though it had not lost its age, and they all drew closer to the table, as if trying to escape the reach of the shadows behind them.

  The rain fell; thunder muttered.

  “And one of the things I know,” she said, “is this — that in this village a creature walks, Lucas Stockton. Not a man who kills like you have imagined, and not a wolf strayed from his home and seeking only food. A creature such as one you have never seen before in your life.”

  “Maria —”

  “Be still, and listen!”

  After a moment of shifting, the silence was complete.

  They could hear in the front room Ned telling his story.

  They could hear in the kitchen the pull of their breathing.

  And finally, through the insistent drumming of the rain, the distant cannonade of thunder, they all heard it.

  The baying.

  The shattering of the night of a full-throated voice that made Jeddy bury his face in Ned’s side, had Johanna scrambling for Lucas’s hand, had Charlie cover his face and whimper.

  A baying, a howling, the dark cry of the moon.

  Lucas glanced at his hands, saw them clenched so tightly the knuckles were bled white.

  Maria leaned her face back into the light, looked straight at him and pointed.

  “A wolf on two legs,” she repeated. “And not a wolf.”

  He showed her his puzzlement.

  She sighed and closed her eyes, her lips moved in voiceless prayer. When she stopped, she reached out and took hold of the blossom between two fingers and held it up.

  “When the wolfsbane blooms, and the moon is full, there walks about the land a man under a curse.” And again she looked directly at Lucas.

  The howling seemed nearer.

  Unearthly.

  A fiend.

  “Lucas Stockton,” she whispered, “what you hear now is that man. What you hear is a werewolf.”

  Chapter 12

  God go with you, Lucas Stockton . . . but the Devil walks tonight.

  The shiny black umbrella was large enough to protect the three of them from the savage downpour. They hastened along the deserted street while rain gouted from the sky, smashed against the cobblestones and fountained up again. Tendrils of anxious mist wove themselves to tangles beneath hedges, in the gutters. Foliage sagged, groaning branches were beaten and whipped by the wind. A loose shutter slammed against the side of a house.

  There was no sense talking; all they could hear was the storm.

  The Devil walks.

  Lucas felt the cold eating its way into his bones, far worse than it should have been this time of the year, and he braced himself against it as if he were walking through December. Though Johanna was trembling in the circle of his arm, and Jeddy in hers, he could feel nothing; all his senses were overrun by Maria’s solemn voice explaining what manner of beast he was dealing with now, what midnight creature had stalked into the village.

  He will change at the full moon, and change at will; he will feed for his hunger, he will kill for his rage.

  A terrible thing, Johanna had said; what torment he must be suffering, what hell he must live in.

  Only, Maria told her, if he does not wish it; there are some who seek the bite of the werewolf, some who want to run in the shadow of Satan.

  He believed it. He had seen the way Elijah had been savaged, seen the way poor Jerad had been taken.

  When Maria was done, no balm for their fear, there had been no doubts, and no questions; too many times he had heard the nighttime stories that in other places would have been dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic, the imagination of a tale told of dark faeries. Lucas knew better. He instinctively knew there were forces about him which were beyond the rationale of scholarly books and university lectures.

  He knew.

  And he believed.

  And he listened through the rain for the sound of something following, listened for the baying.

  You may carry the gun, yes, but you need silver, not lead or iron.

  At Delia Pendleton’s cottage they huddled under the protection of the porch roof and he asked again if Johanna were sure she wanted to do this.

  “I can’t very well stay with you, now can I?” she said with a brave brief smile. “Besides, Jedadiah —”

  “Jeddy!” the boy insisted, lower lip protruding angrily.

  She tousled his hair and shrugged. “All right . . . Jeddy. He needs us, Lucas. Delia will scrub him up, and I’ll tend to his cuts and scratches. We’ll be fine. We’ll . . . be fine.”

  “Sure,” Jeddy said. “I’ll watch them, Chief. Don’t you worry, I’ll watch them.”

  He was reluctant to leave, and knew that he must. Quickly, then, before the parting became impossible, he kissed Johanna’s cheek and held her close for her warmth, grabbed the boy’s thin shoulders and held them a moment before lifting his longcoat’s collar high and stepping back into the rain.

  Water drummed deafeningly on the umbrella.

  Puddles and lakes formed along the pavement.

  I gotta go back, Chief Charlotte’s alone.

  He saw in the dark the outlines of homes, trees, hedges, low walls. Gleaming when distant lightning gave the air a silver coating, shifting when their shadows eased out to ensnare him.

  I can take care of myself, don’t worry. I saw that thing, remember, and I can run like hell if I have to.

  A shudder quite apart from the chills walked his spine; Charlie had gone, had disappeared headlong into the storm as soon as Maria had finished her warning. Lucas had tried to stop him, but the young man would not be deterred from rushing to his wife’s side, and he had almost wept when the door closed behind him.

  He turned the corner onto Devon Street, his eyes narrowed as he glanced up and down Chancellor Avenue. The globes of the ornate streetlamps were shimmering as if drowned in a vast obsidian lake, the water running beneath them in pale gold rivulets.

  There was no one abroad, and though he didn’t like the feeling, he was somehow glad that he had been left alone.

  But when he turned to head home, a shadow moved with him, contrary to the wind. A half-dozen hurried paces, and he saw it up ahead, faltered and waved a hand as though brushing away the rain.

  At first he was sure it was nothing but his imagination, a remnant of the waking nightmare he felt after listening to his housekeeper. Then it moved again, there in the middle of the street at the far end of the block. It waited between two faint sprays of lamplight, but Lucas could see at once it was no ordinary shadow.

  It was white, and from its proud high-slung head sparked two slanted orbs of darkbright amber.

  His throat dried instantly though he tried hard to swallow; his heart swelled in his chest and made his breathing shallow. A gust of wind lashed pellets of water into his
eyes; he blinked rapidly to clear them . . . and the white creature moved into the dim swaying glow.

  Even at the distance which separated them, he knew it was immense. Charlie was right in every respect — it was white, and it was larger than any wolf or dog he’d ever seen, and its whiplike tail snapped at the air behind it.

  The Devil walks tonight

  He took one step forward, and it saw him.

  Lucas knew it was watching, despite the fact that its head did not move, nor did its mouth open.

  It was watching him.

  It was waiting.

  He took another step toward the house, a man gingerly testing the thickness of ice, and held his breath.

  It was waiting.

  A glance behind him, the rain falling from his umbrella in glittering strands, the wind mocking him from its laughing place under the eaves.

  Another step, and he found a rhythm — a striding so slow he was barely able to keep his balance.

  And still it watched him.

  Its fur thick, its ears pricked high, standing on powerful legs that seemed poised to spring.

  Lucas kept his gaze steadily on it, blinking only when a dark trunk passed between them, when the wind spat in his eyes, when a wayward leaf swirled out of the dark like a bat on the hunt. His boot heels struck the brick pavement loudly, too loudly, and because of the storm he could hear no echoes.

  He was ten feet from the house when the night-beast shifted its front paws to face him more directly. He froze, bit hard on the inside of his cheek and welcomed the pain, his grip on the umbrella’s pole cramping his fingers until he forced himself to loosen his grip.

  The head lifted, and its fur rippled in waves from the thick mane behind its ears to the plume of its slow-lashing tail.