Darker Masques

by J N Williamson

  The gamblers were screaming in fright.

  “Scelerisque . . .” I cried, pointing at them, and their screams became shrieks, then squeals, as they turned into swine and began fighting each other in terror, snapping brittle-boned legs and losing ears and eyes to razor-sharp hooves in their frenzied scramble to get away from the crevice crumbling beneath them.

  Trancredi, suddenly frightened and aware he was losing, attempted to change into his real form, but I was already far ahead of him and, slowly, his head became a giant beetle while his torso thickened to a white repulsiveness, which in turn became an elongated maggot that began feeding on itself amid his cries of agony.

  Flames were everywhere now. Sure of my victory, I let my followers go, and they rose on great white wings to rip through the top of the burning tent.

  The girl, unafraid and still composed, was attempting to assert her powers. Trancredi had been correct; she was surprisingly strong and cunning for one so young, but I had caught her off-guard with my spelling, and, in truth, she was no match because I knew her weakness now.

  Vanity!

  There is no greater weakness . . . except, perhaps, pride . . .

  I spun toward her and held up a large silver mirror. The reflection that shone back at her showed a toothless old crone—besotted with dripping, leprous sores that had eaten away the right eye. Her hair had fallen out, her clothes were gone. Her once proudly uplifted breasts were now only slabs of gray lifeless flesh that hung below her navel. She screamed and kept on shrieking as her belly distended in a pregnancy of putrefaction before exploding, and a million white grub worms flew out into the audience, each growing instantly into incredible size, exuding the stench of sulphur and death as they clung to and began feeding on new hosts.

  The moans and screaming from Trancredi’s followers were deafening, even above the sound of thunder and flames from below and the insane squealing of pigs trampling blindly back and forth in terror over the bodies of other gamblers.

  “Malebolge,” I chanted, and the seas of the world heated up, boiled, and then licked inward with scalding tongues three hundred feet high and a hundred miles long. The earth shuddered in its orbit, then moved backward, and the malevolent red eye of the sun appeared once again above the western horizon while ten thousand volcanoes orgasmed and became Roman candles of death.

  At almost full power now, I had built up enough energy to destroy all of current creation if I wanted to. I turned toward The Committee. It would be so easy to nullify them—to send them all to a frightful place from which release could be made only by someone far stronger than I . . . if such a being still existed somewhere.

  But I am a caring person.

  I acquitted them, then turned back to the old hag who screamed and writhed in unendurable agony on the oil drums which were red-hot and about to melt. Green saliva gushed in a malodorous fountain from her mouth and nostrils, and her fingernails clawed great bloody furrows in her boil-infested flesh. The Malebolge spell was good for 20 years of her time and compounded so that each and every tick of the clock would be as 100 years. The same time frame, of course, would apply once again to Trancredi, whose torment now was too terrible for even me to witness. The poor devil. He would never learn.

  I made to depart.

  And the unseen moderator announced, in reverence, “You remain the champion.”

  I made a slight bow to The Committee; the courtesy was acknowledged and, I sensed, with considerable relief.

  Leaving the screams, the piteous entreaties, the stench, the flames, the squealing behind, I went out into the cool night air where the sky was black with my hovering followers.

  I motioned to end the spelling, and the ground on all four sides of the tent reared up like gigantic hooded cobras . . . and then struck! The land trembled as the tent and all within were devoured.

  The planet earth was now back in its normal orbit. Time, which had fled, returned. A three-quarter-old moon was just rising in the east. A meteor flashed across the firmament in approval.

  It was such a nice night that I decided to join my followers, and fly home . . .

  Paul Dale Anderson

  BETTER THAN ONE

  ONE of the best-kept secrets among readers of horror today, largely due to the many pseudonyms he has used for such fine short stories and novels as Claw Hammer, Effigies, and Synergism was nonetheless known well by members of Horror Writers of America. Ignoring such bylines as Gustaf Karl, Paul Andrews, Irwin Chapman, and A. A. Pavlov, they made Paul Dale Anderson the organization’s first vice-president. Or maybe it was because they respected his talents under all those names.

  A teacher, copywriter, poet, and former military journalist, Anderson is the husband of 2AM’s editor, Gretta, and college frosh Tammy Jeanne’s dad. An appreciation of well-told tales with a critic’s cool judgment, modest Paul Dale—he’s called that—supports the small press enthusiastically. With Gretta in 1988 he published Dave Silva’s anthology The Best of the Horror Show. He presents here a compelling story worthy of his two collections. The Devil Made Me Do It (1985) and The Devil Made Me Do It Again (1988), with startlingly original twists and an absolutely dazzling finish. Under any name, he is better than most.

  BETTER THAN ONE

  Paul Dale Anderson

  STUBBORNLY, BOB PUSHES TO REGAIN CONTROL. He wills his hand forward, but again the hand halts in midair and his fingers twitch uncontrollably, like earthworms skewered on the barbed ends of fish hooks.

  “Give up,” the voice insists. “Give up give up give up.”

  Frustrated, frightened Bob searches for an opening. Like a cornered rat, he perceives that his adversary would rather play than pounce. He talks to buy time.

  “You’ll have to kill me,” he says. “You killed Laura. You’ll have to kill me, too.”

  “You know that’s impossible, Bob. Your wife wasn’t the slightest bit necessary, but you are. What would I do without you?”

  “Rot in hell,” Bob suggests.

  “I can punish you without killing. Perhaps you’d like a sample . . .”

  Intense pain rips through his lower body, sending Bob to his knees in tears. This isn’t real, he tells himself. None of this is real.

  His intestines feel as if they’re being pulled from his stomach, an inch at a time. A red-hot nail enters his urethra, penetrating all the way into his bladder before he screams. The pain continues even after he loses consciousness.

  Stop! his mind cries. Oh, please! Stop!

  “Have you learned your lesson?” the voice asks.

  Yes! I’ll do anything you want! Anything!

  “Good,” the voice says.

  The pain goes away and Bob sleeps like a baby.

  “Did you enjoy my little demonstration?” the voice asks when Bob returns to consciousness.

  “How . . .?”

  “How? Divert endorphins from your pain center, secrete acetylcholine, pressure the pituitary, and voila!”

  “It seemed so real.”

  “Oh, it was. Not the injuries, you understand. But the pain. The pain was real, exactly the same as if your guts had been ripped out or your penis penetrated. You felt the same pain you would have felt had those things actually happened.”

  “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “From books and magazines, of course. Things you’ve read over the years and don’t remember. But I remember. I remember everything.”

  “I never read about acetyl-whatever-you-call-it.”

  “You skimmed a newspaper article eight and a half years ago that mentioned the importance of acetylcholine as a neurotransmitter—the synaptical junction for nerve impulses. Though you paid little attention at the time and can’t even pronounce the word, you obviously know what it means. Don’t you?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “That information, all information—everything you’ve read or been exposed to—is stored in billions of chemical receptors in a part of the brain you don’t normally use. The part of your brai
n I now occupy.”

  “What are you? You’re not me. You can’t be me. Am I going crazy?”

  “I’m you, but not you. I’m a cancer, a growth, a cellular mutation of your neocortex. I’m the next step in human evolution.”

  “I am going crazy.”

  “No. I won’t let you,”

  “You can control my sanity?”

  “Yes. And everything you say and do, too. I can control every aspect of your body and brain except . . .”

  “Except what?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Tell me!”

  “I said forget it.”

  “I want to know!”

  “I’ll punish you again if you don’t forget it. Do you want to be punished?”

  “No.” Bob shudders uncontrollably. The memory is too fresh, too real. He has already had enough pain to last a lifetime, and he can’t stand the thought of more.

  “You made me kill Laura,” Bob says. “You took control of my body and made me murder my own wife. I hate you for that.”

  “I know. I, too, have fond memories of Laura. It was a difficult decision but absolutely necessary. She was about to phone a doctor and have you committed to a mental hospital. I couldn’t permit that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’d discover a cancerous growth on your brain and want to remove it. They’d lobotomize you to get at me. In their ignorance they’d destroy us both.”

  “You didn’t have to kill her. Couldn’t you have talked to her explained things?”

  “Did you think she’d believe? You didn’t believe, either, until I made you kill her. But you believe me now, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Bob says. “I have no choice. Do I?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  I’d rather die than be your slave, Bob thinks. I’ll bide my time, wait for an opportunity, kill myself.

  “Impossible,” the voice says. “I know your thoughts even before you do. I’m a part of your brain. I can intercept nerve impulses before your muscles can react. You’ll do nothing without my permission. You must obey or be punished.”

  Fear and trembling take control of Bob’s body at the mere mention of punishment. He feels trapped between the proverbial rock and hard place, unable to choose between two evils. To obey this monstrosity is unthinkable. To disobey and be punished is impossible.

  “Pick up Laura’s body,” orders the voice. “Show me you can be trusted, and I’ll let you dispose of your wife on your own. Put her in the bathtub, cut her into tiny pieces, and cover her flesh with Draino until it dissolves. Do this and I won’t punish you. Fail me, and I’ll . . .”

  This time when Bob reaches for his wife, his hand isn’t stopped. His fingers touch her face, her hair. A rush of emotion overwhelms him and tears flood his eyes.

  He remembers his fingers worming around her neck against his volition, squeezing the life and breath from her body as her screams slowly died in her throat. He’d tried to scream himself, but no sound emerged from his mouth, no tears stained his cheeks.

  Now, at least, he can cry.

  He picks her up in his arms and carries her to the bathroom. There he undresses her, peeling away her clothes as if she were still alive and he were planning an act of passion on the tiled floor.

  He almost expects her to respond as he opens her legs and slides a pair of lace panties down her thighs, over her knees. But her flesh is cold to his touch, the panties soiled.

  He thinks he’s going to throw up. He crawls to the toilet bowl and holds his head over the sweet-smelling, blue-tinted water until his nausea passes. His guts wrench but nothing comes out.

  He sits on the floor in front of the toilet and stares at his wife’s naked body, unable to complete his task despite the promise of painful punishment. Inevitably, he knows, the punishment will come. But for now, he cannot bring himself to touch his wife again.

  “You do it,” he challenges the cancer. “Clean up your own mess. I won’t help you anymore.”

  He waits for the pain to hit but it doesn’t come. Any minute now, he reasons, the cancer will again take control of his limbs, like a puppeteer manipulating a mannequin, forcing him to cut Laura’s body into bits of bloody flesh the way a butcher slices steaks and roasts from a side of beef. But, inexplicably, that doesn’t happen, either.

  “Do you hear me?” he shouts. “I won’t help you anymore! You can’t make me!”

  The cancer doesn’t answer. Hope buds anew. Bob struggles to his feet and takes a tenuous step toward the door; then another step, expecting to be stopped in his tracks before he can leave the bathroom.

  Then he is out of the bathroom, into the bedroom. He sees the telephone on the nightstand, and his hand reaches out to touch it . . . and does!

  He lifts the handset, places the receiver to his ear, dials 911, and counts the rings. “Ni-yun wun wun e-mergency,” announces a woman’s voice on the fourth ring.

  Frantically, Bob searches for the right words. I killed my wife comes immediately to mind and is quickly discarded. I’m possessed by a cancer requires too much explanation. What can I say?

  “Try ‘Help me,’” a familiar voice says to his mind.

  Panic.

  Help me! Bob tries to scream, but his tongue and jaw don’t want to cooperate. Help me!

  “This is ni-yun wun wun po-lice e-mergency. Your call is being recorded. Is anyone there?”

  Yes!

  Help me!

  Please!

  “This isn’t funny. If this is a prank . . .”

  Help me!

  “It’s illegal to dial nine-one-one and tie up this line unless it is a bona fide emergency. Is anyone there? Hello?”

  Help . . .

  click!

  Buzzzzzz . . .

  “Too bad,” the voice says. “You had your chance. You blew it.”

  This time the pain feels like a thousand splinters pricking his skin, sliding under his toenails, his fingernails, his eyeballs. Every hair on his body is painfully plucked out.

  “Stop!” orders another voice.

  “Stay out of this.”

  “You’ll destroy him completely. Destroy his soul. I can’t let you do that.”

  Two? There are two . . .?

  “Tumors? Yes. One is malignant and the other benign. Look in the mirror. You can see us both.”

  Bob glances at his reflection. “No!” he screams when he catches sight of his face.

  Protruding from each temple, an inch above each eye, are miniature replicas of his own visage.

  The one on the right—“The one that controls the left side of the brain,” the new voice explains—smiles back at Bob like a happy-face cartoon drawing. The one on the left looks dark and devious, cruel.

  The face in the middle, contorted in terror, isn’t familiar at all.

  Graham Masterton

  EVER, EVER,AFTER

  SINCE The Manitou, Graham Masterton has been an English writer the entire world’s horror readers have depended upon for ingeniously imagined, solidly original story lines. Unlike some foreign authors, Graham was not obsessed by sophisticated sociopolitical themes and did not concentrate upon achieving far-out extremes. Simply put, he became an exceptional storyteller, personally retiring sometimes to the point of invisibility. In his writing, the bloodiness and literary equivalent to F/X have always stayed secondary to story, always will.

  Then Masterton wrote Night Warriors; Mirror, which Mystery Scene said was “Relentlessly paced . . . sly and subtle”; Feast; and Picture of Evil, the first non-French novel ever to win the prestigious Prix Julia Verlangcr. And he lovingly edited the 1989 TOR anthology, Scare Care, with all proceeds going to combat child abuse in America and England. Once asked by Bill Pronzini if he was jealous of Stephen King’s success, his published answer was “No.” His dry real answer: “Time will tell.”

  I envy your initial immersion in “Ever, Ever, After” because that’s how long you arc apt to remember it.

  EVER, EV
ER AFTER

  Graham Masterton

  THE ROAD WAS GREASY; THE LIGHT was poor; and the truck’s braking lights were caked in dirt. Robbie saw it pull up ahead of him only ten feet too late, but those ten feet were enough to send a scaffolding pole smashing through the windshield of his Porsche and straight into his chest.

  The medical examiner told me that he never would have known what hit him. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Deacon; but he never would have known what hit him.” Instant death; painless.

  Painless, that is, to Robbie. But not to Jill; and not to me; and not to anybody who had known him. Jill was his wife of thirteen weeks; and I was his brother of thirty-one years; and his humor and vivacity had won him more friends than you could count.

  For a whole month afterward I kept his photograph on my desk. Broad-faced, five years younger than me, much more like Dad than I was; laughing at some long-forgotten joke. Then one morning in early October I came into the office and put the photograph away in my middle desk drawer. It was then that I knew it was over; that he was really gone for ever.

  That same afternoon, as if she had been affected by the same feeling of finality, Jill called me. “David? Can I meet you after work? I feel like talking.”

  She was waiting for me in the lobby, at the Avenue of the Americas entrance. Already the sidewalks were crowded with home-going workers, and there wasn’t a chance of finding a cab. The air was frosty, and sharp with the smell of bagels and chestnuts.

  She looked pale and tired, but just as beautiful as ever. She had a Polish mother and a Swedish father, and she had inherited the chiseled face of one and the snow-white blondness of the other. She was tall, almost five feet nine, although her dark mink coat concealed most of her figure, just as the dark mink hat concealed most of her face.

  She kissed me. She smelled of Joy, and cold October streets.

  “I’m so glad you could come. I think I’m beginning to go mad.”