Darker Masques

by J N Williamson

  She hesitated for a second then pushed her way out of the kitchen and I heard her retching in the toilet. Robbie was on his knees, his arms by his sides, making no attempt to pick up his heavy kilt of guts.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Get it over with.”

  I was shaking so much that I could hardly hold the knife. He tilted his head back, passive and quiet, his eyes still open, and like a man in a slowly moving nightmare I cut his throat from one side to the other; so deeply that the knife blade wedged between his vertebrae.

  There was no blood. He collapsed backward onto the floor, shuddering slightly. Then the unnatural life that had illuminated his eyes faded away, and it was clear that he was truly dead.

  Jill appeared in the doorway. Her face was completely white, as if she had covered herself in rice powder. “What have you done?” she whispered.

  I stood. “I don’t know. I’m not sure. We’ll have to bury him.”

  “No,” she said shaking her head. “He’s still alive . . . we could bring him back again.”

  “Jill . . .” I began, moving toward her; but she screamed, “Don’t touch me! You’ve killed him! Don’t touch me!”

  I tried to snatch at her wrist, but she pulled herself away and ran for the door.

  “Jill! Jill, listen!”

  She was out in the corridor before I could stop her, and running toward the elevator. The elevator doors opened and the Italian-looking man stepped out, looking surprised. Jill pushed her way into the elevator, hammered wildly at the buttons.

  “No!” she screamed. “No!”

  I went after her but the Italian-looking man deliberately blocked my way.

  “That’s my wife!” I yelled at him. “Get out of my goddamned way!”

  “Come on, friend, give her some breathing space,” the man said and pushed me in the chest with the flat of his hand. Desperately, I saw the elevator doors close and Jill disappear.

  “For God’s sake,” I snarled at the man. “You don’t know what you’ve done!”

  I shoved my way past him and hurtled down the stairs, three at a tune, until I reached the lobby. The doorman said “Hey, man, what’s going on?” and caught at my arm. He delayed me for only a second, but it was a second too long. The swinging doors were just closing and Jill was already halfway across the sidewalk, running into Central Park South.

  “Jill!” I shouted after her. She couldn’t possibly have heard. She didn’t even hear the cab that hit her as she crossed the road and sent her hurtling over its roof, her arms spread wide as if she were trying to fly. I pushed open the swinging doors and I heard her fall. I heard screams and traffic and the screeching of brakes.

  Then I didn’t hear anything, either.

  It was a strange and grisly task, removing Robbie’s body from Willey’s apartment. But there was no blood, no evidence of murder, and nobody would report him missing. I buried him deep in the woods beyond White Plains, in a place where we used to play when we were boys. The wind blew leaves across his grave.

  We buried Jill a week later, in Providence, on a warm sunny day when the whole world seemed to be coming to life. Her mother wouldn’t stop sobbing. Her father wouldn’t speak to me. The police report had exonerated me from any possible blame, but grief knows no logic.

  I took two weeks away from work after the funeral and went to stay at a friend’s house in the Hamptons, and got drunk most of the time. I was still in shock; and I didn’t know how long it was going to take me to get over it.

  Down on the seashore, with the gulls circling all around me, I suppose I found some kind of unsteady peace of mind.

  I returned to the city on a dark, threatening Thursday afternoon. I felt exhausted and hung over, and I planned to spend the weekend quietly relaxing before returning to work on Monday. Maybe I would go to the zoo. Jill had always liked going to the zoo, more to look at the people than at the animals.

  I unlocked the door of my apartment, tossed my bag into the hallway. Then I went through to the kitchen and took a bottle of cold Chablis out of the icebox. Hair of the dog, I thought to myself. I switched on the television just in time to see the end credits of “As The World Turns.” I poured myself some wine; and then, whistling, went through to the bedroom.

  I said, “Oh Christ,” and dropped my full glass of wine on my foot.

  She was lying on top of the comforter naked not smiling, but her thighs were provocatively apart. Her skin had a grayish-blue sheen as if it would be greasy to touch, but it wasn’t decayed. Her hair was brushed and her lips were painted red and there was purple eye shadow over her eyes.

  “Jill?” I breathed. I felt for one implosive instant that I was going mad.

  “I used the spare key from the crack in the skirting,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if her lungs were full of fluid and crushed bone. I had seen her hurtling over the taxi, I had seen her fall. I had seen her die.

  “You said the words,” I told her dully. “You said the words.” She shook her head. But it was then I remembered watching her asleep, and reciting that childish rhyme. Immortooty, immortaty, ever, ever, after.

  She raised her arms, stiffly. The fingers of her left hand were tightly curled, as if they had been broken.

  “Make love to me,” she whispered. “Please, make love to me.”

  I turned around and walked straight to the kitchen. I pulled open one drawer after another, but there wasn’t a single knife anywhere. She must have hidden them all, or thrown them away. I turned back again, and Jill was standing in the bedroom doorway. This time she was smiling.

  “Make love to me,” she repeated.

  Alan Rodgers

  PROMETHEUS’

  DECLARATION OF LOVE FOR

  THE VULTURE

  ALAN Rodgers’ first published fiction, “The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead,” which ended Masques II, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and tied for the Bram Stoker Award in Horror Writers of America’s novelette category. It was HWA’s first year of annual awards.

  Then the boyish former editor of Night Cry wrote a novel called The Children, accepted by Bantam as a paperback original. He also placed another novel with them on a mere premise—a lengthy work-in-progress entitled The Voice of Armageddon.

  Here, Rodgers’ versatility is used to take an original poetic look at that time-honored tale at the root of all Frankenstein fiction. I note that he is a Leo astrologically, the one sign ruled by the sun, and doubt that gifted “Alano” must wait for Hercules’ help in order to have his talents completely unbound.

  PROMETHEUS

  DECLARATION

  OF LOVE FOR

  THE VULTURE

  Alan Rodgers

  In the ten thousand years

  that I lay chained

  on this mountain

  in the Caucasus,

  when you would wake me each day

  with your beak upon my belly,

  tear my gut,

  and feast upon my liver,

  I came to love you, bird.

  It seems to me

  that you have always

  understood our love

  better than I could—

  for I every moment loathed you,

  despised you,

  plotted against you

  (but came to know your touch,

  to tell your mood

  by the feel of your spittle

  in my veins . . .

  and even to be jealous,

  though I could not

  then confess it,

  of the carrion

  I would sometimes smell

  on your breath)

  —for I saw sunlight catch

  on a tear

  falling from your eye

  the day Heracles freed me.

  It haunted me,

  and does so still.

  O Eater of My Liver:

  come away with me,

  the love

  who has returned to you;

  follow me


  out into the corridors

  of light and pain and love

  that are the world.

  And live with me.

  THE “NEW” HORROR

  SOMEBODY I work with thought I wouldn’t like what Rod Scrling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine proclaimed a new horror; what others call “splatterpunk.” I mentioned my pleasure with Rex Miller’s Slob and even such talcs I wrote myself as “The Book of Webster’s” (Night Cry) and “Public Places” (Pulphouse). What I don’t like, I said, is stories that aren’t. Isolated bloody events, nightmares or daydreams produced not by muse but by drugs or booze. And the premise that shock is suspense; improbable intercourse, story line. Or the notion that 1989 (or 1999, or 2189) is bound to be better or worse than earlier years; that history is shit. Or the assumption that terse little words I first heard my drunken uncle use must always supplant the widely acceptable ones and also disgust people. I do not like the notion that the neat dudes all make out with somebody, or that the mad, rad people are cool because they ripped off their folks, dwell in shooting galleries, join gangs, overlook any atrocity, and defile their nation’s flags instead of identifying America’s faults and correcting them.

  But I also don’t enjoy authors playing ostrich—who pretend it’s still Stoker’s, Lovecraft’s, or young Stephen King’s period. Writers who brandish old bigotries as if recently vindicated in some people’s opinion. Who write about street kids who say “damn” when they mean “fuck.” Who don’t intend to learn what’s happening because it might contaminate their finer sensibilities.

  If “new” horror is really new—not a recycling of the early and brilliant works of Harlan Ellison (his stories arc still around, happily)—it’s probably involved with exercises in freedom and observations by a writer of yet one more crummy condition that cries out for exposure. It must be told with a directness that strives for candor—sometimes a candor that elicits more laughs than cries. The humor is of that outrageous variety typical of people who hope it may make this week’s nightmare stop—magically. At its worst, “new” horror can be choppy, or filled with a certain belligerence; with vulgarity. At its best, it’s a marvelous use of American freedom to say or do that which the writer hopes devoutly will make one particular, monstrous social fuck-up leave our griefstrickcn lives forever.

  Now and then, the new horror pinpoints or expresses insights that have not been voiced before, not with such clarity—or not for a long time. It alarms us about big wrongs, problems, lies—and if there’s nothing new about that in fiction, exactly, there’s nothing wrong with it either. Ask one of the teachers present in this book about the tantalizing and haunting writers of classics who began their careers that way—or culminated them with such shocking and revelatory masterpieces.

  The “new” horror stories should not be excluded; nor should they exclude other styles. Exciting storytelling should never be excluded. And neither should people.

  R. Patrick Gates

  LONG LIPS

  HE came snarling into the tiny world of published novelists in October 1988 with an Onyx title that other novelists wonder how they overlooked: Fear. Publishers Weekly called it “a highly charged chiller” and Rick McCammon described it as “an excellent and chilling debut.”

  Here’s the first short story by R. P. (Randy; his wife is Pat) Gates, bom October 14, 1954, a free-lance journalist with an award from Ladies Home Journal in his past. LHJ might blanch and tremble at the directions taken by Gates. His second novel will be a “modern-day Hansel and Gretel for adults,” he reports from Massachusetts, called Grim Memorials. As for your editor, one thing is certain: my lips are sealed!

  LONG LIPS

  R. Patrick Gates

  FOG SLIPS IN FROM THE SEA like blood sliding from a wound. It drips over the seawall, stains the cobblestone streets. It chills the air like the icy breath of Death. With it slinks a shadow; thin, quick, ethereal. It dances like fine rain in the night. It slithers and laughs, filling the night with a hideous tinkling, like razor-edged slivers of glass ripping into dead flesh . . .

  She paused, listened, and shivered. She closed her coat against the fog and hurried toward the friendly lights of the tavern. A black cat skittered through the fog, howling like a human baby in pain. Chills ran over her spine like ice down the back of her blouse. She gasped, exhaled loudly. Dead laughter floated on the fog but she mistook it for the echo of her own frightened breathing. She didn’t see the shadow dancing close behind her.

  The music from the tavern was distant, fading in the mist. It sounded like a dirge played in the depths of a mausoleum. The woman shivered, fumbled out a cigarette. A man stepped out of the fog.

  “Good evening,” he said in a deep but vaporous voice. She relaxed. Just another john. She lit the cigarette and ran her tongue seductively over her lips.

  “Hello, sugar,” she said in a sweet southern drawl. “What can I do you for?”

  The man smiled, showing luminescent teeth.

  “You shy, honey? That’s okay. You can tell me. What you want Mama to do?” She peered into his face, but the swirling mist shrouded it. She could see only his eyes. They were deep purple and seemed to glow.

  She shook off the sudden chill that rippled her skin, took his hand. “I can’t help, sugar, if you won’t talk to me.”

  He pointed to a nearby alley.

  “Now we gettin’ somewheres! Come on, don’t be scared.”

  In the alley, her open blouse revealed large brown breasts frosted with mist. His tongue glided over them, licking them dry. She giggled at the sandpaper feeling. He pushed her to her knees. She unzipped his pants. He sighed.

  “Oh my God!” she said in amazement. “I’m sorry, sugar, but I can’t. I—” Her voice was cut off suddenly. She gave a muffled cry, then gagged. The fog carried away the sound of her death and the thin, mean laughter rejoicing in it.

  “What have we got?” The captain barked the question as he stepped out of the cruiser. His voice was hoarse from too many cigarettes and too many years in the damp, seaside town. He was a short man, stocky and wide. With a little more height on him he would have made a fine football player. His face was windburned and weathered, making him look more like a lobster fisherman than a cop. His hair was getting gray. He never combed it, leaving it to wave wildly in the wind.

  “There’s . . . ah, been a homicide, of sorts,” said a tall lieutenant named Hedstrom, trying to hold back a lecherous grin.

  “No shit, Dick Tracy? I thought we had a mad jaywalker on the loose.”

  An unsuppressible giggle bubbled from Hedstrom.

  “What’s the MO?” the captain asked, scowling and heading into the alley. Hedstrom giggled again and his face turned bright red. The captain pushed past him. The dead hooker, covered by a worn woolen blanket, lay against a trash can. The captain knelt, lifted the blanket from her body, and almost jumped back in horror. He’d seen murdered corpses before but never anything like this. He covered his shock—he was too much of a pro to let it show—yet he felt it, inside. It assaulted his innermost being.

  She was half-naked, but he barely saw that. His eyes were drawn to her face. Her eyes were open. They stared at him and the horror of death lingered in them. She might have been a pretty girl once, but the ravages of her profession and the violence of her death now made her ugly. Long strands of milky fluid hung from both nostrils. Her jaw had been broken and hung on her upper chest. Her face and neck were blotched with bloody bruises.

  The captain stared out the window. His feet rested on the top of the old desk and a cigarette hung from his mouth. Opposite him sat Lieutenant Hedstrom, the medical examiner, and the DA.

  “This isn’t for real,” muttered the captain. The DA coughed and the captain pulled his eyes away from the window. “Is there any way the guy could be faking this?”

  Hedstrom giggled.

  “I mean,” the captain continued after an angry glance at the lieutenant, “is there some way he can make it appear that he has—” The cap
tain fumbled for the right word.

  “Fellatioed his victim to death?” offered Hedstrom. “Maybe oralicide, or headicide? How about blown away?”

  “Knock it off!” barked the captain. He turned to the medical examiner. “Is there any way to fake this—make it appear he killed her this way?”

  The medical examiner sighed. “Not in this case. Abrasions at the back of the throat, coupled with sperm and skin cells found in the victim’s mouth and on her teeth, prove conclusively that the murder took place the way I described.”

  The captain took a deep breath. “So it looks like we’ve got a killer with an unusual modus operandi.”

  “He shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Hedstrom commented. “All we’ve got to do is look for a guy with a third leg.”

  The captain glared at him.

  “Actually,” the medical examiner interrupted, “that’s not far from the truth. By measuring the bruises in the victim’s throat, I’d say the killer has a twenty-inch penis—with a circumference of seven inches.”

  “Holy Christmas,” mumbled the DA. “You know, if we catch this bastard, there’s no way we can try him! It’d be a side show. If we catch him, he’ll have to be put away quietly. Heaven help us if the papers get wind of this!”

  “Putting him on trial is the least of my worries,” the captain answered. “But I do want to keep this out of the papers. We’ll put out a standard release saying the guy is a strangler; nothing more.” He pointed at Hedstrom. “Circulate a description of the murderer’s, ah, anatomy to the hookers in the red-light district, but do it discreetly. You’d also better check the doctors and hospitals within a fifty-mile radius. It seems to me there should be a record somewhere if this guy is such a freak.”

  Hedstrom nodded.

  “And double the night patrol downtown. We’re going to crack down on the johns until we find this guy. Anyone soliciting sex is to be picked up and examined.”