Darker Masques

by J N Williamson

  Maureen shoved Carlotta off and struggled to her feet. “You stinking cow,” she growled. She backed away from the old woman’s still-clawing hands, into the dining area.

  The revelation struck Maureen full-force, driving her into the edge of me table. “No!” she cried waving her arms to ward off the advancing horror. “Not—no . . . you couldn’t have—you wouldn’t have!” She dodged Carlotta and ran to the refrigerator, where she touched the red mass wedged between it and the oven. “Tricia . . .” she groaned “oh, my poor baby . . .”

  Maureen wiped her face on her sleeve and turned to face her mother-in-law. “What have you done with the rest of her?” Maureen demanded. Her voice was icy, measured almost calm. “You couldn’t have eaten her bones, could you? No, I don’t think so.” Maureen’s hand fell upon the bread knife.

  The old woman’s rheumy eyes followed Maureen’s hand as the fingers curled around the rosewood handle. Her mouth curved and stretched with moist smacks.

  Blade in hand Maureen advanced on the frail figure before her. “Your own granddaughter,” she wailed. “And on Sunday!”

  The long knife sliced through Carlotta’s face and breast as easily as it had sliced through the air. Dark-red droplets rained on Maureen’s hair, blending with it, and drizzled down her arms to run off her elbows. Carlotta’s gnarled, blue-veined hands rose stiffly to her cheeks to spread blood into her cottony hair and blinded eyes. The blade descended once more and cut through the fingers of her right hand before plunging up to the handle behind her collar bone, where Maureen left it.

  The younger woman stepped back, dazed and whispered “Die.”

  The sound of the front door opening—of light footsteps across the foyer—spun Maureen around. She gaped both in relief and horror, at her daughter standing just inside the dining room. “Baby!” Maureen cried.

  The old woman sank to her knees, remained there. Her eyes stayed wide open, obscured by duck red film. She stared at me Congoleum while her fingertips explored the knife handle.

  Maureen ran to Tricia and threw her arms around the little girl. She drew her to her bosom tightly, rocking on her heels until she stood and brought the child up with her. She carried her to the kitchen counter, all the while ignoring the glazed expression on her mother-in-law’s face. “What happened love?” she begged wiping at the streaks of blood on the girl’s face. “Who did this to you? Where have you been?”

  Andrew appeared in me doorway, hung there a moment, then rushed to his mother.

  “I was sure she’d eaten Tricia,” said Maureen, still dabbing at the crimson blotches on her daughter’s face and arms. “I did what any mother would do in the same situation!”

  Andrew eased his mother onto her side and reached for the telephone. “Should I call the police? I mean—what would we tell them?”

  “I don’t care.” Maureen slid Tricia upright and studied her. “I don’t see any wounds, baby. Can you tell Mommie what happened?” Her own hands shaking, she lifted Tricia’s and turned them over, inspecting each finger. She peered into the child’s dark-blue eyes and was startled by their sharpness. “Sweetie, what happened?”

  Still holding the phone, his breathing quick and shallow, Andrew said “Maybe she had a nosebleed?”

  Maureen backed away from her daughter. The girl scrambled off the high counter and dropped to her feet, stared at her grandmother with hard eyes, then glanced up at her parents. Neither adult moved when she took several tentative steps toward the fallen woman to stand in the growing pool of blood; neither made an effort to stop her when she bent, tore off the old woman’s nose, and stuffed it into her mouth.

  Andrew hung the receiver on its hook and joined Maureen. “She was Tricia’s favorite grandmother.”

  “Yes,” agreed Maureen, watching her daughter chew. “And it’s not as if the old bitch didn’t owe us . . .”

  Wayne Allen Sallee

  THIRD RAIL

  WAYNE Sallee’s bold fiction has been chosen for three Year’s Best Horror Stories annuals from DAW. In Fangoria (December ’88), reviewer David Kuehls discussed Sallee’s “Take the A Train” and wrote that even if “the writing is a bit overheated,” there is “an intensity that’s almost palpable.”

  That’s true of most of the fifty-five stories and seventy-five poems published by this denizen of Chicago whom Sandberg might simultaneously recognize and turn from in horror. The world observed by Wayne is as unremittingly rugged as anything Nelson Algren reported. Sallee’s work is rough, real, at once “new” horror—and as old as dying.

  THIRD RAIL

  Wayne Allen Sallee

  CLOHESSY WATCHED RAINE’S BLUE CIVIC HEAD back toward the Kennedy on-ramp; then he turned, zippering his jacket as he took the down escalator steps two at a time to the concourse leading to the El train. The Kennedy overpass was deserted and he stood for several minutes staring out at the eight lanes of weekend traffic—four on each side of the Jefferson Park/Congress/Douglas rapid transit line.

  Then he noticed the girl.

  Before looking back at her a second time, Clohessy—time-scheduled commuter that he was—glanced north, saw that the train was nowhere near arriving at the terminal. He had been chilled crossing the parking lot, yet the girl below him was wearing only a pair of jeans and a white sweater that clung tight to her waist. A loose gilded belt completed the image. Cliched as it was, she looked as if her body had been poured into her clothing. The sweater was pushed up around her elbows. Maybe he’d offer her his gloves after he’d handled business.

  Clohessy walked briskly down the glass-and-stainless-steel corridor to those stairs leading to the El platform. It was after 10 p.m.; the ticket agent’s booth was closed. He’d have to pay on the train and took a second to make certain he had small bills. The conductor wouldn’t be able to break a twenty.

  Clohessy never carried a comb, so he ran a hand through his thin blond hair (not that it would matter in the sharp late-September wind), pushed through the gate and took the down escalator. Halfway to the platform, he caught a flash of the girl’s sweater, a creamy slice of arm. As cold as it was, and my, how the hair on her arms danced.

  Clohessy had been disappointed to leave Raine’s place so early, but he’d had a two-hour trek on public transportation to the Southwest Side ahead of him; he enjoyed Raine and Peg’s company and likely wouldn’t see them again until Lilah Chaney’s party in Virginia next February. Yet seeing the girl on the platform made him momentarily forget the last few hours.

  As Clohessy’s shoes clacked onto the concrete, she turned to look at him. He met her gaze and she glanced quickly away. She did not seem concerned about whether the train was coming; she didn’t seem impatient in her movements, and, after the first five minutes Clohessy had watched her from the corner of his eye, she hadn’t once leaned out, over the tracks (as most people—himself included—usually did).

  He looked at the digital clock on the Northern Trust Bank across the Kennedy: 53° at 11:09. If he was ever going to strike up a conversation with the girl, he’d have to do it now; the train would be mere by quarter after.

  Walking the ten or so steps to where she was standing, Clohessy jammed his fists into his pockets, realizing just as he neared her that he was wearing his spring jacket and that he’d sound pretty damn stupid offering her his gloves when he’d left them on his coatrack back in his apartment! Embarrassed, he swung away.

  The platform rumbled; he turned to stare north. It was only a plane leaving from O’Hare, a mile away. Clohessy whistled tunelessly, rubbernecked. The sign above him read: BOARD HERE FOR TRAINS TO LOOP & WEST SIDE. The dull white neon lines flickered. The clock at the bank now said: 52° at 11:11. A huge tanker truck obscured the red neon Mona Koni restaurant sign as it made wide turn into the parking lot of Dominick’s.

  Sighing, Clohessy began watching for signs of life in one of the lighted upper floors of an office building to the far side of I-90’s left lanes. When he turned again, the girl was gone. Clohessy glanced up at
the escalators. From where he stood, he saw the bottom fifteen steps of the two stairwells, with the escalator in the middle, before they disappeared out of sight behind the overhead ads for Camel Filters and Salem Lights. He was still surprised by how well kept and graffiti-free the El station was.

  Clohessy saw a blurred flash of color.

  The girl was riding the rails on the up escalator. He smiled, amazed. Slipping back into sight from above, she’d slide down nearly to the bottom before stopping, then glide back up. Clohessy watched her straddle the moving stairwell a half dozen times, saw her ride up in a kind of swimming sidestroke. She was gorgeous. Her sweater had hiked up over her hip, exposing more flesh. Her hair fell across her face.

  She turned to stare at Clohessy, winked. He touched his collar, glanced away at the bank clock again, too flustered even to notice the time. He looked back; again she was gone from sight.

  Clohessy heard whistling and catcalls from above. Male voices. The voices came nearer, accompanied by the sound of sneakers on the concrete stairs. Clohessy calculated four separate voices, fretted for the girl. All four men wore slicked-back hair, he saw when they reached bottom; all wore lime-green fall windbreakers. Each carried a bag of some kind. They walked closer. Behind them, the girl slid back down the rail. She stared at the men, but with boredom.

  Once they had reached the glare of the sodium lamps, Clohessy realized why the girl wasn’t afraid of them, and, for what seemed like the twelfth time that night, he felt extremely stupid. They weren’t gang members. The jackets advertised Szostak’s Tavern.

  The four guys were a Polish bowling team.

  Within minutes, the southbound train pulled in. The bowlers got on, heading toward Milwaukee Avenue; Clohessy was certain. He glanced at the time. 11:18. Still plenty of time to catch me Archer bus downtown. He’d wait around to see what the girl was going to do. She seemed in no hurry to leave. Maybe she was waiting for Clohessy to make his move.

  The southbound train was now far in the distance. The girl hadn’t come back down the escalator since the train was in the station. Clohessy, inching closer to the stairwell and her, heard a shuffling sound from the concourse above. Probably her boyfriend showing—

  He saw something white, lying flat on one of the escalator steps lowering to the platform. White with splashes of red.

  Descending.

  Red nails on a girl’s hand.

  Red veins at the wrist.

  Descending. Catching on the edge of the platform grille and flipping up. Her hand severed at the wrist, hideous in the green glow seeping up from the escalator’s bowels. Creating a ghastly cast of shadows from her dead veins and finger joints.

  Then her corpse followed riding the rail down, lines of blood sprayed across the chrome. Her eyes, forever open, still had the bored look she had given the bowlers.

  Then, also riding the rail down, toward Clohessy, the man with the knife.

  Mark McNease

  COOCHIE-COO

  WRITING tense, tight short-shorts well is an unsung accomplishment, amazing if you consider that the next horrific gem was written for the Writer’s Digest School course I instructed. In short, it’s one of the “first” stories in Masques III—but I’d bet a bundle you wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t told you!

  A young Californian, Mark McNease used some of what he learned from the course (and considerable raw talent) and not only wrote two one-act plays but saw them produced in Los Angeles—and directed one—to absolute raves. Of “Brand New Walker” and “Ribbons,” dramatized together as One Axe. one critic wrote: “These plays are strong stuff and worth your time,” and a second said McNease “eviscerates the tense underbelly of family existence and spills out the psychologically-bloody entrails . . Richard Labonte, writing in Update, added that the fifty-minute plays were “unsettling, uncomfortable and demanding.”

  Evisceration, tension, psychological gore, and unsettling strong stuff are ideal to horror. Playwriting or writing prose, I predict Mark McNease will make a searing mark on the underbelly of our human family.

  COOCHIE-COO

  Mark McNease

  EDDY’S EYES BURNED WHEN HE OPENED them, each brown iris floating in a pool of red. He jerked his head forward, as if the receding nightmare had shaken him by the shoulders or drilled like a fist into his spine with its vicious images. His muscles, constantly alert and prepared, contracted sharply and he bolted upright in his seat. Sweat adhered his clothes to him; sweat unrelieved in the hot, stagnant air of the bus.

  He listened with the nerves of a rabbit to the sounds around him—nothing now but the hum of the engine.

  Time had passed. He guessed it had been a long while, judging from the empty seats. Only one other passenger remained, a woman sitting directly in front of him with a baby peering over her shoulder.

  A curious baby with wet blue eyes.

  A fat, hairless baby sucking its thumb. Staring at him.

  Everyone else was gone.

  Eddy’s sleep had been fitful at best, plagued by a dream he’d floated in and out of for hours. It was more like a memory than a nightmare: stabbed in the Portland depot, cornered in the men’s room by a thief like himself who thought nothing of putting a blade in him over ill-chosen words. A skinny black man with yellow teeth whose knife hand he remembered too clearly for dreams; a thumb and three fingers twisting into his belly.

  Plunging in.

  Digging.

  He clenched his shirttail, pulling it up to expose his abdomen. God I don’t wanna die don’t let me die. Without looking down he ran his palm over the skin, expecting to feel dried blood with the sweat. Not on a bus please not on a bus. Nothing. It had been a dream after all.

  He exhaled loudly, following it with a laugh that cut through the stillness. He slapped his thigh. “Goddamn, Eddy boy,” he said half-aloud to reassure himself, “you got the luck. You sure do got the luck!”

  He carefully rubbed his eyes, trying to soothe the sting that bit with every blink of his lids. The smell of his hands made him grimace. It was the odor of long days and nights on the road, the pungent aroma of sweat and the dirt of traveling that builds from a film to a tangible layer of filth. He sniffed, familiar with the places it came from—doorknobs and benches and cigarette butts plucked greedily from the sidewalk. His grimace changed to the smile of a child who has found his way home.

  Eddy leaned back and wiped his hands on the knees of his jeans. He immersed himself in that feeling of home. This was it: riding down a deserted highway with a dozen destinations to choose from. He wouldn’t let them kick him out this time, or lock him up with common drunks. He wouldn’t let them give him rules and regulations, or wag their righteous fingers at the kid gone bad, saying, “Why can’t you be like your brother? He made something of himself in the exciting and challenging world of data processing. He gets to meet interesting people every day. But you, Eddy Brisk? You’re a schmuck. A zero.”

  He flinched at the memories. They were useless to him, like love or duty to the family he’d detached himself from five years before. A family content with being slaves to boredom while he, Steady Eddy Brisk, insisted on freedom. Unconditional freedom.

  Certain law-enforcement agencies argued that he wouldn’t keep it for long. They said stealing wasn’t freedom, but crime. Well, Eddy thought, grinning with the teeth he had left, they ain’t caught me yet. I got the luck. I sure do got the luck. Secure in the knowledge of his good fortune, he leaned forward to spit on the floor. When he lifted his head he realized that the baby was staring at him, its fingers dug into the gray cotton of its mother’s blouse. Eddy winked and made a face, sticking his tongue out while crossing his eyes.

  The baby was not amused.

  Eddy nodded. “Name’s Brisk,” he said. “Rhymes with risk.” He laughed, certain the mother would turn around to glare down her nose at him. When she didn’t respond, Eddy assumed she was asleep. Dumb bitch is out of it, he thought with a smirk. Just as well. One less mom to snatch her brat away fro
m me.

  He curled his index finger, hooking it several times like a worm sticking up from an apple. “Coochie-Coo,” he said, his voice more a grate than a whisper.

  The baby just kept staring, its cool blue eyes too large for its face; round blue eyes that were oddly developed for a child so small.

  Eyes that didn’t blink, gazing intently with what Eddy suddenly took for contempt.

  He drew back in his seat, not wanting to play anymore. “You’re weird,” he said. “Can’t be more than two years old and you’re fucking weird.” He ran a grimy hand across his forehead, wondering why sweat had beaded there. He passed it off with a phlegm-stained chuckle and turned his attention to the landscape outside.

  Dust covered the window. Most of it was external, but not all of it. By wiping the glass with his sleeve, Eddy was able to see into the darkness. He peered out, expecting to catch a glimpse of the hills they were surely descending as the bus wound down through northern California. Relieved that they must be hundreds of miles from the redneck bastion called Oregon, he grinned as he gazed inches from the windowpane.

  His smile dropped quickly, his mouth opening in a gape. Desert. He wiped frantically at the glass. Desert. Long endless cold desert.

  He sat back, perspiring heavily, cursing himself for drinking so much. Damn, he thought. I got on the wrong bus! Jesus. How long was I asleep? He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, trying to calm himself. Thinking. He decided he must be headed for Vegas. Of course. Where else would his drunken mind have thought to take him? He was always grand when he drank. Always had his plans.

  He slumped into the seat cushion. He opened and closed his eyes several times, squinting tightly, attempting to dispel the tension building just inside his skull. He didn’t want to go to Vegas. He’d had trouble there. No problem. Somebody might remember him. You got the luck. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe he was on a roll. His fear began to subside.