Darker Masques

by J N Williamson

  And the baby stared.

  It dawned on Eddy that the child had been watching him all this time. Obnoxious little shit. He looked away, surveying the seats across the aisle. Where is everybody? Apparently no one was much interested in Vegas. Awful damn dark in here.

  He brought his head back around only to discover that the baby was still staring. He glared back, his annoyance mixed with apprehension. “It’s not polite to stare,” he said.

  The baby paid him no mind. It had taken its thumb out of its mouth and used its hands to climb up on the woman’s shoulder. A little bit farther.

  A little bit closer.

  Studying the man whose sweat blended with fear to spice the air.

  Staring.

  Two small, pudgy hands alternately digging into and releasing the shoulder it perched against.

  Staring.

  Its androgynous yellow jumpsuit failing to be cheerful.

  Staring.

  Eddy squirmed in his seat. He laughed nervously, thinking how foolish it was to be disturbed by a baby. Still, it had the strangest eyes he’d ever seen. As if they knew everything—where he’d been and where he was going. All that he’d done in his thirty-two years, and all he’d never accomplished. He found himself caught in its unblinking gaze, slipping away, his eyelids growing heavy.

  He snapped out of it with a quick, jerking motion. He thought of other things—anything but the bus and the baby. Headed for Vegas. He covered his face with his hands, smelling the filth on them. Portland to Vegas. He turned to the window, confused by the stretching desert. Stabbed in Portland. Left for dead. Son of a bitch took my money. Bleeding. He grabbed his stomach, pressing his fingers into the flesh, feeling for a gash. No gash. No money either. He patted his pockets. Going to Vegas no money.

  Eddie threw himself against the cushion behind him. His breathing had accelerated; he could hear it escaping in short, fierce puffs through his nose. As panic heightened his senses, he saw the woman’s purse nestled between the seats. A common purse, it was, beige cotton with one dark letter in a pattern like a designer item, or a cheap imitation. A clearance-sale purse that no doubt held lipstick, Kleenex, sunglasses, and money. Got to have some money. Not much, but some. Got to have some money.

  He debated with himself for the next five minutes. If he reach up slowly, cautiously, he could slip the pocketbook out of the purse without a sound. But he could get caught. The woman could wake up, start screaming, have him arrested at the next bus station.

  After weighing the consequences, he quietly leaned forward.

  And it watched him.

  He slid his arm between the seats, taking what seemed an eternity to get to the other side.

  And it wouldn’t take its eyes off him.

  With just the slightest pressure, he pushed his forearm through. Years of skill paid off when he grasped the latch. Muffling the noise with his palm, Eddy snapped the purse open.

  And it grabbed his arm, digging its fat little fingers into his flesh.

  Eddy gasped, looking up, found himself pierced by those ice-blue eyes.

  “Coochie-Coo,” it hissed. A shrill laugh escaped its mouth. A squeal of delight.

  Eddy tried to pull his arm back. It was stuck between the seats, partly from his twisting away from the baby’s grasp but mostly from fear.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman’s torso move. He glanced up, knowing she would glare at him, accuse and loathe him. He dreaded what he would see in her face.

  What he saw was nothing. No eyes. No nose. No mouth. Just the front of a skull covered tightly with skin. Turning away with his heart racing, Eddy saw where the woman ended and the baby began—up near her right shoulder—growing and wriggling and laughing. Sprouting like a tumor. Being her eyes. Her mouth. Her terrible shriek of pleasure as it dug into his arm, pulling it up to cut its teeth on him.

  A wetness began to spread near Eddy’s waist. It could been urine. He knew it was blood.

  Bill Ryan

  THE WULGARU

  ONE story here required “translation”: the following tale. Translated, that is, from the original Australian! Don’t fret, though, mate. Brisbane Bill Ryan is the horror-fiction equivalent of Crocodile Dundee, with a background as a security guard, meat packer, clerk, and postman Down Under (it’s the last two writing warm-ups that seem potentially as scary as crocfighting to me). The needed Americanizations have not harmed this individualistic and adventurous romp.

  Brisbane Bill, born July 22, 1956, says he’s a “passionate reader of horror, fantasy, and science fiction,” and that he experienced “enormous relief, vindication, and just plain fantastic feelings” to learn of this, his first professional sale. Relief isn’t what you’ll experience when you read about mulga trees, Gidgce logs, charging razorbacks, diabetic aborigines—and the special supernatural horror indigenous to Australia. You’ve never heard “G’day, mate” uttered with such a mood of menace—or with greater originality. Give it a fair go, right?

  THE WALGARU

  Bill Ryan

  EICHAEL ALOYSIUS CURRY WAS NINETEEN WHEN Caitlin O’Shea fanned his desperate love into an act of revenge. Revenge for his brother, Dion. Mick’s and Caitlin’s plastique had left one paratrooper legless in the Falls Road another’s brains running down his back. The legless one rose somehow, a spray of petrol smoldering on his flak vest. Caitlin ran as the para bore Mick through the broken bow window of Fihelly’s florists, where Cup Final wreath crisped.

  The para knew the Brothers Curry from the papers. Dion’s suicide in Belfast’s Maze Prison had given the press a martyr and they’d plastered young Mick’s confirmation picture everywhere. Eamon Curry’s eldest had looked angelic with his arm around the lovely Caitlin.

  But an unchristian eye might have noted the kerosone burns Dion had suffered in lighting the neighbors’ tomcat.

  The soldiers had wanted names, read Mick’s terror as defiance. Even as the bayonet burned his knuckles, though, he was no Judas. One finger fell among the charred Cup flowers.

  Then, cheek to cheek, he betrayed every IRA lad he had met through Dion. The girl? No, he’d never grass on Caitlin, never! The para began to cry for the woman in Kingussie who would soon be his widow and lopped off another of young Curry’s fingers as he died. Mick wriggled out of the glass and embers, and ran . . .

  Ten years had left him graying, ruddy, and soft; only the brittle green eyes remained of the boy Mick. Sucking brandy, he decided this vigil for wild boars on a pile of rocks in outback Australia had been a mistake. His ghosts were no more bound to Belfast than he.

  “You won’t see the pigs at this rate, sport.” Jo Pitman retrieved the bottle, took a slow swig of amber. Under her Stetson the brassy sunset glowed in her eyes.

  “Yeah.” The two fingers of Mick’s right hand checked his rifle for the tenth time. The dum-dums hadn’t walked away.

  “They’re coming down,” Jo said.

  He heard faint squeals and snorts. He looked down from his rocky perch. The waterhole burned. The pigs were black shadows against it. He brought the rifle to his shoulder, jerked the trigger. His slug bounced off a boar’s skull, knocked it to its knees. It struggled up, squealing. Mick put a round through its chest. Reload . . . slow. Pigs, they were running. But two more dropped before the rest were gone.

  “Thought they’d be bigger.”

  The sun was fat and red when they reached the first carcass.

  “Like that movie, Razorback?” Jo showed Mick a crooked smile. “You want a buffalo, sport!”

  She slid a hunting knife from her boot, then hacked a tusk three inches long from the pig’s jaw. “In Spain, you get the bull’s ears and tail. Reckon this’ll look better round your neck.”

  Mick laughed, then noticed the fine silver links hanging from the boar’s mouth. A bracelet was bent around the peglike teeth. Jo’s knife levered them apart and he worked it free. Earth removed the blood and pus.

  Jo snatched the dangling diabetic ID bracelet and race
d back to her antique Jeep. Mick weaved after her.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “NevYagunjil’s the only diabetic round here. An aboriginal, not far off.”

  Still muzzy, he managed to puke overboard as they bounced over ruts. Like a dream, the Jeep growled across a dry lake, and the red-and-gray waste took wing. The parrots were the colors of the clay, invisible until startled into flight. The eye of a raucous hurricane, Mick clutched the Jeep’s roll bar and his head.

  In no time, Jo’s apricot singlet and shorts were soaked. Her sandy hair swung in damp rattails. His own shirt was a sweat rag and his skin glowed pink where he wasn’t caked in dust.

  Jo braked at a steep ridge and dug out a first-aid kit. Mick followed over red earth and boulders peeled like onions by sun an frost. Shards cut the soles of his Nikes.

  The granite fell to a sapphire pool ringed by pale mulga trees, which sheltered a monstrosity of corrugated iron and slabs of bark. Tarpaulins made the shanty resemble a shipwreck.

  “Nev?” Jo slid down the loose rock without waiting for a reply mat never came.

  Most of Nev Yagunjil was on the far side of the shanty. The pigs had scattered him like terriers with a rag. The aboriginal’s face and scalp hung from a spiny bush, a child’s discarded mask watching blowflies troop on his bones and goanna lizards squabble for any morsel left by the pigs.

  Jo turned green but choked it down. The awful find had no effect on Mick: this wasn’t a corpse, it was a jigsaw. He held Jo until the spasms eased. Finally she stuck that pugnacious cleft in her chin up at him and said, “Thanks.”

  The peeled skull turned to face them. Jo screamed. It nodded sadly at Mick’s approach. The left temple was staved in; a red goanna unraveled from inside the cranium and fled on its hind legs. The skull spun and stopped with the jagged hole up.

  “Could pigs have done that, Jo?”

  She shook her head.

  “Looks like someone took a shillelagh to him.”

  “Or a rock.” Jo turned it with a twig.

  A wedge of flint was embedded in bone near the hole. Mick steered her toward the shanty before she bit through her lip.

  Under the tarp awnings, a toadlike paw had drawn an aboriginal hunter into the hollow stump of a baobab. Yagunjil had carved him skinless, after the black style. Each knot of muscle, each filigreed vein, stood out. So did the terror in those naked features. Mick resisted the temptation to cover that nightmare with Yagunjil’s own face.

  “Pretty horrific,” he said.

  “His Dreamtime Legends series,” Jo grunted. “Nev even had the wood and stone trucked in from the original tribal lands.”

  The workshop was dark. As their vision adapted, they saw a carpet of bloodstained sketches. Flies ran down the crusty streaks on walls.

  Another of the artist’s flayed men stood by a hurricane lamp burning with the tiniest blue spark. The wood smelled old; rotten. Flies delved the incisions for blood and swarmed on its horrible right hand. The limbs and the fingers were articulated with knotted human hair.

  Mick winced. “What’s that great ugly thing?” he asked.

  “The Wulgaru legend.” She shuddered, pulled herself erect “A kurdaitcha man supposedly freed an evil spirit from a tree by carving it into human shape. Then it ran amok; real Frankenstein stuff. I don’t recall all the details. This was to be Nev’s last piece. He was months finding the right Gidgee log.”

  Mick squinted. “Are those eyes opal?”

  “Quartz.” She shuffled paper. “These drawings . . .”

  “What about them?”

  “Nev was fanatical about ‘feeling the spirit in the wood’ then paring away ‘all else.’ He never before planned a work, Mick.”

  “So he put this spook on paper, eh?” Mick turned the sketch. There was a thumbmark in the charcoal rendering of a rough log. He could almost see hateful eyes and hair like smoke. Caitlin O’Shea, he thought, seen through tears.

  Jo was gone. The chop of a shovel led Mick to her. She was digging a grave. He offered to spell her.

  “Lousy holiday for you, Irish.”

  “It’s different.”

  They collected the bones in a rusty oil drum and rolled it into the grave. The sun died behind the mulga as they tamped dark soil on Yagunjil’s impromptu bier.

  “Have we just illicitly disposed of a body?” he asked, suddenly anxious.

  “Sport, the nearest cop is six hundred klicks east. I radio him from town, he gets Homicide to fly up from Brisbane. Three days. This way, there’s something for them to poke at.”

  “Oh.” Mick wiped his forehead. His wrist left a stripe of sunburned skin in the ocher dust. Jo drew circles on his cheeks.

  “Let’s lose the warpaint, chief.”

  After a stiff progress to the pool, their tension scraped away with the dust. Jo stepped out of her shorts. Scanties white against her tan, she jackknifed into the pool. She spat and slicked her hair back. “Well?”

  No great swimmer, Mick was worried by the depth. Despite her whistle he felt ridiculous in his boxer shorts. An explosive belly-flop proved the water both deep and cold. He swallowed a howl and kicked for the surface.

  “Unique style, Irish,” said Jo.

  Mick’s dog paddle barely kept him up. “That’s how we do it in the Auld Sod.”

  He floated, watched the first stars appear. The cool quiet recalled a boy mounting rotten steps in a Belfast boarding-house. Whitewashed glass turned the light to sour cream and cobwebs. He’d perched breathless on the widow’s walk as the world rolled away to the mountains of Mourne. His dreaming place, refuge from Dion’s malice. He’d trusted it to Caitlin and she’d made it a deadly cache.

  He remembered fierce love and the hate that fed it. Mick had joined the Na Fianna Eirann after the Orangemen smashed his father’s kneecaps, but even that shining hate hadn’t nourished itself as Caitlin’s did. If Mick hadn’t loved his brother, he’d done his duty.

  Love, hate and duty! No wonder he was enchanted by this uncomplicated Australian lass.

  Jo splashed him. She laughed and swallowed water. Coughs lured him in for another volley. They caught each other’s wrists and traded fierce grins.

  “Ten dollars says I can duck you,” she said.

  “You’re on.” Mick knew he had the weight advantage, but Jo was solid and fitter than he’d ever been. He kissed her to break her grip. Even though it was necessarily hard and clumsy and he held it too long, Jo didn’t back off.

  “Cards on the table, Mick.”

  “Not quartz, eh?”

  “Color, mate. Worth a packet.”

  “So why are we talking about it?”

  Jo refilled the lamp and threw light on Nev’s Wulgaru and its stone eyes. She chewed a knuckle in thought. “Jeez, I’ll be yanking Nev’s gold teeth next.”

  “Didn’t have any.”

  She made a face. “Real funny. I hate myself for doing this.”

  A shrug. “Then go.”

  “And hate myself for passing it up?” Jo’s exasperated smile made him laugh. “So make yourself useful, sport!”

  He chose a knife and chipped away the dark resin holding the opals. As he pried one loose, his hand slipped. A flint tooth drew blood. “You bastard!” he yelped.

  Getting a solid grip on the jaw, he yanked the opal out.

  But his triumphal laugh was punctuated by the clasp of stone—and pain. Confused, he jerked back his hand—

  And his right thumb was gone. Mick stared at where it belonged in agony, disbelief. His knees turned to water then, making him sag, sparing him Yagunjil’s fate. Incredibly, a graven arm skinned his cheek. (A kurdaitcha man freed an evil spirit from a tree. . .) Striking the worktable with all his weight, Mick inadvertently tipped the lamp onto the littered floor.

  From there, astonished he watched the unbearably ugly Wulgaru creak and writhe. Behind the fire. Flies rose from it in a lazy swarm. Mick’s hand was a red rubber glove, so Jo, glancing back up at the horror, kno
tted something white around his wrist.

  “It got my thumb.” He said it wonderingly, feebly. The world was eating his hand, bits at a time.

  “Keep pissing claret like that and it’ll get the rest of you kosher.” Her panties stanched the blood but not before covering her, making her an abstract in red below the navel. “We’ve got to—”

  Suddenly, wagging limbs writhing with human hair, the Wulgaru splintered a bark wall and fled the fire. The shanty groaned alarmingly; that sound and the icon’s terrible, carved face penetrated the shock that had held Mick paralyzed. He grabbed Jo’s wrist and they dodged under flapping sheets of flame that had been the canvas roof. Scarcely escaping, they saw that the Wulgaru had lurched between them and the ridge. Now it was herding themback toward the water and into it with a loud splash. Holding onto Jo, Mick dashed quickly to the deepest point, pursued by the monster.

  Its ghastly head cocked its remaining eye at them and then sank . . .

  “We’re safe!” Mick exclaimed. “The bastard can’t swim!” Treading water, he sucked his thumb joint, fought weakness.

  “C’mon, we can’t lose too much—”

  Abruptly, silt boiled up around them.

  Jo stared at Mick. “It’s . . . walking. Along the bottom!”

  Then the water promptly closed over her with a hiss.

  With their fingers twined, Mick was dragged under also. He tried to see. Silver bubbled from her nose but her cheeks were full. Jo had had time for one quick breath. He wriggled down beneath her arm, into the milk, saw the living legend.

  The Wulgaru had hooked her calf muscles! Mick tried hard, couldn’t budge so much as one claw. The Wulgaru grinned at him. Content to hold her, it flaunted Mick’s helplessness. In desperation, he gnawed at wood and sinew alike but was ignored.

  Raw lungs decided it. Mick had no choices. He kicked away after seeing Jo’s lips as a blue circle, her eyes already mercifully shut.