Darker Masques

by J N Williamson

  “Sure.”

  “Well, let’s go,” he said, pulling on his flight jacket.

  “But I have to change clothes.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather have a new dress?”

  This time I did get excited. “Sure!” I said and raced him to the Jeep.

  We drove down the mountain to town. I had to try on several dresses from the incredibly wide selection at Candy’s Fashion Scene before I decided on a short pink one. It was a lot shorter than Momma would’ve ever let me buy. I really didn’t expect Dad to let me either. To be honest, I tried it on just to see if he would say anything. All he said was. “I think that color looks good on you.”

  After the dress, we drove to the town’s new restaurant for lunch. The Mountain Inn didn’t look like a restaurant at all. It was just a big blue rectangular building with a gaudy neon sign mounted on the back of a trailer. And I thought, What a waste of a new dress!

  I guess Dad could tell by my face I was disappointed because he said, “Things aren’t as fancy in this part of the country. But the food’s good.”

  I got mad at myself for acting childish and said, “I’m starved.” When we sat down, a waitress plopped two plastic menus in front of us. She had on a name tag that said “Wyoma” and a face that said she knew Dad. Her uniform was a pair of tight jeans and a T-shirt with the slogan “Blondes Do It Better.” She looked at me, then said to Dad, “Good to see you, Gary. It’s been a while.”

  “Been busy,” Dad said. He asked me what I’d like and he ordered the same.

  Wyoma asked “Would you like for me to cut the little girl’s meat for her, or is she old enough to handle a knife by herself?”

  Dad laughed when I said “I can cut my own meat, thank you.”

  “Spunky little thing, ain’t she?” Wyoma gave me a fake grin.

  “Takes after her father,” Dad answered.

  Wyoma looked at Dad to see if he was serious, then hit his arm with her order pad. “I could kill you, Gary Fenster! Teasing me like that.”

  When Wyoma left, I asked Dad, “Wonder what it is she does better?”

  Dad’s lips moved a little to the side as they always did when he was thinking something funny. “Well, I know she makes better toast than I do,” he said, and we both laughed so loud that people turned around and looked at us.

  I whispered, “I think she likes you.”

  “She likes anything with a deep voice and pants,” Dad said, and we laughed out loud again.

  When Wyoma brought our order over, she asked, “You two hiding a joke book under the table?”

  Dad and I couldn’t stop giggling. You know how it is when you get really tickled at something? Things aren’t even funny anymore, but you keep laughing anyway.

  Wyoma tore our check out of her order pad, slapped it upside down next to Dad’s plate. “She seems a little too innocent for your jokes, Gary.” Then she pushed a pencil behind her ear and went to pour coffee for customers sitting at the counter.

  That night, Dad surprised me by taking me to an outdoor concert. It was country/western music—not exactly my favorite, but it was okay. Toward the end of the concert, the band started playing a really fast song and everyone hopped up, clapping and dancing. Before we knew it, we were dancing too—swinging, dipping, kicking. As the music sped up, we did too, dancing faster and faster. I felt my new dress swish high around my thighs. I’d never felt so wonderful, so free.

  The song stopped suddenly and we fell to the ground, too out of breath to say anything. We lay there, chests moving up and down, hair wet with sweat. I could have stayed in that same spot all night, staring up at the stars, feeling the earth spin.

  Dad held my hand all the way home that night. He didn’t even let go to shift gears. It felt so good having someone care that much about me. Momma loved me, but not like Dad. The rhythm of me road and the breeze against my eyes put me to sleep, my head still spinning.

  I didn’t wake up until Dad was carrying me inside the cabin. I was still half asleep when I felt him put me gently on my sleeping bag and kiss my cheek. He kissed me again on my other cheek. He brushed my bangs back and kissed my forehead. I told myself to calm down. He’s your father. He loves you. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. He’s not like that.

  I opened my eyes. Dad’s face was close to mine, and behind him I saw the skull. It glowed in the firelight, the flames dancing in its empty eyes. I wanted to go away again, let it happen to someone else; but me skull face wouldn’t let me. I was caught between sleeping and waking, not knowing what was real and what was a dream while he stared down at me, stroking me. I closed my eyes, tried to go away, but I could still feel him on me. “Dad . . .” I started to say. But when I looked it wasn’t him anymore. It was the skull’s face, lit by the fire, staring down at me, grinning. It moved closer, that awful mouth opening and closing as it whispered over and over, “I love you, Ronnie, I love you.”

  I screamed.

  I screamed so loud, I scared myself even more. Then I couldn’t stop screaming. I screamed at the skull, I screamed at him, I screamed at the dark woods around us. All the ugly pictures flashed through my head one after me other, blending into each other like the rooms in this cabin, like his face and the skull’s face; with no beginning and no end. Then I was crying and shaking so hard, I could barely breathe.

  Dad held me down. He was saying over and over, “Ronnie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Ronnie, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

  When I finally got calmed down, he tried to take me in his arms to comfort me, like only a father could. I jerked away from him, said, “I want to go home.” I knew it hurt him, but I didn’t care.

  I stayed awake all night, waiting for the sun to come into the room. I thought it would be better then. But it was worse. Everything was so much more real. I still had on the pink dress. It seemed cheap and dirty, and I hated it.

  Dad sat motionless in the chair across the room. He’d been awake all night, too.

  I asked if we could get ready to leave and he asked if I was hungry. I shook my head, knowing I would choke if I tried to swallow anything. I changed clothes and packed.

  The drive to the airport was silent—no talking, no music. Dad took care of changing the ticket for me.

  “Any problem?” I asked when he handed it to me.

  “No problem,” he said. He backed up a few feet, stared at me. He ran his hand through his short hair. “Except now I wish I had been killed over there and I wouldn’t have hurt you like this.”

  Standing away from me like that, he didn’t seem so handsome anymore. He stuffed both hands in his pockets, said, “Tell your mother I’m moving. Tell her I’ll . . .” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Straighten things out. I’ll make them even.” He cleared his throat. I could tell this was tough for him, but I still didn’t care. “And I want you to be honest with her. Tell her the truth.”

  I nodded. Just wanted to get away from there. Away from him. I wondered if I would ever stop hating him.

  When the announcement was made to board the plane, I practically ran. I didn’t say good-bye or even turn around to look at him. From my window seat, as the plane taxied, I watched him disappear into the terminal, head down and his hands buried in his flight jacket.

  That was the last time I ever saw him. No one knows where he is or even if he’s still alive. Momma and I don’t play the music anymore. Sometimes I really miss it. Sometimes.

  William F. Nolan

  ON 42ND ST.

  OPEN an anthology, book of poetry, novel, or magazine, and don’t be startled to find Bill Nolan present creatively. It’s all catalogued in a nine-year project recently published by Borgo, The Work of William F. Nolan—one hundred short stories (including those in his upcoming horror/terror collection Nightshapes (Avon) and fifty books, among them his renowned “Logan” trilogy and his first horror novel, Helltracks (also Avon)—a still blooming total of more than twelve hundred works.

  What can’t be catalog
ued is friendship. Or good times. Like an Ottawa night when Wuffin, from memory, acted out most of the Maltese Falcon film parts. Or a Nashville night when, to highlight his affection for Shane, he did the same for Shane with magical impressions of Alan Ladd; Van Heflin; Jack Palance. Nolan finished by calling “Shaaaaane” in the perfect wail of eleven-year-old Brandon DeWildc. Just as in this new story a remarkable writer captures the wails rising from a certain sin-soaked street. A different Nolan, here—the genius intact.

  ON 42ND ST.

  William F. Nolan

  HE HADN’T BEEN TO NEW YORK since he was a kid, not since his last year of high school. That had been his graduation present: a trip to the Big Apple. He’d bugged his parents for years about New York, how it was the center of everything and how not to see it was like never seeing God. As a kid, he used to think of New York as the god of the U.S. He read every book he could find about it at his local library in Atkin.

  His parents were quite content to stay in Ohio, in this little town they’d met and married in, where he’d been born and where his father had his tool business. His parents never traveled anywhere, and neither had he until he took the train to New York that summer when he was eighteen.

  The city was hot and humid, but the weather hadn’t bothered him. He’d been too enchanted, too dazzled by the high-thrusting towers of Manhattan, the jungle roar of midtown traffic, the glitter of Fifth Avenue, the pulse of night life on Broadway—and by the green vastness of Central Park, plunked like a chunk of Ohio into the center of this awesome steel-and-concrete giant.

  And by the people. Especially on the subways; he’d never seen so many people jammed together in a single place. Jostling each other, shouting, laughing, cursing. Big and small, rich and poor, young and old, black and brown and yellow and white. An assault on the senses, so many of them.

  “The subways are no good anymore,” his friends now told him. “They’ve got graffiti all over them and you can get mugged real easy on a subway. Cabs are your best bet. Once inside a taxi, you’re safe . . . at least until you get out!”

  And they had also warned him, all these years later, to stay away from 42nd Street. “Forty-second’s like a blight,” they declared. “New York’s changed since you were a kid. It can get ugly, real ugly.”

  And they’d talked about the billions of cockroaches and rats that lived under the city and in it, how even in the swankiest apartment on Fifth Avenue they have cockroaches late at night, crawling the walls . . .

  So here he was, Ben Sutton, thirty-eight, balding and unmarried, on a plane to Kennedy—returning to the Apple after twenty years to represent the Sutton Tool Manufacturing Company of Atkin, Ohio. His father, Ed Sutton, who had founded the company, was long dead. Now Ben owned the business, because his mother had died within a year of his father. Over the past decade, he’d been sending other company employees to the National Tool Convention each year in New York, but this time, on a sudden impulse, he’d decided to go himself.

  His friends backed the decision. “ ‘Bout time for you to stir your stumps, Ben,” they told him. “Take the trip. Get some excitement into your life.”

  They were right. Ben’s life had settled into a series of dull routine days, one following another like a row of black dominos. By now the business practically ran itself, and Ben was feeling more and more like a figurehead. A trip such as this would revitalize him; he’d be plugged into the mainstream of life again. Indeed, it was time to “stir his stumps.”

  Kennedy was a madhouse. Ben lost his baggage claim check and had a difficult time proving that his two bags really belonged to him. Then the airport bus he took from Kennedy to Grand Central suffered some kind of mechanical malfunction and he had to wait by the side of the highway with a dozen angry passengers until another bus arrived a full hour later.

  At Grand Central a gaunt-bodied teenager, with the words “The Dead Live!” stitched across the back of his red poplin jacket, ran off with one of Ben’s suitcases while he was phoning the hotel to ask for an extension on his room reservation. A beefy station cop grabbed the kid and got the suitcase back.

  The cop asked if he wanted to press charges, but Ben shook his head. “Let somebody else press charges when he steals another suitcase. I can’t get involved.”

  The cop scowled. “That’s a piss-poor attitude, mister.” He glared at the teenager. “This little dickhead ought to be put away.”

  When the cop finally let him go, the kid gave them both the finger before vanishing in the crowd.

  “You see that?” asked the cop, flushed with anger. “You see what that little shit did? I oughta run him down and pound him good. An’ I got half a mind to do it!”

  “That’s your choice, Officer,” Ben declared. “But I have to get a cab to my hotel before I lose my room.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” said the cop. “It’s no sweat off my balls what the hell you do.”

  Well, thought Ben, they warned me things could get ugly.

  The convention hotel was quite nice and his room was pleasant. His window faced Central Park and there was a wonderful view of the spreading greenery.

  The bellhop nodded when Ben told him how much he liked the view. “Yeah—maybe you’ll get to watch an ol’ lady being mugged down there.” He chuckled then asked if Ben was “with the convention.”

  “Yes, I’m here from Ohio.”

  “Well, a lot of the convention people are boozin’ it up at the bar. Maybe you’ll make some new friends.”

  The bellhop’s words were prophetic.

  After he had showered and changed into fresh clothes, Ben took the elevator down to the bar (called The Haven), and he had not been there for more than five minutes when two men sat down on stools, one to either side of him.

  “So, you’re a tool man, huh?” asked the fellow to Ben’s left. Bearded, with large, very dark eyes and a lot of teeth in his smile.

  “Correct,” said Ben. “How did you know?”

  “Lapel,” said the other man, the one on the right. He was thin and extremely pale with washed-out blue eyes behind thick glasses.

  Ben looked confused. “I don’t—”

  “That pin in the lapel of your coat,” the bearded man said. “Dead giveaway.”

  Ben smiled, touching the bright metal lapel pin which featured a hammer, wrench, and pliers in an embossed design above the logo: “Sutton’s—Tools You Can Trust.”

  “Are you two gentlemen also here for the convention?” Ben asked.

  “You got it,” said the man in glasses. “I’m Jock Kirby, and this bearded character is Billy Dennis.”

  “Ben Sutton.”

  They shook hands.

  “Us, we’re local boys, from the core of the Apple,” said Billy Dennis. “Where you hail from?”

  “Atkin, Ohio.”

  “Akron?” asked Jock. “I know a tire man from Akron.”

  “No, Atkin,” Ben corrected him. “We’re a few hundred miles from Akron. People tend to get the names mixed.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Billy.

  “It’s a small town,” Ben told them. “Nothing much to hear about.”

  “What you drinking?” Jock asked.

  “Scotch and water,” said Ben.

  “Great. Same for us.” Kirby gestured to the bartender, raising Ben’s glass. “Three more of these, okay?”

  “Okay,” nodded the barman.

  “So,” said Billy Dennis, running a slow hand along his bearded cheek, “you’re an Ohio man. Not much pizzazz back there, huh?”

  “Pizzazz?” Ben blinked at him.

  “He means,” added Kirby, “you must get bored out of your gourd with nothing much shaking in Akins.”

  “Atkin. It’s Atkin.”

  “Well, whatever,” Kirby grunted.

  Their drinks arrived and Dennis shoved a twenty-dollar bill toward the barman.

  “What do you do for kicks back in Ohio?” asked Kirby.

  “I watch television,” Ben said, sipping his Scot
ch. “Listen to music. Eat out on occasion. Go to a movie when there’s one I really want to see.” He shrugged. “But, frankly, I’m not much of a moviegoer.”

  “Boy,” sighed Billy Dennis. “Sounds like you have yourself a blast”

  “Fun time,” said Jock Kirby.

  Ben shifted on the barstool. “I don’t require a whole lot out of life. I guess I’m what you’d call ‘laid back.’”

  Billy Dennis chuckled, showing his teeth. “Take my word, Bennie, it’s better gettin’ laid than bein’ laid back!”

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Jock.

  Ben flushed and hastily finished his drink. He wasn’t accustomed to rough language and he didn’t appreciate it.

  Dennis gestured to the barman, making a circle in the air. “Another round,” he said.

  “No, no, I’ve really had enough,” Ben protested. He was already feeling light-headed. He’d never been a drinker.

  “Aw, C’mon, Bennie boy,” urged Jock Kirby. “Live a little. Take a bite out of the Big Apple.”

  “Yeah,” nodded Billy Dennis, his dark eyes fixed on the Ohio man. “Have another shot on us.”

  And each of them put an arm around Ben Sutton.

  The walk down Broadway was like a dream. Ben couldn’t remember leaving the bar. Had they taken a cab here? His head seemed full of rosy smoke.

  “I think I drank too much,” he said. The words were blurred. His tongue was thick and rebellious.

  “Can’t ever drink too much at a party,” said Billy Dennis. “An’ that’s what we got goin’ here tonight!”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Jock said. “It’s party time.”

  “I’ve got to get back to the hotel,” Ben told them. “The convention opens at ten tomorrow morning. I need sleep.”

  “Sleep?” Dennis gave Ben a toothy smile. “Hell, you can sleep when you’re dead. We’re gonna show you a fun time, Bennie.”