“What did you expect!” she snarled, trying to pull Mavrsal to his feet.
A heavy flapping sound flung foggy gusts through the window. Kane cried out something in an inhuman tongue.
“If you kill Mavrsal, better kill me this time as well!” cried Dessylyn, clinging to the sea captain as he dazedly rose to his knees.
He cast a calculating eye toward the fallen sword. Too far.
“Leave her alone, sorcerer!” rasped Mavrsal. “She’s guilty of no crime but that of hating you and loving me! Kill me now and be done, but you’ll never change her spirit!”
“And I suppose you love her, too,” said Kane in a tortured voice. “You fool. Do you know how many others I’ve killed—other fools who thought they could save Dessylyn from the sorcerer’s evil embrace? It’s a game she often plays. Ever since the first fool . . . only a game. It amuses her to taunt me with her infidelities, with her schemes to leave with another man. Since it amuses her, I indulge her. But she doesn’t love you.”
"Then why did she bury my steel in your back!” Despair made Mavrsal reckless. “She hates you, sorcerer—and she loves me! Keep your lies to console you in your madness! Your sorcery can’t alter Dessylyn’s feelings toward you—nor can it alter the truth you're forced to see! So kill me and be damned—you can’t escape the reality of your pitiful clutching for something you’ll never hold!”
Kane’s voice was strange, and his face was a mirror of tormented despair. “Get out of my sight!” he rasped. “Get out of here, both of you!
“Dessylyn, I give you your freedom. Mavrsal, I give you Dessylyn’s love. Take your bounty, and go from Carsultyal! I trust you’ll have little cause to thank me!”
As they stumbled for the secret door, Mavrsal ripped the emerald-set collar from Dessylyn’s neck and flung it at Kane’s slumping figure. “Keep your slave collar!” he growled. “It’s enough that you leave her with your scars about her throat!”
“You fool,” said Kane in a low voice.
“How far are we from Carsultyal,” whispered Dessylyn.
“Several leagues—we’ve barely gotten underway,” Mavrsal told the shivering girl beside him.
“I’m frightened.”
“Hush. You’re done with Kane and all his sorcery. Soon it will be dawn, and soon we’ll be far beyond Carsultyal and all the evil you've known there.”
“Hold me tighter than, my love. I feel so cold.”
“The sea wind is cold, but it’s clean,” he told her. “It’s carrying us together to a new life.”
“I’m frightened.”
“Hold me tighter then, my love. I feel so cold.”
“I seem to remember now . . .”
But the exhausted sea captain had fallen asleep. A deep sleep—the last unblighted slumber he would ever know.
For at dawn he awoke in the embrace of a corpse—the mouldering corpse of a long dead girl, who had hanged herself in despair over the death of her barbarian lover.
I CAN HEAR THE DARK by Dennis Etchison
Dennis Etchison’s stories of contemporary horror have won him favorable comparison with writers like Richard Matheson. But when you read one of his stories, don’t be surprised if the comparison melts away. Etchison writes stories so psychologically vivid, so compelling, that when you read one you find yourself left with an understanding of why this young California writer is repeatedly singled out by a growing coterie of critics and knowledgeable readers as a modem master who must be allowed to set his own ground rules—as he does here, beautifully. “I Can Hear the Dark” has never appeared before in print.
There was a blackness and a struggling somewhere in the house; William could feel it. The others were busy again trying to be something they weren’t, and he tried not to listen, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. He had this feeling you begin to get when something is wrong but you don’t quite know it yet. Still, wherever it was, he knew that he ought to find it, whether he was supposed to or not.
“How do you feel?” said the actress.
“Mother,” he said slowly, “where do we go when we die?”
“Why don’t you just let him outside so he can play with himself or something?” said the tall actor from the living room. “You know, you’re going to turn him into a goddam vegetable, Leona, keeping him under wraps like this all the time.”
“Into an agent,” said one of the other actors, laughing.
“Don’t be absurd,” she answered, too softly for it to carry, tipping her head down close to the boy’s eyes. “Willum’s doing just fine today.” She smoothed the hair from his eyes, and a tender, practiced pout appeared in a line below her mouth. “Aren’t you, my baby?”
He nodded uncertainly.
“So. Why don’t you run down the week for me?” said another actor, the one with his hair over his collar. “I guess I’ve lost track, since that Dr. Whosit character put Ian into the hospital. You know.” Fingers snapping. “The one they brought out from New York.”
“Crispin, I think he was called,” said the tall actor.
"Listen, there’s some fresh fruit in the dining room,” said the actress in her throaty voice, the one she used when she talked on the telephone at night, when the tall actor or Daddy, whichever one it was, was asleep. “And some of those good croissants, and your orange marmalade.” She studied Willum absently. “I could ask Monica to make up another omelet with cream cheese. Would that please you, darling?”
“Leona, for God’s sake,” said the tall actor.
“All right!” She pretended to spit the words, making her eyelids flutter the way they did on The Late Show. “My G-o-d.” She rose, still stooped, and kissed him dryly on his lips. “Take care, baby,” she said. “Mother’s just going to be a while longer. You can play downstairs, if you like, or—”
“Well,” said the tall actor, “let’s see. They finally got me divorced Friday. Just a minute. Leona!”
“. . . So the way it went was this,” said the third actor matter-of-factly. “Mm, what-was-her-name?”
“Jan.”
“Right. Jan miscarried right after the rape. For a while it looked like they’d have her go back East to stay with her mother. But someone decided they should send this Crispin out from New York. And then it worked out that Jordan met up with his old flame again and filed for the divorce. Naturally. These things never make sense. You’re right, she used to be married to his brother-in-law, but you know how those things go. Sometimes it takes years. What do you expect? Just like a soap opera, right?”
“What I don’t understand,” said the younger actress, “is that part about the drug dealer, what did they call him?”
“Shorty something. Bernstein, I think.”
“How was she supposed to carry on during all that, with this Bernstein trying to involve her in the trial, not to mention the custody fight. It was all so unbelievable . . .”
“. . . Of course you could handle it,” the actor with hair over his collar was saying on the other side of the room. “Self-assurance is something a person is born with—and you certainly have it, Leona. How many pictures was it you made over there?”
“Twenty-two,” supplied the tall actor, before she could answer.
“You see?”
“But,” she said, “I always had a role to hide behind, don’t you see? Every word—”
“We have scripts, too,” said the tall actor. “Don’t we, Kurt?” He had to laugh. “Such as they are.”
“There,” she said. “That’s just it. You’ve told me yourself that you hardly have time for anything more than the most rudimentary blocking and run-through.” Her chair creaked, straining. “So you must fall back on what you are. Don’t you see? In other words, you’re not provided with an adequate mask.” Pause. “I’d be petrified if I had to work your soap. How do you do it?”
“With your self-assur—”
“Of course, self-assurance, my God! But what about confidence? That’s something one must learn. And I’ve never
had to do that kind of acting before. Why, over there—”
“Then you simply play the surface,” said the other actor, as though explaining to a child. “The line.”
“Don’t you think I know about playing the line?” she said. “My God, how do you think I survived all those shitty films?”
“A lot of actors play the line.”
“What do you think episodic television is all about?” said the tall actor.
“I know,” said the actress. “You could even say that Larry Olivier falls back on pure technique when he’s not given enough to work with. But when one is concerned about playing the meaning—”
“Sure. The spine. Zohra, for example, plays the meaning. Did you catch her on that Kojak rerun the other night? But when her material is thin, that’s all she plays, the meaning. At the expense of the line.”
“But,” said the actress, “what if one strives to play the meaning and the line simultaneously? My God. Do you know that I worked on one with Corman years ago that he shot in four days? Some funny little man was busy in the trailer typing out the next scene directly on stencils!”
“. . . I suppose that was why she had to do it,” continued the third actor, across the room. “Morton wouldn’t accept the separation. And then when he broke in—”
“I watched the whole thing,” said the younger actress. “It was unreal. Like they had some third-rate writer.”
“Then you know. That was all she wrote . . .
I can hear the dark, thought Willum, on the floor in the hall.
If I listen hard . . .
“I tell you, I’ve never felt that way before,” said the taller actor, walking in from the patio.
“Oh, you were just high on shock,” said the other actor, following. “You know. Hey listen, though, I’m glad we can talk—that’s why I came by.”
“If I could only relax, if it would just let up. Some time to myself. You have no idea. The schedule—”
“So why don’t we just kick back now, while everybody’s outside? And you can tell me all about real life.”
The tall actor measured another Scotch. “The daily routine? What makes you think it’s worth the telling?”
“Might do you good.”
“You could run it down as well as I could, you know. All right, all right, what do you want me to say? First, breakfast. Then an argument. Then somebody or other comes over for a visit Or we go over there. Then work. And the crazy, irrational phone calls. Is someone up there writing this tripe, do you think? And the meetings. And the drinking. And the dinners, always at Tallboy’s or the, whadayou call it? the Copper Kettle. Hey, Kurt, can you tell me why? Can you tell me how everything got to be so God damned repetitious? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday . . . Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night wondering how I ever got caught in this stupid imitation of a life.”
“Come on, man.”
“That’s all it seems to me anymore. Just like we’re all trapped in some broken, cheesy videotape loop.” He added abruptly, “Sometimes I think I could walk. You know? No matter what’s about to come down.”
The other actor said ironically, “Do you have a contract?”
“Yeah, you old son of a bitch,” answered the tall actor mildly. “And you know as well as I do that there are some things we don’t exactly sign a contract for. They’re the things that are the most binding.”
Hiding in the garden . . .
Willum padded to the end of the hall. He gazed around him in the half-light. Doors. To the bedroom, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the dining room. The stairway. To his room, where the tutor met with him five afternoons a week. The tutor would keep coming, his mother said, until he got better and could start school, even though he felt well enough to start right now. He had always felt better. And he knew Daddy would understand, and help him to start. Soon. Daddy always helped, when he was here.
He noticed the telephone. Maybe it would tell him something. It had helped his mother lots of times. He touched his face to the cool, black receiver. If it didn’t talk back to him with words he couldn’t understand, the way it had when he tried before. And if it didn’t make him cry, the way it made her cry sometimes.
From the living room came the voice of his mother, magnified by the walls of the corridor.
“I just wish Willum could be free of all this, oh, free to wander naked through the gardens of the universe!”
If wishes were camels, he thought, eyes would have needles . . .
“Precisely,” said the younger actress. “You have a career, and now you must use that to provide access—”
“An access,” said the actress, “is not an avenue."
“But it is a living, isn’t it, Leona?”
“What you get is a living,” said the actress. “If you’re lucky. What you give is a life.”
The tall actor sat her on the couch and tried to speak so that no one else would hear, though the others were waiting outside on the patio.
“It’s going to be all right,” he told her.
In the hall, Willum began trying doors. He was sure that someone had taken from him something irreplaceably valuable; but he couldn’t remember who had done it, or even what it was. And no one would admit it.
“But they all know!” said the actress.
“That’s right, and they’re our friends—your friends, honey. They'll stand with you. We all will. You know that.”
The doors were either locked or did not lead to anything that didn’t show. He could see that. The empty kitchen. The sweet-smelling bedroom with mirrors, her bedroom. The dining room, with the big table legs. And the stairway to his own room. (He knew where each of his toys was hidden, even if she did not.) He looked around again. There were the pictures of her lining the hallway, scary old posters showing the way she was on The Late Show or Chiller:
TERROR FILLS THE NIGHT AS SHE STALKS HER PREY!
“I had to do it,” she said. “What else could I do? He was going to take Willum away, in defiance of the court order. And do God knows what to me, if I got in his way.”
“Self-defense,” the tall actor said. “If you were going to be indicted and tried for it, which you aren’t. Look, Morton broke in, trying to find him. The others were just arriving for dinner. Monica was out with the boy, of course—that part is true. You attempted to stop him. When he got to Willum’s room he grabbed you, pushed you down. I came to your rescue, you ran for the gun, he took it from you, struggled with me, it went off. There. They’ll all say they saw that, even the ones who didn’t see anything—they’ll claim they were already here, right? They stayed and talked to you, tried to calm you. You took a sedative. I called the police. Do you want to go over it again?”
“But why didn’t we call a doctor? They’ll think—”
“Kurt is a doctor, will you remember that? He’d practically finished his internship when he got his first part.”
She sighed and made a small, strangled weeping in her throat. There was the sound of her pill box snapping open.
“Do you suppose he still loves me?”
Willum hesitated at the foot of the stairs, staring up into the blackness.
“Who?”
“Oh, Jordan, have I done such a terrible thing to my boy? Have I?”
The tall actor opened another bottle. “Jesus. You know something? I hate that damned show, but—”
“Then let’s leave. Everything. Now. I’ll get Willum and—”
“—But right now I wish to God life could be as simple as that stupid serial. A nine-to-fiver, with breakfasts, arguments, phone calls, dinners, hassles, but little hassles, ones I could handle with my eyes closed. You know, God help me, I can’t help thinking you’d be better off if you’d never come back from Rome with Morton, if we hadn’t started up again, maybe if Jan—if we’d just—”
She made another, more desperate sound.
“I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t mean it. Forgive me, Leona. Shh, now. Shh.”
&n
bsp; Willum put his fingers on the railing and started up.
He had felt it in the house, something missing, something gone away forever and never coming back, ever since he had come back from the park with Monica. And now he felt it inside himself. He paused at the first landing, peering back at the dimly lighted hall and the last of the posters below.
THE HIGH PRIESTESS OF EVIL
He shivered and, for reasons he could not yet understand, a shudder passed along his spine. He thought: a possum just ran over my grave. That was what Daddy always said. But this time he would be brave.
He tried humming to himself under his breath, closing his eyes tight as he climbed the rest of the way.
“Where’s Willum?” said the tall actor suddenly.
“He-he’s fine. He’s playing. He likes to play by himself. He’s such a good, good little boy. Isn’t he? Don’t you think he is?”
“But where—?”
“Don’t worry,” said the actress. “He can’t go upstairs alone. He’s afraid of the dark. He always has been. I used to be, too, when I was his age.”
“I’d better call the police now,” said the tall actor.
“Yes,” said the actress.
“And I’ll tell Jack to be ready. In case we need a lawyer. You haven’t touched the body since, have you? He’s still up there, where he fell?”
She began to cry.
Willum came to the top. Soon he would be safe in his own room. Eyes still squeezed tight, he thought of the things he must do. He would go through his toys one by one, to be sure they were there. Then he would open the closet and feel around inside. And the bed, he would have to look under the bed. And maybe he would find it. And then. Everything. Would be. All right.
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