by Otto Penzler
There had been silence all through the story. Now suddenly all hell broke loose. The flight sergeant let out a splendid yell and began pointing excitedly at the pinball machine and yelling for his payoff. The construction worker dramatically deserted the poker game, knocking his chair over in the process, and announced lugubriously that these guys here had their own rules, see?
Any atmosphere of Carker-inspired horror was dissipated. Tallant whistled as he walked over to put a nickel in the jukebox. He glanced casually at the floor. Yes, there was a stain, for what that was worth.
He smiled cheerfully and felt rather grateful to the Carkers. They were going to solve his blackmail problem very neatly.
TALLANT DREAMED OF power that night. It was a common dream with him. He was a ruler of the new American Corporate State that would follow the war; and he said to this man, “Come!” and he came, and to that man, “Go!” and he went, and to his servants, “Do this!” and they did it.
Then the young man with the beard was standing before him, and the dirty trench coat was like the robes of an ancient prophet. And the young man said, “You see yourself riding high, don’t you? Riding the crest of the wave—the Wave of the Future, you call it. But there’s a deep, dark undertow that you don’t see, and that’s a part of the Past. And the Present and even your Future. There is evil in mankind that is blacker even than your evil, and infinitely more ancient.”
And there was something in the shadows behind the young man, something little and lean and brown.
TALLANT’S DREAM DID not disturb him the following morning. Nor did the thought of the approaching interview with Morgan. He fried his bacon and eggs and devoured them cheerfully. The wind had died down for a change, and the sun was warm enough so that he could strip to the waist while he cleared land for his shack. His machete glinted brilliantly as it swung through the air and struck at the roots of the brush.
When Morgan arrived his full face was red and sweating.
“It’s cool over there in the shade of the adobe,” Tallant suggested. “We’ll be more comfortable.” And in the comfortable shade of the adobe he swung the machete once and clove Morgan’s full, red, sweating face in two.
It was so simple. It took less effort than uprooting a clump of sage. And it was so safe. Morgan lived in a cabin way to hell-and-gone and was often away on prospecting trips. No one would notice his absence for months, if then. No one had any reason to connect him with Tallant. And no one in Oasis would hunt for him in the Carker-haunted adobe.
The body was heavy, and the blood dripped warm on Tallant’s bare skin. With relief he dumped what had been Morgan on the floor of the adobe. There were no boards, no flooring. Just the earth. Hard, but not too hard to dig a grave in. And no one was likely to come poking around in this taboo territory to notice the grave. Let a year or so go by, and the grave and the bones it contained would be attributed to the Carkers.
The corner of Tallant’s eye bothered him again. Deliberately he looked about the interior of the adobe.
The little furniture was crude and heavy, with no attempt to smooth down the strokes of the ax. It was held together with wooden pegs or half-rotted thongs. There were age-old cinders in the fireplace, and the dusty shards of a cooking jar among them.
And there was a deeply hollowed stone, covered with stains that might have been rust, if stone rusted. Behind it was a tiny figure, clumsily fashioned of clay and sticks. It was something like a man and something like a lizard, and something like the things that flit across the corner of the eye.
Curious now, Tallant peered about further. He penetrated to the corner that the one unglassed window lighted but dimly. And there he let out a little choking gasp. For a moment he was rigid with horror. Then he smiled and all but laughed aloud.
This explained everything. Some curious individual had seen this, and from his accounts had burgeoned the whole legend. The Carkers had indeed learned something from the Indians, but that secret was the art of embalming.
It was a perfect mummy. Either the Indian art had shrunk bodies, or this was that of a ten-year-old boy. There was no flesh. Only skin and bone and taut, dry stretches of tendon between. The eyelids were closed; the sockets looked hollow under them. The nose was sunken and almost lost. The scant lips were tightly curled back from the long and very white teeth, which stood forth all the more brilliantly against the deep-brown skin.
It was a curious little trove, this mummy. Tallant was already calculating the chances for raising a decent sum of money from an interested anthropologist—murder can produce such delightfully profitable chance by-products—when he noticed the infinitesimal rise and fall of the chest.
The Carker was not dead. It was sleeping.
Tallant did not dare stop to think beyond the instant. This was no time to pause to consider if such things were possible in a well-ordered world. It was no time to reflect on the disposal of the body of Morgan. It was a time to snatch up your machete and get out of there.
But in the doorway he halted. There, coming across the desert, heading for the adobe, clearly seen this time, was another—a female.
He made an involuntary gesture of indecision. The blade of the machete clanged ringingly against the adobe wall. He heard the dry shuffling of a roused sleeper behind him.
He turned fully now, the machete raised. Dispose of this nearer one first, then face the female. There was no room even for terror in his thoughts, only for action.
The lean brown shape darted at him avidly. He moved lightly away and stood poised for its second charge. It shot forward again. He took one step back, machete arm raised, and fell headlong over the corpse of Morgan. Before he could rise, the thin thing was upon him. Its sharp teeth had met through the palm of his left hand.
The machete moved swiftly. The thin dry body fell headless to the floor. There was no blood.
The grip of the teeth did not relax. Pain coursed up Tallant’s left arm—a sharper, more bitter pain than you would expect from the bite. Almost as though venom—
He dropped the machete, and his strong white hand plucked and twisted at the dry brown lips. The teeth stayed clenched, unrelaxing. He sat bracing his back against the wall and gripped the head between his knees. He pulled. His flesh ripped, and blood formed dusty clots on the dirt floor. But the bite was firm.
His world had become reduced now to that hand and that head. Nothing outside mattered. He must free himself. He raised his aching arm to his face, and with his own teeth he tore at that unrelenting grip. The dry flesh crumbled away in desert dust, but the teeth were locked fast. He tore his lip against their white keenness, and tasted in his mouth the sweetness of blood and something else.
He staggered to his feet again. He knew what he must do. Later he could use cautery, a tourniquet, see a doctor with a story about a Gila monster—their heads grip too, don’t they?—but he knew what he must do now.
He raised the machete and struck again.
His white hand lay on the brown floor, gripped by the white teeth in the brown face. He propped himself against the adobe wall, momentarily unable to move. His open wrist hung over the deeply hollowed stone. His blood and his strength and his life poured out before the little figure of sticks and clay.
The female stood in the doorway now, the sun bright on her thin brownness. She did not move. He knew that she was waiting for the hollow stone to fill.
GAHAN WILSON ( 1930– ) was born in Evanston, Illinois. A self-described loner and weird kid, he was a fan of science fiction and fantasy, but was especially taken with the horror stories in Weird Tales. Influenced by the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and the cartoons of Charles Addams, he made his earliest sales of bizarre cartoons to Weird Tales, followed by sales to Collier’s, Look, and eventually National Lampoon, The New Yorker, and Playboy, the latter two still publishing his original, hilarious cartoons of gigantic and grotesque monsters and other macabre visitations.
In addition to his work as a cartoonist, Wilson has shown himself t
o be a gifted writer, producing such humorous novels as Eddy Deco’s Last Caper (1987) and Everybody’s Favorite Duck (1988); children’s fantasy novels, including Harry, the Fat Bear Spy (1973), Harry and the Sea Serpent (1976), and Harry and the Snow Melting Ray (1978); more than fifteen collections of his cartoons; and highly popular stories for Harlan Ellison’s famous anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and others. He also created a computer game titled Gahan Wilson’s The Ultimate Haunted House. He received the World Fantasy Convention Award in 1981 and the National Cartoonist Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
“Come One, Come All” was first published in the anthology Book of the Dead 2: Still Dead, edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector (New York: Bantam, 1992).
PROFESSOR MARVELLO TIGHTENED two guy ropes with an expert twist of his strong, pudgy little hands in order to make the poles holding the big canvas sign spread out above the platform stand a little taller, then he squinted upwards at it with a slightly grim, lopsided smile of satisfaction.
The sign read
* MARVELLO’S * MIRACULOUS * MIDWAY *
in ornate, gold-encrusted letters four and a half feet high—exactly the height of Professor Marvello himself, by his personal instructions—and a multitude of spotlights helped each letter glitter proudly out at the silent, surrounding darkness.
Marvello regarded the effect with satisfaction as he carefully and neatly made the ropes’ ends fast around their shared cleat, then he meticulously brushed a speck of Kansas dust off the lapel of his red and white checkered coat and adjusted the bright yellow plastic carnation in its button hole.
“A nice night,” he murmured to himself softly, sweeping the horizon with a benign if slightly wary gaze, and taking a long, fond sniff of the warm, wheat-smelling night air blowing in from the dark fields all around. Professor Marvello had been plain Homer Muggins of Missouri in his youth and he still admired simple, farmy scents. “A hellavuh nice night.”
Then, adjusting his straw boater, he turned to business, flicking his bright little blue eyes down to see if the light was glowing on the solar battery like it ought to be, jabbing back a switch to start the circus music whooping, and plucking the microphone from its metal perch on the banner-bedecked rostrum. That done, Marvello squared his small but sturdy shoulders, softly cleared his throat, and spoke.
“Ladies and gentle—”
Too loud. You didn’t need it that loud because there was no competition. No competition at all. He stooped with a slight grunt, bending to turn the knob down on the speaker system, then straightened his rotund little body so that it stood proudly erect as before and spoke again.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” he said, and the nasal drone of his voice swirled out from a baker’s dozen of speakers and rolled over the midnight landscape of flat, dimly-furrowed earth, sparse trees and long-deserted farmhouses. “Come on, come on, come on. Welcome to the fabulous, most wonderful, undeniably and by far greatest show left in the world. Come and see and be astounded by the one, the only Marvello’s Miraculous Midway—the sole remaining sideshow in the world.”
He paused, hacked, and spat over the edge of the platform onto the dusty ground. He gazed at the dust, at its dryness, half-reached for the flask of whiskey in his hip pocket, but then decided against it. Not yet. Later.
Did he hear a shuffle? His eyes guardedly darted this way and that. Not sure. Sometimes they stayed hidden just out of sight, watching you put up the show, standing on one foot and then the other, no idea what to do with their hands, hardly able to wait. Like kids, he thought, like kids.
“Don’t miss it, don’t miss it, don’t miss it,” he intoned. “Come one, come all, and bring your friends and loved ones so that everyone in this lovely area, in this beautiful county of this remarkable state, can be fortunate enough to experience the entertainment thrill of their lifetime, so to speak. So to speak.”
Yes, yes indeed, there was a shuffle. He avoided looking in its direction, plucked a large polka-dotted handkerchief from his other hip pocket, the one not containing the flask, and wiped his brow in order to conceal his covert peering.
There it was, just by the popcorn stand. Raggedy, forlorn, and skeletal. It was dressed in torn blue denim overalls and the tattered remains of a wide-brimmed straw hat. There was no shirt, there were no shoes. It stared at him, mouth agape, and he could just make out the dull last remnant of a glint in its eyes and a vague glistening in its mouth.
“Good evening, sir,” Professor Marvello said, giving it a formal little bow, an encouragingly toothy grin. “I observe you possess the percipiency to have been attracted by the sounds and sights of our outstanding exhibition. May I be so bold as to congratulate you on your good taste and encourage you to step a little closer?”
It swayed, obviously undecided. Professor Marvello increased the wattage of his grin and, producing a bamboo cane from inside the rostrum, employed it to point at an enormous depiction of a huge-breasted Hawaiian hula dancer painted in classic circus poster style on a bellying rectangle of canvas.
“Miss La Frenza Hoo Pah Loo Hah,” he announced proudly, and leaning forward towards the wary watcher, winked confidentially and continued in a lower tone as one man of the world speaking to another, his S-shaped smile taking on a new chumminess and his voice growing increasingly husky and intimate.
“I am sure, my dear sir, that a man of your obvious sophistication and, if I may say it, je ne sais quoi, is well aware of the extraordinary sensual jollies which may be produced by the skilled locomotion of swaying hips and other anatomical accessories on the part of a well-trained and imaginative practitioner of the art of hula dancing. Permit me to assure you that the lovely Miss Hoo Pah Loo Hah is extremely knowledgeable in these matters and will not fail to delight the sensibilities of a bon vivant such as yourself. Come a little closer, there, my good man, don’t be shy.”
The figure swayed, its dark green, stiff arms lolling, and then one large, bony foot pushed forward, stirring up a little puff of dust.
“That’s the way, that’s the way,” said Marvello in an encouraging tone. “There’s the brave fellow. Excellent. You’re doing just fine. I trust, in passing, you’ve observed how plump the lovely Miss La Frenza Hoo Pah Loo Hah is, my dear fellow: how fat her hips, how round and fulsome her breasts, how meaty she is in all respects. I trust you’ve not let those aspects of our lovely dancer get by you, my good sir.”
The overalled figure paused as if to study the poster with increased intensity, or perhaps it was only getting its balance. There was a kind of gathering, a moment of staggering confusion, then it lurched itself forward with a series of crablike waddles until it had worked its way well into the brightly lit area before Professor Marvello’s platform. This one had semi-mummified, its skin had dried more than rotted, and the dark green-brown of its bony, beaky head and face bore more than a slight resemblance to an Egyptian pharaoh’s.
“Over here, over here, my wizened chum,” said Professor Marvello with encouraging enthusiasm, indicating the tent’s entrance with a wave of his bamboo cane. “Keep heading towards that welcoming aperture before you, spur yourself on with rapt contemplation of the sexual gyrative wonders the lovely Hoo Pah Loo Hah will perform before you as envisioned in your most private dreams, and of course never forget nor neglect the generous pulchritude of her charms, which is to say the amazingly large amount of tender flesh which bedecks her frame.”
When the mummy farmer paused at the entrance, Professor Marvello raised the tent flap invitingly with the tip of his cane.
“No need to pay, my good man,” he intoned, though the thing had not made the slightest attempt to reach into its pockets. “The Marvello Miraculous Midway is a rare phenomenon indeed in this hard world, my dear sir, being gratis, entirely free of charge. A generous, altruistic effort to brighten the, ah, lives of such unfortunates as yourself. Go right on in, do go right on in.”
&nbs
p; A few prompting prods from the tip of Marvello’s cane between the separating vertebrae of its narrow, bony back, and the overalled entity finally committed itself and lurched on into the tent to be greeted by the soft throbbings of Hawaiian music, the heady scents of tropic flowers.
“Almost looked happy for a moment there,” murmured Professor Marvello thoughtfully, nudging the tent flap so that it fell softly back into place as the music and the scent of flowers ceased abruptly.
Nearly at once there was another timid shuffling, this from the far left, hard by the ring toss stand, and two figures edged sidewise into view. What was left of a mother and daughter.
They were dressed in faded, flowered frocks which were frayed and torn and flecked with a multitude of dark, dry stains. The girl was missing her scalp on one side of her head, but a glistening gold braid with a large pink bow on its end grew from the other. Her mother held her hand tightly but mechanically, a habit that had somehow survived the loss of everything else.
“Fun for the entire family,” Professor Marvello cooed into his microphone, essaying a fatherly wink which somehow slipped over into the lewd. “Let me assure you, Madame, and your precious little princess standing so trustingly by your side, that the Marvello Miraculous Midway fully satisfies both young and old. Both of you may positively and without reservation enjoy it to the full, as we unhesitatingly guarantee to completely and entirely please folks from eight to eighty. Do come up, do come up.”
He turned and waved his cane at the flapping portrait of a man whose mighty body bulged everywhere with layer upon layer of huge, rippling muscles, but whose calm, heroically mustachioed face radiated an almost saintly kindliness. With serene calm the man was carefully lifting a school bus packed full of laughing children high above a torrent of swirling water.
“Observe a true wonder of the world—Hugo, the Gentle Giant. He has the strength of a lion, but within his huge chest softly beats the heart of a doting lambkin. Here we are privileged to witness him depicted performing his daring, legendary rescue of a group of innocent children from the raging waters of the Jamestown flood. That’s right, dears, come a little closer. That’s right. My, what a sweet little girl. You must be very proud, Mother.”