by Otto Penzler
“But it’s Harry. The boy was Harry. What does it mean? I can’t understand it.”
“It’s not easy, but I think perhaps deep in her unconscious mind Christine has always remembered Harry, the companion of her babyhood. We don’t think of children as having much memory, but there must be images of the past tucked away somewhere in the little heads. Christine doesn’t invent this Harry. She remembers him. So clearly that she’s almost brought him to life again. I know it sounds far-fetched, but the whole story is so odd that I can’t think of any other explanation.”
“May I have the address of the house where they lived?”
She was reluctant to give this information, but I persuaded her and set out at last to find No. 13 Canver Row, where the man Jones had tried to kill himself and his whole family and almost succeeded.
The house seemed deserted. It was filthy and derelict. But one thing made me stare and stare. There was a tiny garden. A scatter of bright uneven grass splashed the bald brown patches of earth. But the little garden had one strange glory that none of the other houses in the poor sad street possessed—a bush of white roses. They bloomed gloriously. Their scent was overpowering.
I stood by the bush and stared up at the top window.
A voice startled me: “What are you doing here?”
It was an old woman, peering from the ground floor window.
“I thought the house was empty,” I said.
“Should be. Been condemned. But they can’t get me out. Nowhere else to go. Won’t go. The others went quickly enough after it happened. No-one else wants to come. They say the place is haunted. So it is. But what’s the fuss about? Life and death. They’re very close. You get to know that when you’re old. Alive or dead. What’s the difference?”
She looked at me with yellowish, bloodshot eyes and said: “I saw him fall past my window. That’s where he fell. Among the roses. He still comes back. I see him. He won’t go away until he gets her.”
“Who—who are you talking about?”
“Harry Jones. Nice boy he was. Red hair. Very thin. Too determined though. Always got his own way. Loved Christine too much, I thought. Died among the roses. Used to sit down here with her for hours, by the roses. Then died there. Or do people die? The church ought to give us an answer, but it doesn’t. Not one you can believe. Go away, will you? This place isn’t for you. It’s for the dead who aren’t dead, and the living who aren’t alive. Am I alive or dead? You tell me. I don’t know.”
The crazy eyes staring at me beneath the matted white fringe of hair frightened me. Mad people are terrifying. One can pity them, but one is still afraid. I murmured:
“I’ll go now. Goodbye,” and tried to hurry across the hard hot pavements although my legs felt heavy and half-paralysed, as in a nightmare.
The sun blazed down on my head, but I was hardly aware of it. I lost all sense of time or place as I stumbled on.
Then I heard something that chilled my blood.
A clock struck three.
At three o’clock I was supposed to be at the school gates, waiting for Christine.
Where was I now? How near the school? What bus should I take?
I made frantic enquiries of passers-by, who looked at me fearfully, as I had looked at the old woman. They must have thought I was crazy.
At last I caught the right bus and, sick with dust, petrol fumes and fear, reached the school. I ran across the hot, empty playground. In a classroom, the young teacher in white was gathering her books together.
“I’ve come for Christine James. I’m her mother. I’m so sorry I’m late. Where is she?” I gasped.
“Christine James?” The girl frowned, then said brightly: “Oh, yes, I remember, the pretty little red-haired girl. That’s all right, Mrs. James. Her brother called for her. How alike they are, aren’t they? And so devoted. It’s rather sweet to see a boy of that age so fond of his baby sister. Has your husband got red hair, like the two children?”
“What did—her brother—say?” I asked faintly.
“He didn’t say anything. When I spoke to him, he just smiled. They’ll be home by now, I should think. I say, do you feel all right?”
“Yes, thank you. I must go home.”
I ran all the way home through the burning streets.
“Chris! Christine, where are you! Chris! Chris!” Sometimes even now I hear my own voice of the past screaming through the cold house. “Christine! Chris! Where are you? Answer me! Chrrriiiiiss!” Then: “Harry! Don’t take her away! Come back! Harry! Harry!”
Demented, I rushed out into the garden. The sun struck me like a hot blade. The roses glared whitely. The air was so still I seemed to stand in timelessness, placelessness. For a moment, I seemed very near to Christine, although I couldn’t see her. Then the roses danced before my eyes and turned red. The world turned red. Blood red. Wet red. I fell through redness to blackness to nothingness—to almost death.
For weeks I was in bed with sunstroke which turned to brain fever. During that time Jim and the police searched for Christine in vain. The futile search continued for months. The papers were full of the strange disappearance of the red-haired child. The teacher described the “brother” who had called for her. There were newspaper stories of kidnapping, baby-snatching, child-murders.
Then the sensation died down. Just another unsolved mystery in police files.
And only two people knew what had happened. An old crazed woman living in a derelict house, and myself.
Years have passed. But I walk in fear.
Such ordinary things make me afraid. Sunshine. Sharp shadows on grass. White roses. Children with red hair. And the name—Harry. Such an ordinary name!
MAKE-BELIEVE
Michael Reaves
WORKING IN NUMEROUS GENRES and media, (James) Michael Reaves (1950–) has written more than two dozen books, five of which have been on The New York Times bestseller list, and has collaborated with several colleagues on novels, including Steve Perry on Hellstar (1984), Dome (1987), and The Omega Cage (1988); Byron Preiss on Dragonworld (1979); and Steven-Elliot Altman on Batman: Fear Itself (2007). He also cowrote the young adult novel InterWorld (2007) with Neil Gaiman.
Among his several hundred scripts for various television series are episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Twilight Zone, Sliders, The Flash, Father Dowling Mysteries, and Disney’s Gargoyles. He won an Emmy and was nominated for a second one as a story editor and writer on Batman: The Animated Series, created and coproduced the syndicated series The Lost Continent, and was a writer and producer of Invasion America, which was produced by Steven Spielberg and Harve Bennett. His screenplay credits include Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, and Full Eclipse, an HBO original movie. Reaves has had short stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Twilight Zone Magazine, Heavy Metal, and Cemetery Dance. His short story “The Night People” (in the July 1985 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine) was named the best horror story of 1985 and is included in The Century’s Best Horror Fiction (2012), edited by John Pelan.
“Make-Believe” is based, up to a point, on a true incident from the author’s childhood; it was originally published in the March/April 2010 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Make-Believe
MICHAEL REAVES
I AM A VERY lucky man. The reason for my saying this is obvious: I’m standing before you, accepting this award for Outstanding Alumnus. But the reason behind the reason is that I became what I wanted to be.
I’m lucky because, for as far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was a kid, five years old, sitting down in front of our new black-and-white TV to watch The Adventures of Superman. I was hooked the first time I saw George Reeves leap into the air and fly. Actually, he was lying on a board in front of a cyclorama screen with a wind machine blowing his hair and cape, but I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I do remember wondering even back then, however, why
he always leveled off at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet even when he was just going a couple of city blocks away.
I’m not what you would call a mainstream writer. I have an unabashed preference for genre fiction—specifically, horror. And, like most horror writers, I’ve drawn most of my stories from childhood fears and experiences. I grew up in this town—you wouldn’t think a place on the edge of the desert would be particularly spooky or atmospheric, but you’d be wrong. The desert can be a terrifying place.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you about one of those childhood experiences. Oddly enough, I’ve never written about it, or even spoken of it, before now. I’m not sure why. Perhaps my reasons will become clear—to me as well as you—during the telling. After all, good fiction is supposed to illuminate as well as entertain, isn’t it?
I was seven years old, and this took place in 1955. It is probably impossible to convey to you all how totally different a time it was. It was, first and foremost, a much simpler time. You all have console games that tremble on the edge of virtual reality; we had Winky Dink. You have cell phones that can video and text and Twitter; we had party lines. And, of course, you have computers capable of processing gigabytes that you can hold in one hand, and we had UNIVAC.
But it wasn’t just the technology that was simpler. It was a more trusting time. Back then, parents thought nothing of letting their kids roam all over the neighborhood, as long as they were home in time for dinner. Somehow or other, adults back then were much better at protecting the young from fearful realities. It’s true that we were aware of those realities—ever hear of “duck and cover”? But kids were allowed to be kids back then. They weren’t exposed to the rampant cynicism and smut that you all imbibed along with your baby food. Don’t get me started.
It was spring, I remember, around the end of April or the beginning of May—you’d think that, considering what happened, the date would be burned into my memory. It had to have been a Saturday, because school wasn’t out yet. I was playing with a couple of friends—Tom Harper and Malcolm James. We’d gone up into the hills a few blocks from my house to play cowboys and Indians. We were armed and ready for trouble.
When I say “armed,” I mean something different than what the word might connote today. I was carrying my trusty McRepeater Rifle, which made a very satisfactory bang when the wheel atop the stock was turned. Tom had a deadly Daisy 1101 Thunderbird, and in addition was packing twin cap pistols. And Malcolm … well, Malcolm was carrying his Johnny Eagle Magumba Big Game Rifle, which he’d insisted on bringing even though he had a perfectly good Fanner 50 cap gun back in his bedroom. Some people just won’t get with the program.
We were hunting Indians, or, as we called them, “Injuns.” The term “political correctness,” let alone the concept, wasn’t exactly widespread back then. It was the middle of the afternoon and, though it was early in the year, it was already hot enough to raise shimmers of heat waves from the dirt road. The hills were still green, but you could see that slowly the vegetation was dying. Another month, and brown would be the dominant color, announcing the beginning of the fire season.
For now, however, it was still pleasant, or as pleasant as those hills ever became. We were walking cautiously through the Badlands of our fantasy, alert for the slightest sound that might betray an Apache ambush. This was more difficult than it might seem, because every few minutes Malcolm would drop into a crouch and spin around, spraying the mesquite with imaginary bullets and going “Kachow!! Kachow!!” Tom Harper finally grew tired of this, and demanded to know how we were going to get the drop on the bad guys with Malcolm constantly announcing our presence to everyone in the county. To which Malcolm replied that it was only make-believe, and that the most we might hope to flush from the underbrush was a rabbit or coyote.
We knew that, of course. We all knew that. It’s important to keep this in mind.
“Knock it off,” Tom finally said, exasperated, “or I’ll drop-kick your ass into next week.”
That got the desired result. Tom Harper’s right leg ended in a stump just above the knee—legacy of a car accident. He wore a prosthetic, a hinged contraption made of wood, metal, and plastic, and when he ran, he used a sort of half-skip in his locomotion which the rest of us found very amusing. We were careful not to show it, however, because Tom could turn that half-skip into a devastating kick that could easily deliver the recipient as far up the calendar as Tom wanted. Malcolm said nothing more that in any way damaged the fantasy gemütlichkeit we had constructed. And again, it’s important to remember that we knew what we were doing.
Malcolm was going on eight, with a seborrheic head of densely black hair and horn-rimmed glasses the exact same shade. He was built like a concentration camp inmate, all sharp, acute angles, with an Adam’s apple that leapt about like the bouncing ball in a Fleischer sing-along cartoon. Not surprisingly, he had few friends. Tom had just turned eight; he was handsome, if somewhat bland in appearance, and looked like a future gridiron star—until he began to walk or run with that characteristic hitching limp. I remember once, when we were both younger and I was at his sixth birthday party, seeing his father’s eyes fill with tears as he watched his son skip-run across the back yard.
We knew what we were doing. It was play, make-believe. Nothing more.
We were wandering along a dirt road, not far from the ranger station. The shadows were starting to grow longer, and the light more sanguine, as the sun neared the smoggy horizon. “We should maybe turn around,” Malcolm said. “We’re gettin’ too near the cave.”
There was no need to stipulate which cave. There was only one in the area—Arrowhead Cave, so named because of the dozens of chipped flint relics found there over the years. It was a tectonic cave, not one formed by gradual erosion. It had come into being thousands of years ago, when an earthquake had shattered a sandstone outcrop and deposited the fragments at the bottom of a ravine. Over the centuries talus and dirt had covered it, and eventually solidified into a roof. It hadn’t been a particularly impressive cave, according to rumor, but it had served the local Indians well as shelter for centuries before the valley was settled. It was even less impressive now, after the tragedy of 1938, when four young boys—out, like us, for play—had become lost in the cave.
I never did learn the specifics of the story—when I was a child, the adults had been very tight-lipped about it, even almost two decades later. All I knew—all any kid knew—was that the four boys had died in Arrowhead Cave. A few days later the City Council, acting with an alacrity hard to believe for anyone familiar with local government, had authorized several construction workers to blow up the cave’s entrance with dynamite, closing it for good.
Tom and I looked at each other after Malcolm’s statement. Neither of us wanted to be thought cowardly. On the other hand, neither of us particularly wanted to get any closer to Arrowhead Cave, as it was supposedly haunted. There had been another minor temblor last week as well, and none of us relished the thought of being near the cave, or—worse—in it, should another quake hit.
As the three of us stood there, momentarily paralyzed by indecision, we—or I, at least—became aware of just how quiet it was. I know it’s a cliché—I knew it even back then—to speak of an ominous, brooding silence holding dominion over the scene. How many times had I lain on the threadbare rug in our living room, chin cupped in my hands, staring at a black-and-white image of somebody wearing a pith helmet, standing in front of a sarcophagus and saying grimly, “It’s quiet—too quiet”? Usually this particular trope was immediately followed by the hero being seized around the throat and throttled by an ancient hand wrapped in dry, dusty cerements.
Still, cliché or no, I could suddenly feel my heart pounding. The light had taken on a shimmering, glassine quality, and the air seemed dead. It was impossible to get a lungful, no matter how deeply I breathed. There was no nourishment to it.
It would be easy, I suppose, to speculate that we all passed through some sort of
transition then—a portal to another reality, I guess you could call it. It’s tempting to use such a device as an explanation of a sort for what we did next. But the truth, as it usually is, was much more banal. We did what we did because that’s what kids did back then.
I started to say something, even though I was somehow convinced that the leaden air would not convey my words. Before I could try, however, a voice shouted, “Hands up!”
Now, this is the point. It was fantasy. Make-believe. And we knew that. But unless you can remember, really remember, those Bradbury days of childhood, the unspoken social norms that we all lived by then, the secret lives and inviolate rules that bound us as fully and completely as office politics and the laws of church and state circumscribed our parents’ lives—well, then I have no real hope of making you understand why we did what we did. It wasn’t even something we thought about—we just did it. They had the drop on us, after all. They’d caught us, fair and square.
So, all three of us dropped our toy guns and reached for the sky.
“They” were four boys our age, armed with toy guns like ours. They’d come up on us from behind and nailed us good. The tallest one, a kid my age, was wearing bib overalls over a flannel shirt. There seemed to be something odd about his weapon—a carbine, with no manufacturer’s stamp apparent—but it was obviously a toy. He gestured with the barrel, a peremptory jerk obviously intended to move us along, while the other three picked up our weapons.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Shag it.”
Arms still upraised, we stumbled along down the road, our captors herding us toward an unknown destination.
Even though these lads represented “the Enemy” (Apaches, space aliens, Nazis, gangsters, the heathen Chinee, or a hundred and one other incarnations of Bad Guys), there was nothing in our childhood rules of engagement that prohibited discourse. Consequently, Malcolm attempted conversation. “Where d’you guys go to school?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you around—”