The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Oliver looked, and suddenly felt Billy’s hands grab him by the shoulders of his jacket, yanking his head down, and then Billy was on top of him, heavy and fat and hot, breathing hard, his stench almost unbearable. He forced Oliver’s head down into the hole and held him there.

  “Look! Dead people! The world is full of dead people! Look! There’s your grandmother! Isn’t that neat?” He laughed, squealed, grunted like a pig, shaking Oliver, pressing him down, down—

  Oliver opened his eyes in the darkness, flinching from the expected dirt, but there was none. He seemed to be hanging in a dark space…and then he saw the dead people, like pale bubbles suspended in the black fluid of the night, the array of them extending into infinite distance, their faces and naked skulls glowing like stars, like dim moons. They were all somehow aware of him, angry that he had intruded upon them. They froze him with their terrible gaze, those shriveled corpses, those skeletons, those heaps of scraps and darkened bones. Nearby, an ancient lady in an old-fashioned dress, lying with her hands folded over rosary beads glared up at him.

  She opened her mouth as if to speak. He shouted, “No! Go away!” But she was not going away and there was no sound. Her voice, he knew, would be the most horrible thing of all, and he would never stop hearing it.

  But she said nothing. There were only wriggling worms.

  “Isn’t that neat?” Billy whispered.

  He let go and Oliver broke free, running through the darkened woods, tripping over vines, tearing his precious jacket among the thorns. Once he fell and landed face-down in a stream.

  At last he came to the edge of the woods, where two holes remained of the old golf course. Alice, his girlfriend, lived nearby. He had planned to visit her tonight. He was late and a mess, but he didn’t think he would make it all the way back to his own house. He would be safe with her.

  “What happened to you?” she said, giggling when she saw him.

  “I fell,” was all he could say.

  * * * *

  Afterward, Oliver glimpsed Billy only at a distance once or twice, crouched under a bush, watching. He was almost able to deny him, to convince himself that he had never been fascinated with the things Billy considered neat. Almost.

  Alice was succeeded by Marlene, who was succeeded by Janice, then Jeanne, then Dora, and that took him to the end of high school. College was more a matter of books, then computers. All that talk about spaceships was rapidly turning him into an astro-physicist.

  But he dreamed of Billy Porter at the oddest times. Once he seemed to doze off in a lecture hall, and someone nudged him on the shoulder, and there was Billy beside him, naked and dirty, garlanded with dead leaves. He followed Billy out of the hall while the professor droned on and no one seemed to notice he was going.

  Outside was not the corridor that should have been there, but the deep woods, where the wind rattled branches and heaved vines, and the trees were alive with presences which welcomed Billy and rejected Oliver. They came to the fort, and Billy squatted down before the fire, then lifted his head off until his spine and entrails dripped in the air. Oliver let out a cry and awoke suddenly back in his seat in the lecture hall. Students around him turned to look. A few snickered, but the professor didn’t seem to have noticed.

  At twenty-three, he began graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, and, after that was done, moved to Princeton. There he met and married Eileen. For several years, that looked like the best idea he’d ever had, and for several more after that, the worst.

  He couldn’t begin to say precisely when the marriage went bad, but it did, with the glacial inevitability of a mansion built on an unsound foundation and tottering to a fall. The petty bickerings started, continued, became almost constant, over just anything—who was right in El Salvador, whether or not flying saucers exist—anything. It didn’t matter. They weren’t really fighting over the ostensible topics, he wearily concluded, any more than the people of the Middle Ages really fought wars over which way you make the sign of the cross or whether the spirit flows from the Father and the Son, or from the Father alone. It was all ego, authority-turf, conquest and humiliation, territorial squabbles in that most personal of personal spaces, the mind.

  At the end, he suspected Eileen had a lover. He didn’t care. Fine and good-riddance, he told himself. But she wouldn’t let him off so easily. She was going to make it messy. At the very end they found themselves screaming at one another, and before he knew it he’d raised a silver candlestick like a club.

  “Go on, you stupid fuck,” she said, her voice even, contemptuous and not at all afraid. “Go on and kill me. That’ll solve everything.”

  * * * *

  He walked out of the house, got in his car, and just started driving. He had no idea where he was going. Just going. He joked to himself that he’d always thought that driving your emotions away with a car was a California trait, but, no, they do it in New Jersey too. Driving, on and on like a record that’s come to the end but the needle won’t lift, so there’s nothing left but an empty rasping noise.

  An hour passed, more. His mind was on autopilot. Autopilot took him across the Ben Franklin Bridge into Pennsylvania. Autopilot turned west on the Schuykill Expressway and exited at Gulph Mills. His motions were as mindless as the orbits of asteroids—

  “My God,” he said aloud. “St. David’s PA.”

  His mind cleared somewhat as he recognized the old neighborhood, or what was left of it. The Sears which had replaced the golf course was itself gone, turned into a corporate center. Across the street a B. Altman’s had come and gone, the building empty. He didn’t turn left to see if the parking lot had obliterated Cabbage Creek Woods. Instead he continued on, then turned right, into Cambria Court, his old street, parked, and got out to walk.

  He wanted to proceed slowly. He wanted to touch and feel and hear, not just to glance from a moving car. More than that, he wanted to put off the time before he’d have to inevitably go back and face Eileen. He wanted this moment to last forever.

  It was dusk on a long summer evening like so many he’d known here. He walked, past the house with the arched gateway over the path, where he’d come that Halloween when he was fourteen, the very last time he’d ever gone trick-or-treating, and the man had said, “You’re getting a little tall for this, aren’t you?” Not old, tall.

  He knew these places, every tree, every stone, for a child can trespass into any number of back yards without being noticed or driven away. Now he could only stand in the street and look.

  The upper court was hardly recognizable. An apartment building had wiped out his own family’s old house and the empty lot behind where, when he was very small, a Victorian pile had burned to the ground amid screaming sirens and flashing lights and thick smoke. It was his most vivid memory from the beginning of his life: the firemen dragging hoses across the lawn, the snapping as the sparks and cinders flew into the air. He remembered standing in the driveway holding his mother’s hand while his father hurried to pile valuables into the car in case the fire spread and they had to leave.

  Now he could only look for traces of that former place, what was his whole world then. Yes, there was one twisted dogwood tree at the edge of the street which had been in their yard, but that was all.

  As he stood there, as the evening shadows deepened, he was able to imagine what it had been like. But the scale was all off. Things were smaller: that dogwood tree, even though it should have grown, was no longer the labyrinthine tower of wood and leaves it had been. It was just a tree. And across the street, behind him, was a walnut atop the rising ground at the edge of the Drake property. He remembered crawling up that little hill on his hands and knees and resting beneath the tree. Now it was no more than a foot above the road surface. He could take the journey in a single step.

  He leaned down and picked up a walnut, its green and black shell peeling to reveal the nut inside. Nobody ever ate them, but he remembered the strong, almost sweet smell which got on your hands and stayed
for hours.

  * * * *

  “Hello.”

  He turned, still holding the walnut. “I used to live here,” he said quickly.

  “I know.”

  He took the other for a handyman of some sort, a stocky fellow dressed in a dirty, dark uniform of the sort filling-station attendants sometimes wear. But there was something about the way the man moved, some unforgotten tone in his voice that made him hesitate.

  For just an instant, he felt a touch of the old fear again. That he recognized unquestionably.

  Then he saw the face clearly. A face as it ages is like a waxen mask slowly melting, stretching. The basic pattern remains for a long time.

  “Bil-ly?”

  “Hey old pal, wanna see something neat?”

  It was so easy, so utterly effortless to follow Billy through the hedge and into the Drakes’ yard, even as some voice in the back of his mind said, Wait a minute. We’re grown men and we’re trespassing on these people’s property. He crawled down the embankment, under the arching forsythias, through the thorns, and it was much easier than he thought it would be. He followed, even as he thought again, How could you possibly know I would be here this particular night? and Billy seemed to answer in his mind: You thought of me and I waited. You were the very last one to come to my fort, and I waited.

  Billy took him by the arm and led him along the tracks. He cringed at that, because everyone knew that trainmen went by and took pictures of people who walked along the tracks.

  He noticed that Billy was barefoot, and his clothes were rags.

  He climbed down the second embankment to the stream, clumsily, sliding amid a shower of sticks and gravel. Billy was ahead of him somewhere, in the trees perhaps, moving swiftly, easily; then waiting for him by the stream.

  They walked out onto the deserted St. David’s Golf Course in the deep twilight, and fireflies rose from the green earth; and a part of his mind said, There’s been no golf course here since JFK was president. And a part of him thought it odd that he marked time that way, since JFK, not since he was in the sixth grade, and he reflected how each of us matters so little against the larger pattern of events. But the whole of his mind did not listen to these voices, and they receded to a nonsensical whisper.

  It was so easy. A downhill slide away from pain, where Eileen could not follow.

  They came to the clump of trees behind the clubhouse, where some kid or other supposedly found a Spanish-American War sword once. Oliver wondered if Billy had that sword now, among his collection of neat things.

  In Cabbage Creek Woods, among the skunk cabbages, the soft mud was almost frigid between their toes.

  And, finally, the two of them crouched in Billy’s fort before a smoldering fire, dirty, almost naked, clutching stone-tipped spears, hooting and howling into the night.

  (Like the kids in Lord of the Flies that other voice said. But he didn’t understand. No, this is all wrong. You’re thirty-five. For Christ’s sake what happened to your clothes?)

  “Isn’t this neat?” Billy said.

  Shaking, sobbing at some memory he could no longer quite define, Oliver said, “Yes. Neat.”

  “Here. Let me show you something.”

  Billy folded his hands, then brushed his own, bare, mud-streaked chest, splashing away the skin like scum on pond water, and Oliver could see Billy’s ribs clearly, his lungs inflating like bags, and his heart beating deep inside.

  “My God—!”

  For an instant Oliver remembered. He struggled back into himself, like a drowning man reaching for the surface. He remembered that he was a full professor at Princeton, that he’d parked his car over in Cambria Court. But he looked down at his slender, hairless legs, at his muddy knees and feet, and he wept, and thought This can’t be real. What is happening to me?

  “Neat, huh?” Billy laughed, like a kid who’s just chewed up some food but not swallowed it, and opens his mouth and in order to be deliberately disgusting.

  It was so easy to stop weeping, to sit with Billy, to try to be just like him, to listen to his stories of the Blood Goblin and of the wild Indians who lived in these woods once, and what terrible tortures they performed on their enemies. If he listened very hard, if he stared intently out into the darkening woods, he could hear the tom-toms and the screams, far away.

  Something moved furtively among the nettles by the stream, ruffling them.

  “Billy,” he said slowly. “I want to stay here. I want to learn to see everything you see. I want you to teach me.”

  No! his adult self screamed within, like a prisoner in a cage being wheeled to execution. He tried to remember science, equations, the names of stars.)

  Billy stood up. He opened his arms wide, and the whole forest was transformed. It was utterly dark now. The bird-calls were exotic screeches. Something huge, like a giant on stilts, stalked among the trees, its bestial head glaring. Below the fort, by the stream, an enormous serpent coiled, its scales gleaming with their own light. Its face was that of a bare human skull. Its tongue flickered between the rotting teeth like a thin knife.

  “Just like me,” Billy said, putting his hand on Oliver’s shoulder in what had to be a gesture of acceptance at last, of genuine friendship. The master of the forest had accepted an apprentice.

  (No! the buried, adult Oliver screamed from within his head. I don’t want to be like you. I’m not like you. I grew up! You never did!)

  “You’re exactly like me,” Billy said aloud.

  And the two of them crouched inside the fort. Oliver, looking up for Billy’s approval first, leaned down, placing his folded hands in the dust.

  It was so easy. He didn’t have to be forced. He looked down into the hole and if peering through a ceiling from the floor above, and he saw Eileen there, lying on the kitchen floor in their house back in Princeton, blood pooling around her throat.

  She gasped softly. Her fingers opened, closed, opened, were still.

  He screamed and turned away. For an instant he crouched low beneath the cramped roof of the fort, his back pressing into dirt and roots, naked, a savage, yes, but in his adult body, and he saw the wild boy before him and was filled with horror and disgust. He shoved Billy aside and crawled to the doorway of the fort—

  (What do you really want? Be honest. Really.)

  (And all he could think of was that time when they were children, when Billy held up the bloody animal skull and said, “Wouldn’t you like to do this to people?” and for an instant he’d known he did. Then, the idea was like a horrible jack-in-the-box he had to shove back inside with enormous effort, but he had done it, and closed the lid. Now the lid had burst right off its hinges, useless, gone.)

  The Blood Goblin rose out of the nettles by the stream, its eyes glaring, its spine dangling below.

  Billy spoke. His voice was deep and harsh. “You will slay her. You will resume your former guise long enough to execute the appointed task, then return here and dwell here forever.”

  That wasn’t Billy talking. Billy never used words like former guise and execute the appointed task. That was the Blood Goblin, grown eloquent in the long years of searching for rest.

  Not Billy.

  Billy was a dirty little boy. He didn’t mean any harm.

  “Something neat,” Billy said solemnly. He put a stone dagger into Oliver’s hand, closing his reluctant fingers over it.

  And Oliver began to chant, softly, hardly realizing he was doing it, “Slit her throat. Kill her dead. Drink her blood. Bash her head.”

  Billy smiled. He seemed to like that a lot.

  “No,” Oliver said aloud, his voice rising in tone, sinking into youth, into childishness, cracking, even as his body changed, as the room was comfortably-sized again, as his bare, hairless legs gleamed in the firelight. “I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t hate her. If only she’d leave me alone.” He was pleading now. “If only we could talk it out like civilized human beings.”

  (Civilized? We’re savages, remember?)

>   Billy was pounding on the dirt with hands and feet. “Slit her throat! Kill her dead! Drink her blood! Bash her head!”

  Oliver-within-Oliver, drowning, struggled one last time for the surface, reached up, but didn’t make it. So easy to let go. To sink down. It made things so simple.

  (I won’t let you do this to me. I won’t.)

  Oliver crouched down by the fire, chanting along, “Slit her throat! Kill her dead!”

  (You will. You’ll do it yourself, to yourself.)

  He looked at Billy as if he’d seen him truly for the first time. It was so easy, like letting go, sinking down.

  (What makes you think I want to be like you?)

  (You already are.)

  And the Blood Goblin hovered before the fort’s single opening, and the huge stalker among the trees leaned down and whispered terrifying things; and the wild Indians crouched in the darkness, describing whom they had tortured and how. The great, bone-faced serpent entered the fort and circled around the two boys, again and again.

  Oliver looked into Billy’s eyes, and understood fully, and he thought that Billy understood him, and for the first time it was Billy who was afraid.

  (No. This isn’t happening. You are a teacher, a scientist, a grown, decent man. No. Billy was a dirty little boy you knew years and years ago. What was that voice? It was so easy to ignore it.)

  Oliver looked into Billy’s eyes, and he understood that there could be no two masters of the forest, that there could be no apprentice. No, it was not like that. The fort was built for one.

  He knew what to do now. It was clear. Billy had shown him the way, had been showing him the way all these years, had ultimately seduced him, even as he allowed himself to be seduced.

  “It’ll be neat,” Oliver said. “Really, really neat.”

  Billy screamed and Oliver opened him up. He methodically peeled Billy apart, tearing out his ribs, his lungs, his heart, dropping them down the hole into the kitchen, on top of his wife’s body (Whose wife?), while the forest birds screamed and the Blood Goblin chanted and the sound of the wind through the trees was a kind of song.