Masques IV

by J N Williamson

  It is also supposedly the case that “new horror”/ “Splatterpunk” fiction has supplanted “traditional” or “quiet” horror. There have even been suggestions that publishers now prefer vampire tales specifically, or yarns about serial killers, possibly to the exclusion of other forms of horror. Not so. My most recent novel sales are about a supernatural region of Arizona, a quest that leads to Hell, an alcoholic who must stop the spread of killing fungi at the county jail, a family trapped by winter in a converted monastery, middle-aged men kidnaped by time-displaced soldiers and forced to undergo basic training, and my boyhood. Not a vampire or serial killer in the lot (though I have such a book in mind).

  Nor was my choice of stories for MIV made with the urgent hope of meeting some arbitrary, shifting mood or fad. Magazine editors may on occasion need to bow to trend, but books should be written or gathered in the hope they will be read and reread for years to come.

  Yet it isn’t impossible, now that the selection process is over again, to categorize what you’re about to read. You’ll find one vampire yarn, though I won’t tell you which one, half a dozen all-in-your-head tales, three it-should-have-been-a-love stories, one curse, three futuristic, about four tied to past events; you’ll read three anthropomorphic yarns (and possibly two anthropocentric), four tales of vengeance (give or take), at least three about child abuse, one as up-to-date as the most recent war (involving us), two ghost stories, a reversion-to-beasts epic, and—depending on how you want to look at them—five or six inhuman monster yarns. (I like them a lot as a rule.)

  For the timid soul leafing through such a book as this for the first time, I can report that only four or five of these tales show human beings dying “on camera,” so to speak—though people are about to perish in approximately seven others. According to the rule that, in good fiction, main characters are drastically changed by the end of the work, Masques IV is definitely on safe ground. They change so eighteen times herein, and the total would be higher if there weren’t three stories without human protagonists!

  There are no serial killers unless you’d like to count the vampire.

  A more traditional breakdown (in three parts!): Horror: 36%; supernatural: 27%; both: another 36% (roughly). 58% are “mainstream” horror (or supernatural) tales, 23% are overt and maybe representative of that “new horror” classification, and 9% seemed like line-straddlers to me.

  The third grouping was intriguing, I thought: 36% of this book’s fiction writers crafted fiction I think of as light or downright amusing. That’s probably a much higher percentage than there was in the previous Masques, but I’m growing tired of using my pocket calculator.

  The bottom line to all this—actually, from about the halfway mark of this formal introduction on—is that I enormously enjoyed the stories and poems you’re about to read, I believe they exhibit no conceivable sign of a slump in the very busy genre identified by the secondary name of this anthology series, and nearly everyone I’ve asked to the Masques so far has had—well, a ball.

  Now, though, the most important guest has arrived. The person wears no “corpse-like mask” and isn’t shrouded “in the habiliments of the grave.” The “throng of the revellers” does wait, however, for the guest’s “strong shudder,” because it is you.

  Let the masque begin!

  J.N. Williamson

  May and June 1991

  Acknowledgments

  For many reasons, the anthology Masques would not have become a series without the unique contributions of my wife, Mary; John Maclay and Joyce Maclay, Maclay & Associates; the late Milton L. Hillman, who generously gave us the title; Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Dean R. Koontz; D. W. and Diane Taylor; and Mort Castle.

  Ongoing thanks for help with the earlier volumes or for Masques IV specifically must be expressed to the following people, publications, or organizations:

  Paul Dale and Gretta M. Anderson, 2AM; Bastei-Lubbe; Robert Bloch; Tyson Blue; British Fantasy Society; Ginjer Buchanan, Berkley Books; the Chicago Star; Rich Chizmar, Cemetery Dance magazine; agents Don Congdon, Michael Congdon; Ellen Datlow, Teri Windling, James Frenkel, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror; designer Glen M. Edelstein; Ediciones Martinez Roca; Peter Enfantino, The Scream Factory; Delores J. Everts; Fantasy Mongers; Futura Publications; Garden Editoriale; David Hinchberger, The Overlook Connection; jacket designer Raquel Jaramillo; Kathleen Jurgens, Thin Ice; Rick Kleffel, Midnight Graffiti; David Kuehls, Fangoria; agent Norman Kurz; Allen Koszowski; Library Journal; Locus; Barbara Lowenstein; agent Uwe Luserke; agent Kay McCauley; agent Kirby McCauley; Harry O. Morris; Stanley Mossman; Mystery Scene; Other Realms; agent Lori Perkins; Publishers Weekly; Katherine Ramsland; Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch; Robson Books; Rocky Mountain News; San Francisco Chronicle; Stuart Schiff, Whispers; Science Fiction Chronicle; Dean Wesley Smith, Pulphouse; Lin Stein; Peter Straub; True Review; Gordon Van Gelder, St. Martin’s Press; Ruben Villegas; Stanley and Iris Wiater; Robert and Phyllis Weinberg; Ron Wolfe; and World Fantasy Award committees.

  Masques IV is dedicated to the delightful memory of the clever and highly original writer, James Cardwell—also known as “Adobe James.” One of his final short stories, “The Spelling Bee,” was a highlight in the editor’s work on the third Masques, and getting to know Jim in his last years—a bit—was a highlight of my life. Find him; publish him; read him. The reward you’ll get will be your pleasure.

  The Pack

  Chet Williamson

  One decade has passed since Chet Williamson sold his second story to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, and it’s difficult to imagine a career that has (among those of us who don’t mind being called horror writers) grown more impressively in terms of versatility, intelligent distribution of one’s time and talent, and popularity among readers and other writers. Except for the Pennsylvania native’s literate style, it’s also hard for the handful of his readers who have not committed his name to memory to comprehend that the same author is the creator of Dreamthorp, McKain’s Dilemma, and Reign (three of his novels, the last of which made the Horror Writers of America final ballot), “The Confession of St. James” (in Night Visions 7), “From the Papers of Helmut Hecher” (Lovecraft’s Legacy), and his tales in Playboy and The New Yorker.

  But, he is. Because, in a phrase, the word “Biedermeier” (artistically or intellectually uninspired) is the antithesis of Chet’s work. He told interviewer Stanley Wiater in Dark Dreamers that he doesn’t fit any school of horror fiction and added, “You can write about anything if you write well.”

  Nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award and, prior to Reign, the H.W.A. Bram Stoker, Chet Williamson does. So read “The Pack” and, when you’ve finished, you may just want to go back and read it for the truths as well as the gross-outs. They’re there in all his writing.

  They didn’t remember rising. They were just dead one minute, up and around the next. Those whose noses were crushed were the lucky ones. They couldn’t smell the others, and they couldn’t smell themselves. That was the worst of it for those whose noses were still working.

  Rusty’s nose worked just fine, and the stench annoyed him. He didn’t know if he’d ever be able to get it out of his nostrils, ever be able to scent game again. The leader ought to be able to scent the pack’s prey. And he was the leader, there was no doubt of that. He was the biggest, for one thing. A mutt, to be sure, but there was a lot of German shepherd in him, and his thin, taut frame indicated that either a Great Dane or a Doberman had participated in a train pulled on his mother or grandmothers. He was also in the best condition of the motley crew gathered around him, which wasn’t saying a whole hell of a lot.

  Jesus, Rusty thought, they looked like shit. Fluffy in particular, one of the few he knew. He had humped her damn near every time she’d been in heat, but had never connected well enough to impregnate her. She was a mutt too, a small, yellow, long-haired bitch who had always carried her tail up and waving, as if to advertise the availability of her hindquarters. Now that tail
was matted and askew, the hindquarters grotesquely large and swollen by the compression of her stomach where the 4x4 had mashed her. Her rear had had no choice but to split apart, and what Rusty remembered as tight and hot organs had given whelp to strands of dirt-caked gut on which she sat, resting her unbroken forepaws on a thick loop of her intestine.

  Rowdy was the only other he knew, an old, old dog who had been dead a long, long time. He’d been run over many times, left to be simmered by hot summer rains and fried in the skillet of high noon asphalt. He lay on the grass more like a well-used welcome mat than a dog. It seemed that only the hemisphere of his skull had not been flattened, and dry, puckered little things that Rusty figured were eyes watched him from that mass of fur and splintered bone, and waited for him to offer a plan.

  For a plan was what was needed. There had to be a purpose in what had happened, in what had drawn them all here together.

  A plan. Rusty shivered at the thought. And then he shivered again at the thought of thought. His mental processes seemed so complex now, and he could tell that those of the others were similar. There had been such simplicity before the awakening—looks and growls and barks and motions that indicated all the necessities of canine existence:

  Play!

  Eat!

  Shit!

  Roll in it!

  Fuck!

  But now there was far more than could be communicated by You smell my asshole, I’ll smell yours. Now there was memory and subtlety and, at long last, understanding of everything Rusty had seen and heard while he lived with the people who had called themselves his family. He knew what family was now, understood it. Males who fucked, bitches who whelped, them and the pups living together, enslaving the dogs, making them trade their freedom for food from cans (vomitous horsemeat shaped like a fat cylinder, the rings of the lid impressed upon the first bite), making them give up the heritage of the pack for a stroke once or twice a day, a walk on the end of a leash, an occasional flight of liberty when a bitch in heat might be fucked, a pile of dung might be rolled in, a wounded rabbit tormented and eventually killed.

  And what response from the humans when these joys were over? A newspaper on the nose, the end of a leash across the hindquarters, stinging the anus, burning the balls. Torture, pure and simple. And then at last, after a lifetime of cowering and cringing and tail-wagging and licking the hand of the goddamned male and his bitch and their pups, after years of that, when the only thing you want to do is lie and rest, then the final visit to the Great Devil in his white coat, the spurt of the needle, the ultimate injection, oh yes, he knew, he’d lain by the fireplace many times while the “family” watched that show on the television (television—Christ, he even knew its name now! And Christ, he could even curse like the humans had!). He had seen the actor pretend to be the vet and kill the dogs with sorrow on his pasty, blotchy face, and Rusty’s “family” had watched too, snuffling, the bitch wiping away tears and the male blinking, pretending his own tears weren’t there, when all the time they knew that when Rusty got old and tired, they’d take him to the real Great Devil as soon as he sneezed, or puked on the carpet, or shit in the house.

  And if not the Great Devil, then dogs died as Rusty and all who now surrounded him had died—crushed, battered, squashed, splattered by the cars, the trucks, the great, stupid machines that carried the humans everywhere because their legs were so weak, so slow.

  “Did they ever try to stop?” Rusty clearly wondered, and the thoughts were like words to the others. They heard, and thought, and he heard in return.

  “Stop?” The word came from Rowdy, and in Rusty’s mind it was festooned with ornaments of flayed fur. It sounded like Rowdy looked. “They tried to hit me. And they did. Too old to get out of the way. Just crossing the road. Just wanted to get to the cool of the oak trees and take a good long piss against them. Took me down. One great flash of yellow fire, and that was all. Next thing I remember, I’m crawling here, moving like a rug, dragging myself along like nothing’s ever moved before, like nothing should be able to move. And why? There’s got to be a reason why. I’m older than you, seen more, heard more, maybe now I understand more. But I don’t understand why. There’s got to be a reason.”

  “There’s a reason,” said a young but twisted thought, and the pack turned what was left of their heads and looked with what was left of their eyes at another dog. Sparks was the name his “family” had given him. He had enough eyes to serve all of them. They had been pushed from their sockets by whatever vehicle had struck him. One looked one direction, one the other, so that his ovoid gaze seemed all-encompassing. “There’s a good reason. To devour what devoured us. To eat what ate us away.”

  The thought struck a flame in Rusty, and he licked his chops with a caked tongue. “The family,” he thought. “Humans.”

  The compressed muscles of Sparks’s haunches pulsed in a futile effort to wag his tail. “Humans.”

  Rusty looked around the ring of broken creatures. Dry, parchment tongues panted in agreement, those tails wagged that could, heads nodded, even one that dangled from a thick strand of neck muscle that was barely visible beneath the sheep dog’s shaggy hair. “It must be,” Rusty thought. “Why otherwise would we have been given life once more, given knowledge, understanding, the complexity of thought necessary to finally realize the perfidy of our persecutors?”

  “There may be no reason like that,” stated a broken-faced dachshund, its jaw and snout poking at right angles to each other. “It may rather be a situation akin to the kind of entertainment that the ‘families’ watch on the television—radiation, chemicals, nitrates from manure on the farms oozing out of the soil and into . . . the soul. There may be no purpose at all, merely a random chain of events.”

  “I for one,” thought Sparks, “do not believe in a purposeless cosmos.”

  “You believe in God then?” inquired the dachshund.

  “I believe in Dog.” Sparks grinned, and Rusty thought the effect was hideous.

  “Fuck your palindromes, and fuck your philosophy,” mentally growled a junkyard dog whose middle resembled a veterinarian’s anatomical chart. “All I know is that I’m back and I’m pissed and though I don’t have much of a stomach to digest it with, I want to tear out some human guts, and get a little back.”

  “I did not say,” clarified the dachshund, “that I did not want that as well. I simply feel there may be no moral or theological justification of such acts. But whether there are or are not, I’d like to rip some humans myself. ‘Wiener,’ they called me. ‘Little Wiener.’ And that was only the first of many injuries, both mental and physical.”

  “Whatever the reason,” thought Rusty, “we have all returned, and we all have the same basic drive—as Sparks so eloquently put it, to devour what devoured us. We are a pack, and together we can triumph.”

  Fluffy resettled her forepaws on her filthy bowels. “They may come after us, try to kill us.”

  “We’re already dead, bitch,” thought Sparks. “If we’re moving around in this condition, bullets aren’t going to be too effective, do you think?”

  “But in this condition,” she replied, “do you think we’ll be able to pull down humans? I mean, look at Rowdy.”

  “It’s true,” Rowdy thought, “I’m not as spry as I used to be. But I do have means of locomotion, albeit slow. If the more active of you can bring our prey down, I can still participate in the final rending. Pieces of teeth remain in here, sharp, capable of cutting.” And a mass of compressed fur rose up so that Rusty and the others could see smooth bits of yellow beneath. Rusty’s newfound imagination could not, however, conceive of those pitiful bits of enamel abrading human flesh, if, indeed, they were still attached to what remained of Rowdy’s jaw. Still, Rowdy was one of the pack.

  This last thought he communicated to the others, and they agreed that the stronger would pull down the prey, but not finish it until all were there to share in the death and the eating.

  “Can we eat?” wondered a de
siccated terrier.

  “We can try,” Rusty thought. “Perhaps it will pass through us, perhaps it will be only symbolic. But still, this should be the law of the pack—to devour what devoured us.”

  Rusty lifted his head and tried to catch the sound of traffic to determine the whereabouts of a road. To scent gasoline or exhaust would have been impossible with the stench of carrion in his nose. Finally, from far away he heard the sound of an engine. “Come. Let’s hunt.” The pack began to move in the direction of the road, but quickly learned that they would make dreadful time if they waited for Rowdy. So Rusty and Sparks got on either side of the irregular disc of leather and fur, dug their fangs into the mass, and hauled their companion along. The dog had been dead so long that Rusty tasted only the ghost of vileness. Once or twice Rowdy’s matted hair got caught on roots and in branches, but the old dog writhed and twisted while the young ones tugged, until they reached a state game trail.

  On the way, Rusty’s eyes (still sharp, despite yellowing of the white and minor leaking of the vitreous fluid) discerned a rabbit standing in darkness next to a stump. Although his first reaction was to immediately drop Rowdy’s fur pie and race after the creature, something made him hesitate. He thought at first that it might be increased intelligence, that the mental maturity he and his cohorts had achieved had shown him the futility of chasing rodents. But as the stump and the creature that stood next to it retreated in his peripheral vision, he realized that there had been something dreadfully wrong with the rabbit, if rabbit it was. It had seemed terribly thin, reduced in girth beyond the effects of emaciation. He had seen rabbits like that before, but where? . . .