Masques IV

by J N Williamson

  Fortunately, the afternoon with Louise had gotten a little better. They both liked to smoke cigarettes so Penny got out the Winston Lights she stole one-at-a-time from her mother and they sat in front of the TV and watched MTV and drank Pepsi and told kind of semi-dirty jokes and laughed and gossiped about boys at school and generally had a good time until Bob came home.

  Bob was Mom’s newest boyfriend. He’d lived with them for a year now. He was a used car salesman, one of the few men on the block to wear a necktie to work, which Mom thought was real cool for some reason. He had black wavy hair and very white teeth and you could tell by the way he looked at you that he really thought he was pretty hot stuff. On all his sport coats you could see a fine white powder of dust from walking around the car lot all day.

  Penny hated Bob but Mom loved him. After she’d been dumped by her last boyfriend, Mom had tried to kill herself with tranquilizers. She’d ended up getting her stomach pumped and staying in a mental hospital for three weeks while Penny lived with her aunt. Mom hadn’t really snapped out of it for a whole year, till she met Bob. Now Mom was her old self again. “Oh, hon, if Bob’d ever leave me, I just don’t know what I’d do,” Mom would always say after she and Bob had had a fight. And Penny would get scared. Maybe next time Mom actually would kill herself.

  She thought of all these things in an instant as she watched Bob’s slow, sly smile.

  Now, he stood there staring down at Penny so long that Louise finally got up and said it was time she git and so she got, and Bob said then, “Your Mom’s not gonna be home for another couple hours.”

  But Penny didn’t want to think about Bob now. She wanted to think about Mr. Rigler. The way she’d thought about Mr. Menetti before him and Mr. Stufflebeam before him (Mr. Stufflebeam was another who frequently used his fists on his family).

  She went up the rear stairs quickly.

  The covered porch smelled of heat and spaghetti from last night.

  From the downstairs apartment came the sounds of dorky country music and a little baby crying. In this kind of heat, babies usually cried.

  At the screen door, Penny knocked once and then listened very carefully. She didn’t hear anybody talking or moving around. Louise, she knew, was across the city at a movie with her cousin. Mrs. Rigler was at the restaurant where she was a short-order cook.

  And Mr. Rigler was sleeping off his drunk. He’d get up at two, shave, shower, fix himself something to eat, and then head for the factory in an old Ford that was nearly as junky as those dying beasts he kept in the backyard.

  “Mr. Rigler?” she called.

  She could hear a window air-conditioner roaring and rattling in the distance. But nothing else.

  “Mr. Rigler?”

  She waited a full two minutes and then went inside.

  The apartment smelled of cigarettes and beer and spaghetti. Dirty dishes packed the sink. Without both arms, Louise could hardly do housework.

  Penny went through the kitchen into the living room where aged overstuffed furniture was all covered with decorator sheets so they’d look newer.

  The bedrooms and the bathroom were down a hall.

  She was halfway down the hall when she picked up his snoring. He was really out.

  When she reached the door, she peeked in and saw him on the bed. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt. You could see his huge hairy belly riding up and down beneath it as he breathed. His face was dark with stubble. The panther tattoo on his fleshy right arm looked as faded as the flesh itself. He smelled of beer and onions and cigarettes and farts. Penny’s stomach grabbed momentarily.

  She stood watching him. Just watching him. She wasn’t even sure why.

  She thought of Louise’s arm. The way it must hurt. She thought about the time Louise’s Mom had gotten her collarbone broken. And the time he’d given her not one but two black eyes.

  He was the same kind of man Mr. Menetti had been. The same kind of man Mr. Stufflebeam had been.

  “You sonofabitch,” she said to the man who lay there in the silence of the bedroom. “You fucking sonofabitch.”

  Then she got to work.

  Penny was back in her apartment watching a Happy Days rerun—she dreamed of a world as nice as the one Richie Cunningham lived in—when she heard the fire truck rumbling down the brick street, siren singing.

  They’d hurry in there with their axes and their hoses, but it would be too late. Just as it had been too late with Mr. Menetti and Mr. Stufflebeam. “Asphyxiation” was the word that had been in all the newspaper articles.

  After a time, she went out on the fire escape and looked across five back yards to where the two red fire trucks filled the alley. Maybe as many as forty or fifty neighbors had come out to watch.

  The ambulance came next, a big white box, two attendants rushing over to the back stairs.

  After more time, Penny went in and opened a Pepsi and turned on MTV. She really liked the new Whitney Houston video. She hoped they’d play that before three o’clock, which was when she had to be out of the apartment. Before Bob got home.

  At two-thirty, she was in the bedroom, tugging on a fresh Madonna T-shirt, when she heard the front door open and shut.

  It could have been Mom but she knew better.

  She knew damned well who it was.

  By the time she was finished pulling on the T-shirt, he was leaning in the doorway, a smirk on his mouth and a cigarette in his hand.

  “Hey, babe, how’s it goin’?”

  “I’m on my way out.”

  “Oh, yeah? To where?”

  “The park.”

  “Your Mom don’t like for you to go to the park.”

  “Yeah,” Penny said, staring right at Bob and knowing he’d get her meaning. “She’s afraid a child molester will get me.”

  He was still smiling, even when he took two quick steps across the room to her, even when he slapped her hard across the mouth.

  “That crack about the child molester s’posed to be funny, you little bitch?”

  She fought her tears. She didn’t ever want him to see her cry. Ever.

  “Huh? That s’posed to be funny?”

  She didn’t want to say anything, either, but she hated him too much and words were her only weapon. “I could tell her. I could tell her what you been doin’ to me in the bathroom.”

  At first, Bob visibly paled. This was the first time she’d ever threatened him this way. And there was great satisfaction in watching him lose his self-confidence and look scared.

  But he quickly recovered himself. She could see cunning now in his stupid blue gaze; he was Bob the used car salesman once again. “You know what she’d do if you told her about us?”

  “She’d throw you out,” Penny said. “That’s what she’d do.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, she probably would. But you know what she’d do then?”

  He drew a long, white finger slowly across his throat. “She’d kill herself. ’Cause I’m the only hope she’s got. The only god-damned hope she’s got in the whole wide world. She’s never had no other man stay with her as long as I have, not even your old man, that sorry sonofabitch.”

  She started to say something but he held up his hand for silence. “I’m goin’ in the bathroom and I want you in there in five minutes.”

  “No.”

  He stared at her. “Five minutes, you understand me, you little bitch?” She shook her head.

  He grinned. He was the old Bob again. “Five minutes, babe. Then I’ll take you out to the mall and buy you a new blouse. How’d that be?” She had the satisfaction of watching him panic again.

  She’d taken three steps back to the nightstand and picked up the phone.

  She didn’t threaten, this time. She simply dialed her Mom’s work number, and before he could slap the phone from her hand, she said, “This is Penny Baker. I’d like to speak to my mom please. Thank you.”

  “You little bitch—”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  She almost laughed. Bob nearly loo
ked funny. He’d totally lost it. Was starting to pace back and forth, running a trembling hand through his hair.

  “Hi, honey, everything all right?”

  “I just wanted to talk to you, Mom.”

  “Hon, I’m kinda busy right now. Is it real important?”

  “It’s about Bob.”

  He made a big fist and shook it at her.

  “Bob?” Mom said. “What about him, hon?”

  “Just that—”

  But Mom didn’t wait. “Nothin’ happened to him, did it?”

  “No, Mom, I—”

  “Oh, God, hon, I have nightmares all the time about somethin’ happening to him. Getting hit by a car in a crosswalk or gettin’ mugged somewhere or—”

  Penny heard the need then, heard it more clearly than ever before, the childlike need her mother felt for Bob. Bob hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that her mother would kill herself if he left. “You gonna tell me, hon?” Mom said, still sounding crazy with fear. “Tell you?”

  “Why you called, hon? Jesus, Pen, this is scaring the shit out of me.”

  “I just called to—”

  “—yes?—”

  “Tell you that Bob—”

  And now Bob moved closer. She could smell his sweat and his aftershave. And in his eyes now she could see pleading; oh, please. Penny; don’t tell her; please don’t tell her.

  “Tell me what, hon? Jesus, please just say it.”

  “That Bob’s going to take me to the mall.”

  And then Mom started laughing. “God, hon, that’s what you wanted to tell me?”

  Bob knew enough not to approach her. He just stood there a few feet from her and held his hands up to God as if in supplication and gratitude.

  “That’s all you wanted to tell me?”

  “Yes,” Penny said. “That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

  A few minutes later, Bob was in the bathroom. The water running and the medicine cabinet closing. He liked to get himself all cleaned up for her down there, he always said.

  Penny lay on the bed. She listened to a distant lawn mower on the summer afternoon.

  The water in the bathroom stopped running.

  After a time the door opened and he said, “You can come in here now.”

  She didn’t get up. Not at first.

  She lay there for a time and thought of Mr. Rigler and Mr. Menetti and Mr. Stufflebeam.

  The smoke and the fire and the too-late screams.

  She saw Bob lying on such a bed now. And heard his own too-late screams.

  “You don’t want to keep the old Bob waitin’ now, do you, babe?” he called again.

  Oh, yes, someday it would happen; somehow. Bob on the bed with his too-late screams.

  And then she got up and went into the bathroom.

  Please Don’t Hurt Me

  F. Paul Wilson

  Because of my admiration for The Keep, there was no writer I wanted more to be a part of the initial Masques than F. Paul Wilson. About his novel, in the enjoyable Horror: 100 Best Books (London, 1988), I wrote: “It’s difficult . . . to imagine anything essential to the genre’s form which was omitted,” and expressed the opinion that The Keep could be an exemplar for hopeful novelists in “any modern genre (including the mainstream—which could use an infusion of originality, plot, suspense and so forth).” So I was immensely pleased when Paul wrote “Soft” for Masques and when (in ’89) he and Tom Doherty titled the practicing physician’s first story collection Soft and Others. (Dr. Wilson’s second collection, Ad Statum Perspicuum—“toward invisibility”—was the October ’90 Author’s Choice from Pulphouse, by the bye.)

  Five writers from the inaugural Masques antho are again in attendance, and two—each gentleman answering to the name Wilson (Gahan is the other)—return, herein, for the first time.

  F. Paul hasn’t been idle since 1984. In addition to writing novels called The Tomb, The Touch, Reborn, and Black Wind—Dean Koontz called the latter “a stunner”—he has edited the second Horror Writers of America anthology. The burden of producing it has taken Wilson out of, into, again out of, and back into Masques IV—

  With a possibly tongue-in-cheek, all-dialogue story that seemed to me so much an all-unknowing logical continuation of the young life sensitively delineated by Ed Gorman that I could not resist placing the tales back-to-back. Perhaps you’ll conclude there’s a happy ending, of sorts, to each fine story.

  “Real nice place you’ve got here.”

  “It’s a dump. You can say it—it’s okay. Sure you don’t want a beer or something?”

  “Honey, all I want is you. C’mon and sit next to me. Right over here on the couch.”

  “Okay. But you won’t hurt me, will you?”

  “Now, honey—Tammy’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “Tammy Johnson. I told you that at least three times in the bar.”

  “That’s right. Tammy. I don’t remember things too good after I’ve had a few.”

  “I’ve had a few too and I remember your name. Bob. Right?”

  “Right, right. Bob. But now why would someone want to hurt a sweet young thing like you, Tammy? I told you back there in the bar you look just like that actress with the funny name. The one in Ghost.”

  “Whoopi Goldberg.”

  “Oh, I swear, you’re a funny one. Funny and beautiful. No, the other one.”

  “Demi Moore.”

  “Yeah. Demi Moore. Why would I want to hurt someone who looks like Demi Moore? Especially after you were nice enough to invite me back to your place.”

  “I don’t know why. I never know why. But it just seems that men always wind up hurting me.”

  “Not me, Tammy. No way. That’s not my style at all. I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

  “How come you’re a sailor, then? Didn’t you tell me you were in that Gulf War?”

  “That’s just the way things worked out. But don’t let the uniform scare you. I’m really a lover at heart.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “If you’ll let me.”

  “My father used to say he loved me.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’m talking about that kinda love.”

  “Good. Because I didn’t like that. He’d say he loved me and then he’d hurt me.”

  “Sometimes a kid needs a whack once in a while. I know my pop loved me, but every once in a while I’d get too far out of line, like a nail that starts working itself loose from a fence post, and then he’d have to come along every so often and whack me back into place. I don’t think I’m any the worse for it.”

  “Ain’t talking about getting ‘whacked,’ sailor man. If I’d wanted to talk about getting ‘whacked’ I woulda said so. I’m talking ’bout getting hurt. My daddy hurt me lotsa times. And he did it for a long, long time.”

  “Yeah? Like what did he do to hurt you?”

  “Things. And he was all the time making me do things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Just . . . things. Doin’ things to him. Things to make him feel good. Then he’d do things to me that he said would make me feel good but they never did. They made me feel crummy and rotten and dirty.”

  “Oh. Well, uh, didn’t you tell your mom?”

  “Sure I did. Plenty of times. But she never believed me. She always told me to stop talking dirty and then she’d whack me and wash my mouth out with soap.”

  “That’s terrible. You poor thing. Here. Snuggle up against me now. How’s that?”

  “Fine, I guess, but what was worse, my momma’d tell Daddy and then he’d get mad and really hurt me. Sometimes it got so bad I thought about killing myself. But I didn’t.”

  “I can see that. And I’m sure glad you didn’t. What a waste that would’ve been.”

  “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about Daddy. He’s gone and I don’t hardly think about him anymore.”

  “Ran off?”

  “No. He’s dead. And good riddance. He had an accident on our farm, oh, so
me seven years ago. Back when I was twelve or so.”

  “That’s too bad . . . I think.”

  “People said it was the strangest thing. This big old tractor tire he had stored up in the barn for years just rolled out of the loft and landed right on his head. Broke his neck in three places.”

  “Imagine that. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Yeah. My momma thought somebody musta pushed it, but I remember hearing the insurance man saying how there’s so many accidents on farms. Bad accidents. Anyway, Daddy lived for a few weeks in the hospital, then he died.”

  “How about that. But about you and me. Why don’t we—?”

  “Nobody could explain it. The machine that was breathing for him somehow got shut off. The plug just worked its way out of the wall all by itself. I saw him when he was just fresh dead—first one in the room, in fact.”

  “That sounds pretty scary.”

  “It was. Here, let me unzip this. Yeah, his face was purple-blue and his eyes were all red and bulgy from trying to suck wind. My momma was sad for awhile, but she got over it. Do you like it when I do you like this?”

  “Oh, honey, that feels good.”

  “That’s what Daddy used to say. Ooh, look how big and hard you got. My momma’s Joe used to get big and hard like this.”

  “Joe?”

  “Yeah. Pretty soon after Daddy died my momma made friends with this man named Joe and after a time they started living together. Like I said, I was twelve or so at the time and Joe used to make me do this to him. And then he’d hurt me with it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Don’t stop.”

  “I won’t. Yours is a pretty one. Not like Joe’s. His was crooked. Maybe that’s why his hurt me even more than Daddy’s.”

  “How’d you finally get away from him?”

  “Oh, I didn’t. He got hurt.”

  “Really? Another farm accident?”

  “Nah. We weren’t even on the farm no more. We was livin’ in this dumpy old house up Lottery Canyon way. My momma still worked but all Joe did was fiddle on this big old Cadillac of his—you know, the kind with the fins?”