“Fine,” he said, waiting for the tingling sensation of the probe and the sound of his dreamkey.
“Atta boy,” the man said with his jovial workaday smile in place, preparing to look at Durrell’s brain
[*] Venetian is spelled Venusian but henceforward all turvywords will be spelled phonetically. [He dreamed that he crossed this out. His editors hated footnotes.]
Pratfall
John Maclay
One of the begetters of this anthology series, the publisher of the first two volumes (not to mention the popularly admired Nukes and books written by William F. Nolan and Ray Russell), refused to permit his own fiction writing to appear in Masques until he’d earned his spurs elsewhere.
With two novels, his story collection (Other Engagements, Dream House, 1987), and all-on-his-own short fiction or poetry in publications ranging from Twilight Zone and Night Cry to Pillow Talk and True Love—from Footsteps, 14 Vicious Valentines, Grue, and Nolan’s The Bradbury Chronicles to Crosscurrents, Amazing Experiences, The Horror Show, and AntiWar Poems—from Hardboiled Detective, Human Digest, Cemetery Dance, and Horizons West to Borderlands, Pulphouse (#5), Scare Care, Whispers, Stalkers and Urban Horrors . . . there simply was no reason not to accept the editor’s invitations to the third Masques, and the fourth.
Award-winning Bruce Boston wrote elsewhere that John Maclay is “a master of that most difficult of literary forms, the short-short story.” He means “story,” not vignette, and Bruce was right in both assertions. Recall Maclay’s “Death Flight,” “The Sisters,” “Safe,” “Black Stockings,” “Models,” “New York Night”—and meet Josef, the “clown.”
My name is Josef Stern. I am seventy-five now, but with my full head of dark hair and my small, wiry body, I could pass for years less. Born in Vienna, I have lived through two world wars, two world peaces, and everything in between. I take things in stride. You see, I am a clown.
It used to bother me some, seeing people laugh as I tramped around the sawdust rings of the great circuses of the world. Berlin, Paris, London, I played them all. Moscow and Washington. I knew that I thought more deeply about things than did the crowds who watched me from above, even the leaders and crowned heads. One has to feel, to be a clown. To create laughter, one also has to cry. I foresaw what havoc Hitler would bring, even before he came to power. I knew that the Cold War would follow. Therefore it seemed ironic that my audience was so secure, while I carried on in such a trivial manner.
But then I came to know that this was exactly my defense, and my victory. My white makeup, my painted smile hid attitudes that might have put me in trouble with the vast, unthinking majority. My polka-dotted suit inspired smiles, instead of the vengeance which always follows the prophet. Nobody kills a clown.
So I was able to do good, in my own small way. I saved Jews, hiding them in a circus wagon on the road to Berne. Evenhandedly, I later smuggled Germans through the Wall. There was even a young man fleeing the F.B.I. after the events of 1968; America or no, it was all the same.
Yet there was another part of my job which caused me concern. That was the violence, the continual slapping around. Reflecting upon it, I feared it would inspire real anger, real bloodshed, real war.
However, an older clown told me that it served a useful purpose, it was merely relief. By acting out their primitive urges through me, he said, people rendered them harmless. So I went on.
And then, scarcely a year ago, the barriers came down. It did my old, good European’s heart proud to see the end of that same Wall, the people surging happily through the streets of the capitals I knew and loved, even the Russians speaking freely in a way I had never known. The American leader had also called for a kinder, gentler time, and I believed that he had the peaceful strength to bring it. In Berlin, I danced, now, for joy.
Such was my feeling, when the circus finished its engagement in Tel Aviv. Such it was, when I set out alone to visit Baghdad.
The war began, as all wars do, with a spark. There was the rape of the tiny country. But then, through intransigence, through the visceral rush of blood, it flared. I have never seen anything to war, no glory or honor. Even the “noble” emotions it inspires are, to me, bogus, given their origin in animal slaughter. War is, in a word, stupid.
Yet I was caught in it, as I had been caught in worse ones. My rented car was diverted from the Amman-Baghdad road, to carry some Iraqi troops to the front. And there I was, invited to share a hole near the Kuwaiti border, in the middle of the desert.
Spirits were high at first, food and water was in good supply, and I spent some of my time entertaining, the soldiers. I pulled my age-faded, polka-dotted suit from my trunk, painted my face, and made them laugh heartily at my antics. None of them really wanted to be there, except for a few of the pathological sorts that one finds in any army.
Then the bombing began, the metal death loosed by the swooping eagles and the lumbering cranes that had long since removed war from the hands of man, made it impersonal. The effect, however, was very real, as my ears were deafened and huge geysers of sand rose into the mockingly blue sky. Very real, as a man who had laughed at me a moment ago was surreally torn into four pieces, his mouth now an obscenity, gushing blood. Yes, the sand was red that day, as if from a child’s drink spilled on a playground.
There were rumors of peace, and rumors again. But the food stopped, the men grew gaunt, and even the water became nothing but dew collected from spread canvas. I could no longer perform my pratfalls, I could merely survive.
One night, as I lay looking at the stars, I began to think again. Had I been wrong; had the violence in my act truly inspired the portrayal of more, as in the films exported in such quantity from the land of peace? Had these, indeed, become a self-fulfilling prophecy, along with the fervor of those who called upon the Islam God?
But no, I decided. It was unsmiling men who made war, those who followed concepts instead of life, those who could not find humane answers before further evil ensued. Those who were still in thrall to the weapons which had become their masters. Those who had stayed serious during my antics in the ring. Those who, well, had never been clowns.
Still the bombs came. Yet one day, there was silence. I awoke to find my companions gone. And when I poked my head above the sand, I saw two lines of tanks a thousand yards on either side, facing each other, facing me.
I did not know what to do, when the muzzle flashes began. Some rounds fell short, exploding merely a stone’s throw away, so I had to decide. I considered running toward one of the lines, waving a flag of peace, but shells were falling even there. I thought to remain in my hole, but it provided little shelter. I did pray to my God.
But then, slowly growing in my old mind, behind the eyes that had seen so much, came the thought. Throwing my wiry body erect, I donned once more my faded suit, bounded up and out into the light.
And I danced there, danced on the desert floor! As the mechanical lines drew closer, as the explosions shook the land, I danced for love and joy! I was giving the performance, perhaps the last, of my long life. I danced against war. I danced!
Do as I do, I seemed to be saying to the men in the machines. Come out now, and dance with each other, dance with Josef Stern. The violence was never meant to be real. This is insane. Paint a smile on, slap yourselves around a bit, but dance! Then go home and tell your leaders, your nations, what you have done.
That was when, as if I had been given preternatural sight, I saw the two projectiles, one from either side. Both headed, unerringly, for me.
What sort of people? I marveled, as my body left the earth.
What sort of people would kill a clown?
The Heart of Helen Day
Graham Masterton
Even after he’s edited the fine anthology Scare Care—proceeds from which go for the care of abused and needy kids in America and England—Graham Masterton is a tough man to sum up. With his black, curly hair, his smiling way of leaning forward to be sure he hears every word, he
looks the part of a sophisticated former editor of the British Penthouse and Mayfair. But there’s this beautiful and witty lady named Wiescka, his wife and agent, and their sons Roland, Daniel, and Luke. (Roland was eleven when he penned the book-closing “In the West Wing” for his dad’s Scare Care.)
Then there’s the Masterton who wrote historical and mainstream novels such as Solitaire, Rich, and Railroad, and the literarily inquiring Mirror; “based very much” on Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. And any bio of this Scot must make it clear he’s the last thing from the Masterpiece Theatre vision of an English stuffed shirt, because he’s the kind who leaves playful messages on your phone machine—and still earns enjoyable royalties from early sex manuals such as the best-selling How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed!
Now, settle your attention on the Graham Masterton whom Stanley Wiater featured as one of the 27 “Masters of Horror” in Dark Dreamers—the author of Charnel House, Feast, The Manitou, Night Warriors, and Night Plague—the versatile author and anthologist[*] who told Wiater, “I have to be frightened by what I’m doing . . . (to have) a true feeling of fear in me.” And add what Graham said on the phone from Surrey, describing this new story to me: “I think I may be writing this one over and over as the years pass.” It fascinated him; it contains the “true feeling” he had discussed. You’ll have it, too, in the Sweet Gum Motor Court of Henry County, Alabama.
A huge electric storm brewed up as Martin drove out of Tlimbleton, in Henry County, Alabama, and fat warm raindrops began to patter onto the windshield of his rented Pontiac. Over to the east, above the Chattahoochee valley, the sky was so dark that it was purple, and snakes’-tongues of lightning licked the distant hills.
Behind him, to the west, the sky was still clear and serene, and Martin was tempted to U-turn and drive back. But he was expected in Eufaula this evening at six, and he still had a hell of a haul; and he doubted in any case if he could outrun the approaching rainclouds. The wind was rising, and already the bright green sunlit trees were beginning to thrash and dip like panicky women.
He switched on the Pontiac’s radio, and pressed “seek.” Maybe he could find a local weather forecast. But all he could hear was fuzzy voices. One of them sounded just like his ex-wife nagging. Over and over, “you bastard, you predictable bastard.” He pressed “seek” again and picked up “—vorce becomes final today . . .”
“Divorce”—shit! That was all he wanted to hear. If he hadn’t gone to that sales seminar in Atlanta last April . . . if he hadn’t picked up that ridiculous ass-wiggling girl in the hotel bar . . . if Marnie hadn’t flown to Atlanta to surprise him . . . if life wasn’t always so damned grisly and so damned absurdly surprising.
Marnie had always told him that it would only take one act of infidelity to destroy her trust in him; and it had.
She and her lawyers had systematically dismantled his life. She had taken the house, the cars, the paintings, the silver, the savings. She hadn’t taken Ruff, his retriever, but the day after the divorce became final, Ruff had slipped the dog-sitter’s leash and been fatally injured under the wheels of a van.
Martin was now reduced to old-style town-to-town traveling, the Alabama and Louisiana representative of Confederate Insurance, selling packages of cut-price business cover to one fat, sweaty redneck after another. He could sum up the majority of his customers in just a few words: bald, bigoted, with appalling taste in neckties. But he wasn’t complaining. It had been his own choice to travel. He had the experience and the references to find himself a much better job, but (for a while, anyway) he felt like letting the days go by without name or number, and he felt like exploring the South. Days of steamy heat and sassafras; days of rain and bayous and girder bridges; days of small towns melting under dust-beige skies; and deputy sheriffs with mirror-blind eyes.
The rain lashed harder and harder. Martin flicked the windshield wipers to HI, but even when the wipers were flinging themselves from side to side at top speed, they were scarcely able to cope. The evening grew suddenly so dark that Martin felt as if the highway had been overshadowed by the wing of a giant crow. Just then flew down a monstrous crow; as black as a tar barrel . . .
He kept driving, hoping that the storm would ease. But after nearly an hour the rain was just as furious, and lightning was crackling all around him like a plantation of tall electrified trees. He had to drive slower and slower, down to 20 mph, simply because he couldn’t see where he was going. The ditches at the sides of the highway were gorged with sewage-brown water and the water suddenly began to flood across the blacktop. The Pontiac’s air conditioning worked only intermittently and he had to keep wiping the inside of the windshield with his crumpled-up handkerchief. He was terrified that a truck was going to come cannonballing out of the rain and collide with him head-on. Or—almost as bad—that another truck would rear-end him. He had seen that happen only two days ago, on Highway 331 just a few miles north of Opp. A whole family had been sent careening in their Chevy Blazer right off a bridge and down a steep embankment, where they had lain in individual depressions in the lush green weeds, bleeding, broken, screaming for help.
He had woken up in his motel room the same night and he could still hear them screaming.
Lightning crackled again, followed almost at once by a catastrophic rumble of thunder, real heaven-splitting stuff. If it were possible, the rain cascaded down harder and the floodwaters spurted and bellowed against the Pontiac’s floorpan. Martin smeared the windshield with his handkerchief and strained his eyes and prayed for some kind of a turn-off where he could wait for the storm to pass.
Then, through the rain and spray and the misted-up glass of his windshield, he saw a pale illuminated blur. A light. No—a. sign, of some kind. A green neon sign that (as he slowed and approached it) read “Sweet Gum Motor Court.” And, underneath, flickering dully, the word “acancies.”
O Lord I thank Thee for all Thy many favors, and in particular for the Sweet Gum Motor Court in Henry County, Alabama, with its acancies.
Martin turned off the highway and down a sloping driveway that, in this weather, was almost a waterfall. Then ahead of him he saw an L-shaped arrangement of cabins with wooden verandahs and corrugated-iron roofing, and (on one side) an oddly-proportioned clapboard house which at first appeared to be gray but, in the sweeping light of his headlights, turned out to be pale green. There were lights inside the house, and he could see a white-haired man in a red plaid shirt and suspenders, and (O Lord I really do thank Thee) the smell of hamburgs in the air.
He parked as close to the house as he could, then wrenched open the Pontiac’s door and hurried with his coat tugged in a peak over his head to the brightly-lit front verandah. Even though the highway had been flooded and his wipers had struggled to keep his windshield clear, he hadn’t realized fully how torrential this rainstorm was. In the few seconds it took him to cross from his car to the house he was soaked through, and the new light tan Oxfords that he had bought in Dothan were reduced to the consistency of blackened cardboard.
He opened the screen door but the main door was locked, and he jarred his wrist trying to pull it open. He rattled the doorhandle, then knocked with his wedding band on the glass. Yes, he still wore his wedding band. It gave him a ready-made excuse when pink-lipsticked strumpets slid up onto barstools next to him and asked him in those cheap husky accents if he needed a little friendship, sugar.
He didn’t need friendship. He needed hot timeless days, and miniscule communities where it was interesting to watch flies walking up a window, and electric storms like this; the catharsis of being unimportant, and adrift.
The white-haired man in the red plaid shirt came to the door and somehow he was uglier and less welcoming than he had appeared through the rain. He had a face that would have looked better the other way, chinside up, like Old Man Muffaroo. Dull-brown suspicious eyes that reminded Martin of olives left on a lunch counter too long.
“What do you want?” he shouted through the glas
s.
“What do you think I want?” Martin shouted back. “Look at me! I’m soaked! I need a room!”
The white-haired man stared at him without answering, as if Martin had spoken a foreign language. Then a big henna-haired woman in a green dress appeared behind him, and Martin could hear her say, “What the hell’s going on here, Vernon?”
“Fellow wants a room.”
“A room?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Well, for God’s sake, Vernon, if the fellow wants a room, then for God’s sake open up that door and give him a room. You don’t get any damned better, do you? You really don’t.”
She unlocked the door and held it wide so that Martin could step inside. As he passed her he smelled frying hamburgs, sour armpit and Avon scent.
“Hell of a storm,” she said, closing and locking the door behind him. “Come through to the office, I’ll fix you up.”
Martin followed her along a red-lino corridor flanked with damp-stained posters for Martz Airlines’ “Safe Scenic Swift Service” and vacations in Bermuda. In the office there was an untidy desk, a whirring electric fan, and a pegboard with rows of keys hanging on it. There were no keys missing so Martin assumed that he was the only guest. Not surprising, the reception that would-be customers were given by old upside-down-face Vernon.
A ragged-looking brown dog was slumbering on the floor. “Just for the night?” asked the woman, stepping over it.
“That’s right,” Martin told her. “I was supposed to meet somebody in Eufaula at six, but there’s no hope of my getting there now.” As if to reassure him that he had made the right decision by stopping here, the rain rattled noisily against the window, and the dog stirred in its sleep. Dreaming of quail, maybe; or hamburgs.
Vernon was standing just outside the office, scratching the eczema on his elbow. “You’ll find plenty of peace here, mister. You won’t be disturbed.”
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