Masques IV

by J N Williamson

  “Was there a recording of that broadcast?” Martin asked.

  Harry said, “Sure. We recorded everything.”

  “Do you think somebody could be transmitting it again?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve heard it. I’ve heard the episode where she gets murdered. I’ve heard the whole thing . . . even when she says ‘Oh God, he’s cut my stomach open.’”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I heard it. Not just once, but twice.”

  Harry stared at Martin as if he were mad. “That’s totally impossible. For one thing, there was only one recording, and that was my master tape; and my master tape was destroyed in a fire along with all of WMOB’s other tapes, in January, 1942. Insurance arson, if you ask me. But I saw the burned spool myself.

  “For another thing, I jumped up as soon as the guy came into the studio and accidentally switched off the tape recorder. The actual killing was never recorded. If you heard it, my friend—you were hearing ghosts.”

  “Ghosts? I don’t think so. I heard it clear as a bell.”

  “Well . . . you’re not the only one who’s heard stuff from the past. I was reading the other day some guy in Montana picked up his dead mother arguing with his dead father on his car radio whenever it thundered.”

  Martin had been ready to leave, but now he leaned forward and said to Harry, “Whenever it thundered? How?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds far-fetched. But the theory is that the human brain records things it hears as electrical impulses, right? Normally, it keeps them stored. But in certain atmospheric conditions, it discharges those impulses . . . so strongly that they can get picked up by a radio receiver. In this case, the guy’s car radio. But apparently they have to be real close. Seventy or eighty feet away, not much more.” Seventy or eighty feet away. Who had been seventy or eighty feet away from that old Zenith radio when it thundered? Who had been old enough and unhinged enough to have attacked Andrea Lawrence all those years ago in the Dauphin Street Studios? Who wouldn’t have been found in the city because, maybe, he didn’t actually live in the city?

  There was no proof. No proof at all. But apart from the actors and the radio technicians, only the killer would have heard Andrea Lawrence’s last words . . . only the killer would have remembered them. So that one thundery night, nearly forty years later, they would have come crackling out on an old-fashioned radio set. Not a program at all, but a memory.

  It was late in the afternoon and unbearably steamy when Martin drove his mud-splattered Pontiac back to the Sweet Gum Motor Court. There was a strong smell of drying mud and chicken feed in the air. He parked and wearily climbed out.

  He knocked at the screen door. He had to wait a long time before anybody answered. The ragged tan dog sat not far away, and watched him, and panted. Eventually Vernon appeared and unlocked the door.

  “You again,” he said.

  “Is Denise around?”

  “What do you want her for?”

  “To tell you the truth, it’s you I wanted.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Andrea Lawrence. You ever heard of Andrea Lawrence? She played Helen Day, in The Heart of Helen Day ”

  Long silence. Eyes dull as olives behind the reflective glass. Then the key, turning in the lock. “You’d best come on in. Go in the office. I won’t keep you more’n a couple of minutes.”

  The tired-looking redhead took the barrettes out of her hair and shook it loose. On the desk, the remains of her evening meal had attracted the attention of two persistent flies. She picked up the whisky glass and swallowed, and coughed.

  She couldn’t believe there was no tv here. If it hadn’t been such a stormy night, she would have driven further, to someplace decent. But half the roads were flooded out and she was frightened of lightning.

  She switched on the radio. Fuzzy jazz, dance music, some kind of black funeral song. Then two voices in what sounded like a radio play. She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes and listened. If only her husband could see her now.

  “You again.”

  “Is Denise around?”

  “What do you want her for?”

  “To tell you the truth, it’s you I wanted.”

  The woman sipped more whisky. Outside, the thunder banged grumpily, and the rain started to gush down more heavily.

  “I heard something pretty curious on my radio last night.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I heard—hey, what are you doing? What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get away from—aahh! Jesus Christ! Aaaaggggh! Jesus Christ! You’ve cut me! Oh Jesus Christ you’ve cut me open!”

  Muffled knocks. A sound like a chair falling over. An indescribable splattering. Then an awful gasping. “Help me, for Christ’s sake. Help me!”

  “Help you what? Help you get me and Denise put away for murder? Or a nuthouse or something?”

  “Help me, Jesus, it hurts so much!”

  “And didn’t it hurt Denise, to listen to that Helen Day every single week, and how Helen Day got men just by winking her eye, and Denise’s only fiancé left her high and dry for a girl just like that? Same given name, too—Andrea! Don’t you think that hurt?”

  “Help me, Vernon.”

  “Help you nothing. You’re all the same. Leaving Denise for your fancy-women.”

  There was a cry like an owl being dismembered alive by a coyote. Then nothing but white noise, on and on and on.

  The woman was already asleep. The white noise continued through the night, like an endless bus journey along an unfamiliar highway, through thick fog.

  [*] Scare Care, TOR Books, $19.95, ISBN 0-312-93156-5.

  Nothing But the Best

  Brian McNaughton

  With lucid, needle-sharp stories in the 1990 centenary anthology, Lovecraft’s Legacy, as well as that year’s World Fantasy Convention souvenir book (“The Vendren Worm”), Brian McNaughton has begun to realize his potential as a special craftsman of memorable yarns—just as people expected him to do several years back when he was regularly selling to the major men’s magazines. Be on the alert for still more fiction by Brian in upcoming issues of the always-coveted Weirdbook.

  With stops in Maine and Neptune, New Jersey, McNaughton is a devotee of the poet Swinburne, “a wild and roaring boy who suddenly switched off like a lightbulb at the age of about thirty.” He believes that there are “explicit photographs” of Algernon’s affair with a bareback rider “under lock and key in the British Museum.”

  Be that as it may, McNaughton’s bulb shines brightly, emanating something of Ray Russell’s sleek inventiveness and apt choice of words. Yet the wit is all his own.

  “You’re ugly, you’re creepy, you’re the filthiest man I ever knew!” Jessica Sexton cried.

  “Yes.” Ahab Wakefield’s head was meekly bowed to hide the fury in his eyes. “But I’m rich.”

  “And that’s the filthiest thing you ever said!”

  She flung back his gifts. The emerald necklace bit his cheek. The tiger-skin coat she hurled shrouded him momentarily in the ghost of its original owner’s clutch.

  “No, please keep them,” he said, “they’re—”

  “Impossible to explain to my husband.”

  He learned that her laugh could be splendidly scornful. He had possessed only her body, and she had so much more to offer—but it was hopeless.

  “Impossible to explain . . . like so much else.” Having admitted the futility of his love, he allowed his lips to relax into their most comfortable sneer. “How do you propose to explain why you left him? And what you’ve been doing all this while?”

  “Bruce will forgive me. And even if he doesn’t, I can go to any hospital for the criminally insane and find a hundred better men than you’ll ever be. You don’t know . . . anything. Did you really think you could impress me with this?” Her toe, perfect to its pallid lunula, nudged the coat with disdain.

  “You deserve nothing bu
t the best.”

  “Do you know how few of these magnificent creatures are left in the world? To kill one of them for a lousy coat—that disgusts me even more than you do.”

  Ahab sighed, admitting his miscalculation. The greatest burden of his long life, he often thought, was trying to keep up with current fads.

  “But there is only one Jessica.” The pain of that truth drove him to his knees.

  “Very bad.” She spoke with critical detachment. “Sometimes I think you learned how people behave from watching silent movies. What I ever could have seen in you, why I should have left the husband I love so much . . .” She paused, as if realizing that these questions had no sane answers. “This hogwash”—her gesture included ancient volumes on swaybacked shelves, dried herbs and fungi hanging from the ceiling-beams, the uniquely malformed skull on his desk—“it doesn’t really work, does it?”

  He rose deliberately to his commanding height and gazed down on her with less warmth than a corpse from a gibbet. “You will see.”

  Fright was another emotion Jessica had not shown him, and she expressed it fetchingly. As she fled, Ahab vowed to see more.

  He had indulged this folly before, and with the same result. To win a love freely given, he had released Chastity Hopkins, of Portsmouth, N.H., from a similar enchantment in 1652. She had called him a pig-swyving pissabed and scurried off to lodge a complaint of witchcraft. Jessica Sexton had no such recourse. In some small ways, the world had changed for the better.

  “When will I learn?”

  Thester, the malapert creature that nested in the skull, croaked: “Nevermore.”

  Ignoring his familiar, Ahab took a knife from his desk and cut a strip of tiger-skin long enough to bind his cadaverous waist. He had no qualms about ruining the fabulously expensive coat. Cheating fools was his hobby, and he had paid the furrier with illusory cash. That he had not given Jessica an illusory coat proved the depth of his sincerity. It was fitting that the rejected love-token should be his instrument of vengeance.

  “Master!” Thester’s agitated claws rattled the skull. “Master, give her the pox, give her the flux, afflict her with some cagastrical distemper beyond the skill of the most learned surgeons—”

  “Death by dismemberment and ingestion,” Ahab said as he assembled further materials, “is beyond their skill.”

  “Remember what happened in Avignon in 1329?”

  “Avignon? My memory . . .”

  “That time you turned into a wolf to assassinate Pope John XXII. And the gamekeeper who sold you the wolfhide belt neglected to inform you that the animal had died after chewing off its trapped leg. Whereupon you learned—”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Ahab snapped, having remembered.

  “—whereupon you learned that a three-legged wolf is no match for a pack of hounds. You had to spend the Renaissance in bed.” It was true that Ahab would assume the form of the particular beast whose pelt he used. He gave the strip of fur a covert inspection, but it told him nothing. He would have to translate himself to Malaysia to trace the provenance of the hide, and that might take hours. He dismissed Thester’s quibbles.

  “My dear abomination, a three-legged tiger—even one that’s blind and toothless to boot—will be all that’s needed for our loving young couple.”

  “And their dog?”

  He winced. Shape-changing was a young man’s game, and Ahab was no longer the sprightly bicentenarian who had disported himself as a crocodile among the wading courtlings of Nitokris. He had feared dogs ever since the Avignon fiasco, but he had forgotten the Sextons’ pet, a Doberman pinscher who had in its last life commanded—with notably more audacity than brains—an SS panzer division. Unaware of this background, Jessica had christened it Muffin.

  Climbing over the doomed couple’s back fence, Ahab was thankful for Thester’s reminder. Forewarned, he had rendered himself not just invisible, but inaudible and inodorous. Even so the dog sprang from its doze on the patio and paced the backyard, tunelessly growling the dimly recalled Curse-motif from Wagner’s Ring. Ahab would never admit to Thester that he’d spared him an embarrassment, but he resolved to find the little horror an especially roly-poly child soon.

  He stripped to the furry belt, opened a vein unseen, and made the appropriate symbols in blood on the flagstones of the patio. The dog sprinted and snarled at random shadows as Ahab crouched on all fours and spoke the required words.

  Instantly the vigor of a healthy young beast surged through him. The formerly still night echoed with racketing bats and clamorous moths. The neutral smell of the yard was submerged under a canine stench so vivid and frightening that it hurt. It was the memory of Avignon that pained him, of course, potentiated by even the biggest cat’s hatred for its old enemy.

  As the other enchantments were canceled and Ahab stood revealed in all his fearful symmetry, the stupid dog charged. Ahab’s sharper eyes, no doubt, made the puny creature seem like a black and tan locomotive bearing down on him, but he stood his ground and drew back his paw to blast Muffin’s bones to gravel.

  “What in hell was that?” Bruce Sexton gasped.

  “Does it matter?” Jessica tried to draw him down again.

  “I guess—” A second piteous cry froze him in the act of being drawn. He tumbled from bed and ran to switch on the patio lights.

  “My God! Look—no, don’t look, Jess. Muffin’s got hold of something, a . . .”

  “A what?”

  Not believing his eyes, he forced them again toward the patio. “It must’ve been somebody’s pet,” he said. “But what kind of a nut would dye a rabbit with orange and black stripes?”

  Somewhere

  Denise Dumars

  The editor and publisher of her own review journal (Dumars Reviews), Denise Dumars is the author of a published book of poetry, Sheet Lightning (Terata, 1987), a frequent contributor to respected “smaller” publications such as Grue, Eldritch Tales and Space & Time, a library professional in the city of El Segundo, and “an Aquarius, near the cusp of Pisces.” Dumars holds A.A., B.A., and M.A. degrees in English, teaches an advanced poetry workshop in her “spare time,” and resides in Hawthorne, California, with her author husband Todd Mecklem.

  And as it is always the case with the very good ones, all her work speaks—eloquently—for itself.

  The grope and blink of sun versus night

  is all one, really.

  Somewhere it is always midnight

  somewhere it is always dawn

  somewhere there is always someone

  pleading with the gods,

  throwing the bone,

  scourging the back.

  Dogs boil out of the kennel

  lights refuse to stop blinking.

  So much for the Tarot,

  so much for the future,

  so much for the reason to raze

  the hate from each breast.

  Over a field of daisies

  an aeroplane falls down.

  Heads splat amongst the foliage

  in a dewy afternoon,

  and sunflowers turn their heads

  to the momentary streak of silver

  lighting up the sky before the bird descends.

  Local women burn the field days later,

  and the children who have eaten

  of the sunflowers, unbeknownst

  to their mothers, begin

  to grow extra limbs.

  Sitting in the shade

  with black glasses on, I drop

  my withered hand into the hat.

  I draw out two cards, six dice,

  and a bundle of dried wheatstraw.

  I throw the straw and the wind takes it

  and it grows like morning light

  and all over the town great shocks of wheat

  erupt through gardens and garages,

  break the soil and stun like ball lightning.

  Everyone who knows me

  dons black glasses

  and pretends not to see.

/>   Milestone’s Face

  Gary Brandner

  Another horror-hand from the midwest—Kisner, Gorman, Tilton, Rex Miller, Castle and the editor are some others—Gary Brandner is one of the 26 writers Stanley Wiater interviewed for Dark Dreamers, the subtitle for which is this: “Conversations with the Masters of Horror.” That says a lot; so does the way Gary’s first horror novel, The Howling, became the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films’ Best Horror Movie of 1981.

  But instead of focussing on the film and its sequels, then dismissing Martine’s husband the same way Filmdom does most horror novelists, consider: Werewolves have been a staple of horror for eons. Who but this pleasant guy had the imagination to use them so effectively that, King-like, he built a cottage industry out of fangs and hair?

  And what of 30 other books, including Walkers—West Coast Review’s Best Original Paperback of 1980? And his first pro sale in 1970 to EQMM? Brandner told Wiater he’s a “book writer” first, and he clearly meant it. Read Floater, for evidence, or the novella “Damntown.”

  Or Gary Brandner’s seventieth or so short story, up next. Then read Floater!

  Georgie the makeup man applied sooty smudges under the blazing blue eyes of Stuart Milestone. He thumbed ghost-gray under the cheekbones to impart a hollow look to Milestone’s firm, ruddy cheeks. He carefully pencilled lines from the flare of the nostrils to the corners of the determined mouth. Finally Georgie stood back, cocked his head, and studied his work.

  “It’s a real challenge to make you look like a bum, Mr. Milestone.”

  “Homeless person, Georgie. We don’t have bums any more.”

  “Oh, right. It’s still a chore. I mean, even your stubble looks healthy.” Milestone flashed the grin that kept The Big Six News at the top of the local ratings among female viewers. “This will be the last time,”