Masques IV

by J N Williamson

  When at last the sun was down he pulled a hat low on his head, where the hair now grew only in sparse patches from the liver-spotted scalp. He put on his largest pair of Foster Grants, pulled a coat collar up to his ears, and ventured out.

  The bartender in the Horsehoe eyed him coldly. “Jessie? I ain’t sure I know the name. Who’s asking?”

  Milestone pulled a crumpled wad of bills from his pocket and threw them on the bar without looking at the denomination. “Just tell me where she lives. I haven’t got time to waste.”

  The bartender smoothed out the bills one by one and folded them neatly. “Go two blocks to your left, turn right half a block, and you’ll see a boarded up store. Jessie lives upstairs in the back.” Milestone covered the distance in a swift walk, holding himself back to keep from breaking into a run. He took the stairs two at a time, raced down a dim hallway and pulled up short before a door at the far end. He drew a deep breath and knocked on the peeling wooden panel. For a heart-stopping moment he thought Jessie might not be home, then he heard her voice from inside.

  “It’s not locked.”

  He pushed open the door and entered. The room was what he expected—threadbare carpet, mismatched furniture, peeling flowered wallpaper. A huge new television set looked out of place on a backless wooden chair at the foot of the bed. Jessie stepped from behind a stained green curtain that closed off the kitchen alcove. She wore a faded orange blouse and black skirt with many folds.

  She looked at him, saying nothing.

  Deliberately Milestone removed the hat and the dark glasses. He turned down the coat collar. “Do you know who I am?”

  “I know you, Whitey. What do you want here?”

  The words gushed out of him like vomit. “I want my face back. You made me ugly and old. I don’t know how, and it doesn’t matter. Maybe I had it coming. God knows I’m sorry if I hurt you. I’ll make it up to you. Just put my face back the way it was. Please, Jessie!” She rolled her head slowly from side to side. “Can’t be done.”

  “Don’t say that! I’ll pay. Anything you say. I’ve got money. Just tell me how much. Whatever you want to fix my face.”

  “I don’t need your money, Whitey. All I wanted from you was friendship. Now I don’t need that either. I’ve got a friend.”

  Jessie turned and pushed the curtain to one side. Seated at a rickety wooden table was Alan Baird.

  He looked at his watch. “Hi, Stuart. Love to stay and chat, but I’ve got a show to do. See you later, Jessie.”

  The new anchor man kissed her withered cheek and walked out the door. The old anchor man felt his face crumble.

  Julia’s Touch

  David T. Connolly

  An equally praised and criticized custom of Masques anthologies is the inclusion—in each book—of work by writers who are either “underestablished” or new. The idea was borrowed from Frederic Dannay, co-editor of Ellery Queen’s; who was the first to buy one of J.N. Williamson’s early yarns. Fred called it his “First Story” department. I loved him, it, the magazine.

  I met David Connolly at a combined SPWAO/NECON gathering where his easy warmth of personality and love of writing and writers were obvious. He was too modest to ask me to read what he’d written—rare enough feat—but the big guy with the sort of unaggressively earnest manners my mother always hoped I’d develop made me want to read his stuff.

  Born December 1, 1957, married to a “wonderfully supportive” Paula Jean, Connolly didn’t want his work plugged. “My horn’s still too small to go blowing it in public.” He asked me to say he’s a member of Small Press Writers and Artists Organization, which has had a “positive effect on me.” Okay. Still . . . think how few writers of horror attempt to craft it movingly. In this series, I remember Ray Bradbury, Castle, Gary Braunbeck, Stanley Wiater, Maclay, Diane Taylor, Tem, and Ardath Mayhar doing so to rare effect. And Ray Russell’s non-Masques “Xong of Xuxan” made your mean old editor cry.

  David T. Connolly is in excellent company with his debut.

  Julia spent most of the afternoon decorating the small apartment for her husband’s birthday party. She braided crepe streamers and blew up so many brightly-colored balloons that it left her dizzy. She was in the middle of preparing the cheese and cracker plate when she realized she hadn’t picked up Robert’s cake. This being his thirtieth birthday, she wanted everything to be perfect. Then maybe at least for one night Robert would call a halt to the critical self-examination his approaching birthday had triggered.

  Glancing at the clock, Julia saw she had just enough time to get to the bakery and still make it back before Robert arrived. Hurrying, she popped the cheese plate into the refrigerator, wiped her hands and prepared to leave.

  She went to the hall closet for a coat and chose the one with the genuine fake-fur collar. The walk would be short but cold. Though Robert worked hard at his job, he earned little and drove their car to work. Because most of the places Julia shopped were close by, she never really felt inconvenienced.

  On her way out of the apartment Julia couldn’t resist another look over her shoulder at the decorations. Then she checked the deadbolt, walked quietly down the stairway and out onto the crowded sidewalk.

  Julia smiled privately, imagining how surprised Robert was going to be! She knew he’d laugh at her for having gone to all this trouble just for the two of them. But she also knew, deep inside, that Robert would be thrilled. And she was happy to be surprising him; after all, Robert had never forgotten her!

  Of course, this was a lot of trouble to go to just to see a surprised and delighted smile on his face. Nonetheless, Julia knew for a fact her man was worth it.

  Wrapped in thought, she never saw the car. It jumped the curb, its drunken driver passed out at the wheel. Striking Julia from behind, the car shoved her through the thick plate-glass window of the florist’s shop. The clerk called the ambulance. Julia was pronounced dead at the scene.

  Feeling a light tap on his shoulder, Robert turned, surprised to see his shift-foreman standing behind him. Following the man back into the office, Robert was told that he had best sit down. At first the news of Julia’s death had no effect. After all, how could it be true? Julia, the only bright spot in his life—dead? No, it just wasn’t possible. He got back onto his feet and walked out of the office without a word.

  Blindly following routine, stared at by his fellow workers, Robert was shutting down the lathe when the police arrived. They asked him to get into his car and follow theirs. It wasn’t until he was staring down at Julia’s corpse that he truly understood she was gone.

  “Is this your wife?” It was a man in a long white coat.

  “Yes,” Robert answered. The word barely cleared his lips. He felt the word on them, felt it fade away, wanted to take it back. Instead, the tightlipped officers walked Robert back to his car. Slowly then, alone, he drove home.

  Entering the quiet darkness of the apartment, his hand went to the light switch. A choked sob pierced the small apartment’s silence. He was in the middle of a party for one, prepared by the only woman he had ever loved. Prepared by a woman who lay cold on a slab.

  His tear-filled eyes grew redder at the sight of the lovingly draped decorations. Looking from the artfully wound crepe-paper that hung from a bouquet of balloons to the sparkling handmade, “Happy Birthday, Honey”, he wiped at the tears with his calloused hand, stopping when he realized the corners of his mouth had pulled back up into a smile—a smile he knew Julia had felt would be worth all her trouble.

  Then he felt the smile shatter like a mishandled champagne glass.

  He crossed into the kitchen and opened a drawer, withdrew a roll of electrical tape, then a small box of single-edged razor blades. In the living room Robert pulled the album of wedding photos out from underneath the coffee table. Then he took the balloons down from the wall.

  He carried his belongings into the bathroom, closed the door behind him.

  Quietly, Robert eased down the lid on the toilet and sat, arr
anging his personal items around him. Tearing off several short lengths of the black plastic tape, he pressed one onto the skin of each balloon. Finished, he set them aside and opened the photo album at his feet.

  Squinting down through his shifting curtain of tears, Robert inspected the pictures one by one. In the first photo he was kissing Julia, outside the church where they’d married. The picture had been snapped moments after they went outside; you could just make out the small drifts of rice in the creases of his jacket.

  Robert took a blade from the small, red box, peeled off its wrapper.

  His tears fell freely, the heavy drops pattering like soft rain on the close-up of the misty-eyed newlyweds. Robert brushed them away; they were quickly replaced.

  He reached down to choose a balloon, his damp fingers slipping ever so slightly. He made a tiny incision in the short length of tape. When he’d done that, Julia’s captured breath drifted toward his face. Her warm, moist breath slowed his flow of tears, drying them for him as if Julia had never died at all. Very slowly, with infinite care, Robert bled the breath from each bright party balloon—all but one.

  Before opening the last, he opened himself. At the wrists.

  Julia’s Touch 135

  The rain of tears dropping down onto the newlywed faces was overtaken by a crimson flood.

  There was time for the final cut and Julia’s breath playing softly on Robert’s wet and trembling eyelids.

  Savages

  Darrell Schweitzer

  There are tales written for the moment, what’s hot or trendy, and there are tales that have a dream-like quality that makes it seem they have always been with us. One kind of story is not superior to the other, I think; few of us set out to write either kind.

  But certain writers are nearly always primarily intrigued by whatever is newest or appears most currently relevant in their lives, others tend to craft their fiction as if having attained a hovering-above-this-world state which mysteriously detours around the significances of time, and Darrell Schweitzer seems to me to dwell in the latter category as (possibly) an unconscious preference.

  A reviewer who always lets readers know whether he recommends a work or not (and in either instance, why), an editor of the revived Weird Tales, the Pennsylvania writer is the kind of man who confides hilarious anecdotes about the disorderly political shenanigans he perceives in his community and somehow makes it sound a fascinating place to visit. A contributor to the British Fear and to Amazing (most recently March ’91), Darrell also had fine fiction in Tom Monteleone’s Borderlands and Gary Raisor’s Obsessions. Even he believes that this story is something special, so here it is: One that will seem as if you’ve remembered reading it for years, perhaps a classic-in-the-making . . . “Savages.”

  To Oliver, he was always Billy, never Bill or William, much less Mr. Porter, even after the two of them grew up. To Oliver, Billy was perpetually nine years old, crawling down the embankment behind the old Drake house, under the thick tangle of honeysuckle and briar, completely at his ease under the vaulted arches of the forsythias like something used to all-fours.

  “Come on,” Billy would say. “I’ll show you something neat.” And the ritual would begin. Oliver followed him always, breathless with expectation, and sometimes he let his three-years-younger brother Daniel tag along, and maybe Howard Gilmore who lived across the street and down two.

  Billy led the way. He was a natural bush-rat, a burrower, able to slip with ease through the tightest hedges, the one who always found the way for the others through the thorn bushes. Down the embankment they went, where their parents had so often forbidden them to go, along the railroad tracks that ran behind the whole neighborhood, then down again, where the hill was so steep they had to take to the trees and lower themselves into a cool, secret place where a stream emerged from a tunnel beneath the tracks.

  They had to do it just right, touching all these special places, never revealing themselves to the eyes of others, creeping like Wild Indians through the undergrowth along the edge of the St. David’s Golf Course when it would be so much easier just to walk across the grass. If they did it right, if they all ran like startled deer across Lancaster Pike when there were no cars coming and quickly regained the safety of the shrubbery on the other side; if they made their way from there deep into Cabbage Creek Woods with its soapy-smelling skunk cabbages, braving the mud and mosquitoes and stinging nettles that grew by the edge of the stream there; if they did all these things as Billy directed, they would come to a path where the land rose into a gravel heap near the abandoned trackbed of the P&W line and come to Billy’s fort: a kind of cave supported by logs, dug deep under the old rail ties.

  You could never get there without him. No one else could find the way. And, if by chance you did, there would be Billy’s anger to contend with, and he was just too strange, too wild. Even from the beginning, everyone was just a little bit afraid of Billy.

  Oliver would always remember Billy that way, his incongruously tubby form able to squeeze through the tightest opening with natural ease, almost always barefoot and shirtless, smeared with dirt, his hands and feet almost black from the dirt and cinders along the railroad embankment.

  Billy would take the others into his confidence and show them something “really neat,” which might really be neat: a Nazi dagger somebody’s father had brought home from the war, an amazing collection of firecrackers, baseball cards, a golf ball he’d sawed in half with no apparent ill effects, monster magazines, what seemed to be a real revolver, several pet snakes he swore were poisonous and only Billy would touch—

  For long afternoons every summer they’d sit there around a smoldering fire—there always had to be a fire inside the fort; it was part of the magic—and as shadows lengthened and evening came on, Billy would tell them the stories of the Blood Goblin who had been a medicine man, centuries ago, with the disconcerting habit of lifting his head from his shoulders till his spine and his guts dangled in the air. Then he would fly through the night, shrieking, his eyes burning red, his teeth distended into enormous fangs with which to rip out the throats and drink the blood of passers-by.

  He was still here, too, Billy said. His body had been stolen and burned while he was away, so he couldn’t leave. Once in a great while a kid disappeared. You’d hear he’d been kidnapped. The police would search and search but never find him, because the Blood Goblin had found him first.

  Only Billy had seen him and lived to tell about it, because Billy was magic. He was at home there in those woods, clad only in a ragged pair of shorts, so dirty he looked more like an animal than a human. Everyone’s parents went on about how poor Billy was, how neglected, but that was precisely why Oliver, Daniel, and the rest envied, all but worshipped him. Billy didn’t have to wash up or dress right or go home when his mother said he had to. He was free. He lived in the woods like a savage, something all of them aspired to become but knew, deep inside, that they never would.

  Sometimes Billy’s idea of what was “really neat” could be distressing, like the dead cat he insisted on cutting into fine pieces with a long, incredibly sharp knife while Oliver and the others looked on in disgust and fascination—both at the insides of the cat and at the spectacle of Billy flaying it with such obvious relish, muttering all the while as if carrying on some obscure argument with himself. One hand would seize the other and force the knife away, and the blade would weave back and forth in the air in front of all their wide-eyed faces. Then, suddenly it jerked down and Billy stabbed himself in his round stomach. Daniel screamed. Oliver forced Billy’s arms aside and had a look, but it was just a scratch. Blood trickled through the grime.

  But Billy remained oblivious to them all and completed his operation, meticulously saving the cat’s heart, lungs, liver, intestines, and even its penis in plastic jars.

  Oliver watched with a terrible, breathless expectancy he couldn’t even put into words.

  Then Billy yanked the remaining hide off the carcass and held the bare skull
up, his hands slimy with blood.

  “Isn’t that neat?” he said.

  “No!” Oliver said. “It’s horrible . . .”

  “Maybe you’re lying,” Billy said softly. “Just maybe you like it.”

  “No!”

  “Maybe it’s not enough for you. I think you want more. Wouldn’t it be neat to do this to people? Wouldn’t that really be something?”

  What frightened Oliver more than anything else was the realization that deep inside a part of him thought doing it to people would be neat. Somehow, the way Billy said it, or just the fact that Billy and not, say, Howard Gilmore had made such a suggestion overwhelmed all objections, enchanted him, and an inner voice said, Yes, that would be neat, and for just the barest instant he agreed with all his heart and soul before his sanity returned and he recoiled from what he was thinking. But the thought remained, like a stain.

  Nobody said anything more. Daniel went home crying that day. Oliver was silent for a long time.

  Billy was the first one to figure out how to masturbate. He showed the others. He set up a bull’s-eye target on the wall of the fort and he was the only one who could hit it. But he never got any further than that. He never developed any interest in girls.

  The boys were older by then; but that was the odd thing: they were changing, and Billy was not. Oliver read more and more books. He wanted to talk about rocketships and explorers and outer space. Billy preferred dead animals he could take apart. By now the inside of his fort stank like a garbage bin, and skulls and skins and wings decorated the walls.

  “Come and see something neat,” he still said, but the others didn’t always come. When they were with girls they pretended they didn’t know him. The girls held their noses with exaggerated gestures and whined, “Eeew! Gross!” And Billy would scream at them and vanish back into his woods and everyone would laugh.