He screamed, turned away. For an instant he crouched low beneath the cramped roof of the fort, his back pressing into dirt and roots, naked, a savage, yes, but in his adult body, and he saw the wild boy before him and was filled with horror and disgust. He shoved Billy aside, crawled to the doorway of the fort—
(What do you really want? Be honest. Really.)
(And all he could think of was that time when they were children, when Billy held up the bloody animal skull and said, “Wouldn’t you like to do this to people?” and. for an instant he’d known he did. Then the idea was like a horrible jack-in-the-box he had to shove back inside with enormous effort, but he had done it, and closed the lid. Now the lid had burst right off its hinges, useless, gone.)
The Blood Goblin rose out of the nettles by the stream, eyes glaring, its spine dangling below.
Billy spoke. His voice was deep and harsh. “You will slay her. You will resume your former guise long enough to execute the appointed task, then return and dwell here forever.”
That wasn’t Billy talking. Billy never used words like former guise and execute the appointed task. That was the Blood Goblin, grown eloquent in the long years of searching for rest.
Not Billy.
Billy was a dirty little boy. He didn’t mean any harm.
“Something neat” Billy said solemnly. He put a stone dagger into Oliver’s hand, closing his reluctant fingers over it.
And Oliver began to chant, softly, hardly realizing he was doing it, “Slit her throat. Kill her dead. Drink her blood. Bash her head.”
Billy smiled. He seemed to like that a lot.
“No,” Oliver said aloud, his voice rising in tone, sinking into youth, into childishness, cracking, even as his body changed, as the room was comfortably-sized again, as his bare, hairless legs gleamed in the firelight. “I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t hate her. If only she’d leave me alone.” He was pleading now. “If only we could talk it out like civilized human beings.”
(Civilized? We’re savages, remember?)
Billy was pounding on the dirt with hands and feet. “Slit her throat! Kill her dead! Drink her blood! Bash her head!”
Oliver-within-Oliver, drowning, struggled one last time for the surface, reached up but didn’t make it. So easy to let go. To sink down. It made things so simple.
(I won’t let you do this to me. I won’t.)
Oliver crouched down by the fire, chanting along, “Slit her throat! Kill her dead!”
(You will. You’ll do it yourself, to yourself)
He looked at Billy as if he’d seen him truly for the first time. It was so easy, like letting go, sinking down.
(What makes you think I want to be like you?)
(You already are.)
And the Blood Goblin hovered before the fort’s single opening, and the huge thing among the trees leaned down and whispered terrifying things; and the wild Indians crouched with them in the darkness, describing whom they had tortured and how. The great, bone-faced serpent entered the fort and circled around the two boys, again and again.
Oliver looked into Billy’s eyes and understood fully, and he thought that Billy understood him, and for the first time it was Billy who was afraid.
(No. This isn’t happening. You are a teacher; a scientist, a grown, decent man. No. Billy was a dirty little boy you knew years and years ago. What was that voice? It was so easy to ignore it.)
Oliver looked into Billy’s eyes, and he understood that there could be no two masters of the forest, that there could be no apprentice. It was not like that. The fort was built for one.
He knew what to do now. It was clear. Billy had shown him the way, had been showing him the way all these years, had ultimately seduced him, even as he allowed himself to be seduced.
“It’ll be neat,” Oliver said. “Really, really neat.”
Billy screamed and Oliver opened him up. He methodically peeled Billy apart, tearing out his ribs, his lungs, his heart, dropping them down the hole into the kitchen, on top of his wife’s body (Whose wife?), while the forest birds screamed and the Blood Goblin chanted and the sound of the wind through the trees was a kind of song.
Very carefully, he placed Billy’s skull among the trophies in the collection.
(Try to remember. Gone.)
He crawled out of the fort. The doorway was too small for him. His bare, broad shoulders brushed it on either side.
In the end he stood there above the stream, naked but for his loincloth, conversing with the Blood Goblin whose entrails dripped down over his shoulders and chest.
In the end, he smeared himself with blood like warpaint, and he held up his stone knife and Billy’s stinking hide and shouted a great shout of triumph, of victory. The master of the fort and forest had come home.
(So easy to slide down. Into darkness. He’d always wanted to, ever since he was a child. Now he was just being honest with himself.)
He had to get back to Eileen. To explain. To resolve things once and for all.
He raised his knife and shouted a great shout.
The Collapse of Civilization
Ray Russell
For a recommended reading list at the back of Horror: 100 Best Books, after noting it wasn’t “comprehensive,” editors Stephen Jones and Kim Newman cited five books or stories for 1962 and applauded five more for 1967.
Ray Russell was singled out once in the former year, for The Case Against Satan—and twice in the latter. (For a still-splendid Playboy anthology he edited, and for Unholy Trinity, genuine Gothic horrors reprinted just a few years ago by Maclay & Associates in the comprehensive collection of dark tales, Haunted Castles.)
It’s prideful to remark that the creator of Sardonicus and Incubus has had original stories, now, in all four Masques. It’s also very pleasant, because readers of this series have seen at least a few sides of this cunningly versatile writer; Ray has the facets of a prized jewel. One such was the humor of satire in an hilarious 1988 gem, Dirty Money—a novel that might’ve been written by a vastly sophisticated member of Monty Python—and a slightly different facet was evident in his 1991 article called “Of Human Brundage,” sold to Playboy for what its former editor—Ray—termed “a stunning sum.”
Here you get withering wit centered on a possibly-fictive rock ’n’ roll group that will surely break up, if they exist, after reading “The Collapse of Civilization.” So will you, probably, but in a different way. (I hope.)
The Collapse of Civilization has always been an out-of-sight group—those four topless teeners yelling their guts out and sweating real sweat, mean as life and all for you in your very own digs on your very own holographic video cassette—but they didn’t make it really big-big until last year, that runaway hit of theirs.
The popularity had very little to do with the music, or even with the lyric, which was not what you might call brilliant—
Honey baby sweetie when you hold me tight
When you grabba hold o’ me and treat me right
When you give me all you got
Never mind the speed or pot
It’s like
RED! HOT! NEEDLES!
In my fingers and my toes!
Gloryosky it’s like
RED! HOT! NEEDLES!
In my nipples and my nose!
Leapin’ lizards, it’s like
RED! HOT! NEEDLES!
In my belly and my buns!
Hallelujah, Lord’ it’s
RED! HOT! NEEDLES!
Like a flamin’ pair o’ guns!
Oh I’m tellin’ you, it’s
RED! HOT! NEEDLES!
In my soul and in my brain!
Gotta have those crazy
RED! HOT! NEEDLES!
Though they’re drivin’ me insane!
A long way from genius, but “Red Hot Needles” had been top-of-the-charts for a whole lot of weeks, and some of the smart freaks thought maybe the background sound effects had something to do with it.
The way the rumor h
ad it, it was all Torquemada’s idea.
She’s the head-head of the group, Trish Torquemada, not her square name, of course. The brainblower was sort of a spin-off from their previous hit, a funky little number called “Ball,” which had a background noise of a sister gasping and moaning and carrying on like she was making it. And it wasn’t acting, they say. It was Trish herself, recorded later on a separate track, being balled by some dude she had around for a while. The record was a smash as a single. The guy, they say, had been Joanie’s before Trish trashed him, but you know these show-biz rumors, there’s probably nothing in it. Joanie is the junior member of the group.
Anyway, that’s supposed to be how Trish flashed the idea for “Red Hot Needles.” She wrote the song first, and they recorded it straight, without sound effects. Then, when they were rapping one day and smoking zilchsticks, she popped the wad to the other sisters in the group.
“It’s heavy “ said Joanie, “but how we gone find someone dumb enough to let us stick red hot needles into her?”
“Simple,” said Trish. “There are four of us. We draw straws. Whoever loses . . .”
Joanie lost.
They made a deal with the recording boys, and late one night, they got it all together. Stripped Joanie down to the raw and spread-eagled her to the legs of an up-ended table right there in the studio. The other three—wearing motorman’s gloves—heated big long darning needles in the flame of a blowtorch and started in on Joanie. She got those needles every place the song said and in a few places it didn’t. They recorded for about half an hour, and later they picked out the best screams and laid them on the record, behind the song.
It was a real bummer for Joanie, but she’s all right now, they say. Spent some time in a private hospital, being treated for burns and a bad case of nerves, but she rejoined the group. That’s the story, anyhow.
“Simply Shocking” was their next big score—all those electronic effects and lots of double entendre with “hot seat” and “plug-in-socket” and so on. Then they did “Rack and Ruin.” You must remember it—
Go in’ to rack
And ruin Brea kin’ my back
With screwin’
Makin’ me black
Makin’ me blue
Makin’ me crack
Splittin’ in two
Makin’ me shriek
Makin’ me weak
Makin’ me feeeeeeeeeeeeeel
Your love
Crankin’ the wheeeeeeeeeel
Of love
Goin’ to rip-rip-rack and ruin over you!
There were all sorts of stories about that one. You don’t have to believe them if you don’t want to. I don’t think I do. Anymore than I believe the one about their next song, “Crash.” You know that background noise of screeching brakes and some guy yelling and then that enormous crunch and explosion when the car hits the wall on the last note? They say Trish engineered that one, too, and the stud in the car was the same one she used on the “Ball” record. People love to heap the hype.
Nobody’s seen Trish Torquemada for a while. The rest of the sisters get all vague when you ask about her. Vacation, they say, resting up, and like that. Maybe so. But I wonder.
Collapse’s next release, coming out next week, is called “Witch.”
I heard a demo. The group expects to get a Grammy and a Gold Record and ten million balloons for this one. The sound effects are something else, and the lyric isn’t bad. Joanie wrote it—
Oh she stole my lovin’ guy
So that witch is gotta die
And the way that witches die
Is ablaze!
She’s a traitor and a liar,
See the smoke a-climbin’ higher,
Hear her screamin’ in the fire
As she pays . . .
Animal Husbandry
Bruce Boston
One of the versatile ones is the Californian who made his Masques debut (in III) with his and Robert Frazier’s hauntingly knowing poem, “Return to the Mutant Rain Forest.” Subsequently, it was selected by Ellen Datlow for 1990’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press) and by Karl Wagner for Year’s Best Horror (DAW). That probably wasn’t a huge surprise to a man who has won the Rhysling and SPWAO awards in addition to the reader polls of both Asimov’s and Aboriginal SF, had his short works collected for Ocean View Books, and enjoyed translations into German, Spanish, Polish and Japanese.
Here, the free-lance book designer from Berkeley returns to prose, as he has in Skin Trades, After Magic, and Short Circuits. Orson Scott Card said of the poet Boston, “the images flash” and the work is “piercingly intelligent.” The same may be said of his short fiction.
When Stuart Evers came home with a vasectomy, his wife Marilyn threw what he could only describe as a tantrum. She stood in the center of their spacious living room with its high Victorian ceiling. Her fists were balled, her face red, her body wracked with sobs. Tears seeped from the corners of her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
“I don’t understand!” she screeched in a voice bordering on hysteria. “Why didn’t you ask me first?”
Stuart, sprawled in the leather easy lounger, was glancing through a copy of Forbes and sipping a glass of white zinfandel. He was astonished at his wife’s reaction, but not about to show it. In twelve years of marriage he had hardly heard her raise her voice.
“But we agreed years ago,” he stated without looking up, “that we didn’t want any children.”
“That’s just the point, it was years ago,” Marilyn shouted. He could see from the corner of his eye that she was shaking her fist at him. At the same time she was trembling. “How do you know I haven’t changed my mind?”
Stuart didn’t care for this behavior from his wife. He dropped the magazine and met her accusing stare head on. “Children are dangerous at your age,” he informed her.
“I’m only thirty-five! My mother had William when she was forty-two.”
“And look how he turned out,” Stuart smirked. “An unemployed steeplejack who makes illegal drugs in his bathtub. He hasn’t been coming around here again, has he?”
“Willie’s a writer and a damn good one at that. It’s not his fault if society is too crass to appreciate his talent.”
“Sure, just like you’re a brilliant artist.”
There! He’d said it at last.
Marilyn screamed, she actually screamed. Bending to the coffee table she picked up the cut glass ashtray, the one they’d bought last year in Bimini, and hurled it across the room. Stuart was too surprised to even duck. The ashtray rebounded from the wall, taking a large chunk out of the plaster, and thudded solidly to the carpet. If Marilyn’s aim had been better, the chunk, Stuart realized, would have been out of his skull.
Over the next few days an uncomfortable silence settled upon their lives. Marilyn still performed the domestic duties that Stuart expected of her. The house remained clean. There were fresh shirts in his drawer. When he came home each night he found his dinner in the refrigerator, waiting to be warmed up. Other than that, she treated him like an unwanted boarder. She only spoke to him when it was absolutely necessary, and she spent most of the time locked in her studio.
By the third night of his wife’s retreat, Stuart had to admit that their king-sized bed was beginning to feel other than spacious. His doctor had claimed that he’d be functional within a week, and when the time came, he didn’t want any delays. Stuart put on his robe, went back downstairs, and knocked on the door of the studio. He had already tried pounding, at great length and to no avail.
“Marilee . . . honey . . . why don’t you come out so we can talk?” Silence.
“You were right, dear, I should have asked you first. But I did it for the both of us. I thought it would improve our sex life.”
A muffled laugh.
Stuart had never thought of his wife as a bitch, but he was beginning to get the idea.
“Marilee, you know what I’ve been thinking?”
&n
bsp; A loud thump.
“Maybe we should get ourselves a pet. I’ve always liked animals.”
Silence.
Stuart had exhausted both humility and patience, so he made his way back upstairs. If he’d known what was to follow his suggestion, he would have bitten his tongue on the way.
Stuart arrived home later than usual to find Marilyn’s brother waiting for him in the kitchen. William had helped himself to Stuart’s imported pilsner. He was drinking directly from the bottle, his third. His boots were up on the kitchen table and he was stretched out and balanced, rocking back and forth, so that only two legs of his chair were on the floor. Stuart felt an urge to kick the chair from beneath him.
“You should have never done it, Stu,” William growled at him. “This time you’ve gone too far. A marriage is a sacred trust and you’ve betrayed it. Your body is a temple and you’ve desecrated it.”
The hairiness of the man appalled him. William’s beard disappeared into the collar of his shirt with no visible sign of a neck between. The hair on his head was even longer than the last time Stuart had seen him and now trailed down his back. In truth, everything about William appalled him. His slothfulness, his disregard for accepted fashion or mores, his theatrical pronouncements. Yet most of all, Stuart suddenly realized, it was the way William smelled. Even from across the room, he was positively gamy. Naturally, Stuart thought; his bathtub was always full of some mind-bending and no doubt gene-mangling brew. He knew that before their marriage, Marilyn had sampled more than a few of these concoctions. Reason enough for them not to have children. There was no telling what sort of monstrosity the woman might produce.
“It’s none of your damn business what I do!” Stuart shouted. “Particularly this. And don’t call me Stu.”
“It’s just no way to treat my sister, Stu. Even if you don’t care about her anymore, I do” William swung his legs off the table and his chair clumped to the floor. His brow furrowed as he rose to his full six-three, half a head taller than Stuart, who suddenly found himself backing away. “You know I warned you even before you married her.” The man was threatening him in his own home.
Masques IV Page 18