His voice was so soft, careful not to embarrass me. “If a loan would help, I could arrange it. Not through the company, I mean. You could repay the money out of your salary, a little bit each month. I can understand . . . what it might mean to you.”
Oh, I know, Mother said he was only doing it to take advantage of me. But she was wrong, they were all wrong. There was nothing else, we never even touched each other. Not until that day . . .
The scent of her perfume warned me to look up just as she brushed past my desk, ready to push open his door. Then, suddenly, she froze, staring at me. My face flushed. My braces had just come off a week before and the raw look from the dermabrasion was starting to fade. Now, the way she looked at me, the way her face went—all brittle with hate. Malicious, jealous hate. Her fingers curved into claws, and I flinched away involuntarily.
She stormed into his office. I had never heard such screaming: bitch . . . whore . . . I couldn’t stand it. I ran into the ladies room and hid in one of the stalls, in case she might come in after me.
When I got back, he was waiting by my desk. His face was pale, as if he were in shock. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you—”
I spared him, saying quickly, “I understand. I don’t want to cause you more trouble.”
He nodded but then, suddenly, he caught my hand in his, so tightly it hurt. But I would never have pulled away, not if he’d held me for a thousand years. Our eyes met and the hurt I saw in his made me burst out. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Will you meet me?” It was a whisper so low I almost doubted what I had heard. But I already knew my answer. “Yes.”
Yes. It would always be yes, no matter what we had to go through to be together. It always will.
I sigh as his hand strokes up the length of my thigh. I move closer to him while he drives, fitting my body against his. He turns his head slightly to catch a glimpse of my breasts visible beneath the sheer fabric of my dress. I can hear the intake of his breath, his wanting me.
We stop at a bed-and-breakfast place in the country. A car behind us slows slightly, accelerates. I glance at him to see if he noticed, but his face shows nothing.
Our reservations are under an assumed name. The room is pleasant, decorated in Williamsburg style with landscape prints on the walls, but we ignore the amenities, we ignore everything else to press ourselves against each other. His hands slide up the backs of my thighs, across the silk panties. He pulls them down. His mouth is on mine, it moves to my throat, my breasts. I can feel his hardness against my belly.
We can’t wait. My dress is on the floor, I’m lying on the bed, lifting my hips. He fills me with himself.
It’s over too quickly. I bend over him. My tongue teases his nipples, moves lower. He reaches up to pull me down on top of him. I can hear the sound of a car outside in the driveway. So little time left. I close my eyes, closing out everything else but the sensation of him. With my body I worship. I cry out, shuddering with pleasure almost too much to endure. His hands clutch my hips. He gasps. We look into each other’s eyes with awe.
I fall onto the bed next to him. We lie next to each other, my head on his shoulder. I breathe in the scent of him. I wonder for an instant that I have never found her scent on him, the musk she always wears; he feels my shudder. He pulls me closer to him and we cling to each other. Our eyes are closed. This is the moment when I always think: let it stop here. Let time stop here and leave us together like this forever.
I hear a noise—the creak of the door hinges—then a sound like wood splitting. His body jerks violently in my arms, and warmth hits my face, fragments of him splashing me.
“Bitch!” The voice spits venom. I turn away from the bloody ruin on the pillow next to me to see her standing in the doorway with the gun still in her hand. It has a silencer on the barrel. I want to scream but terror is choking my throat. The insane, hateful satisfaction on her face tells me everything. She’s glad. I realize now that she had driven him to this all along, tormented him with her jealousy until he was desperate enough to risk both of us. But I—I’m the one she really hates. Younger than she is, prettier than she is.
The gun had been for him. Now she closes the door and takes the razor from her purse, the old-fashioned straight razor. This is what she means to use on me.
I panic, I try to rush past her to the door, but the razor is a bright flash slicing open my breast. I try to fend it off but the razor lays open my palms, my forearms. My blood is spattered on her face. It smears the polished surface of the razor like a crimson oil. I’m screaming now, but her laughter is more shrill. Her face is alive with insane hate, her eyes burn with it. She’s been wanting this for a very long time.
I fall back onto the bed, and hot pain slashes across my belly. I scream again, but she pulls my arms away and the razor slices across my throat. Silenced, I still struggle, gasping for breath, inhaling my own blood through my gaping windpipe. It starts to fill my lungs.
She’s still laughing as she starts to cut my face. My face, my breasts. Angry slashes between my legs. A great rip across my scalp, pulling it away, blinding me with my own hair. The scent of her perfume is suffocating. The pain is fading, sensation ebbs with my blood. It will be over soon.
More noise now, a banging on the door, shouts from outside. Too late, too late. Her laughter is breaking down into sobs. Through the bloody veil of my hair I see her put the gun to her own head. Suddenly she falls across the bed, across his legs.
We are all together now. Again.
I’m fading, the cold is spreading through me, but I still can’t let go. Never to see him again. It was worth it. I would go through it again. For him. To be with him one more time.
I lie naked on the bed and brush the wet hair out of my face. I shiver a little and reach for my robe. The warmth from the shower is fading.
My mother’s footsteps pause in the hallway outside my door. Why do you keep doing this to yourself?
I stand up, pulling on my robe. I don’t want to argue with her. She can’t understand.
But to myself, I whisper the answer. “Because I love him.”
Love, Hate, and the
Beautiful Junkyard Sea
Mort Castle
Mort Castle isn’t just one of the meager few writers to appear in all four Masques anthologies plus the editor’s non-fiction book, How to Write Tales of Horror; Fantasy and Science Fiction. He thought up the idea for said how-to—and he wrote a story for a Williamson anthology that was paid for but never published!
And this, by the author of the widely admired novels Cursed Be the Child and The Strangers, is it. At last.
Since writing it, Castle crafted exquisite tales for Twilight Zone (which wanted “Love, Hate” but folded before they could publish it), Nukes (“And of Gideon”), Masques III, Lovecraft’s Legacy and other excellent publications, one of the newest of which was Still Dead. His novella there, “Old Man and The Dead,” is Hemingwayesque and enviably outstanding. He found time to create “Buzz Mason, The Original Intergalactic Hero” for Northstar Productions, to edit Fear, write a column for Afraid, and to option Strangers to O’Gore Productions. Awarding Cursed Be . . . five stars, Rave Reviews cited Mort as “an emergent master” and said the novel “deserves to be acclaimed a classic of its kind.” So did this editor when he put it on his favorites list in his how-to, back when the working title was “Diakka.” Castle never forgot this story. Neither did I. Neither, I believe, will you.
It wasn’t until the third grade I learned I could love. It was in third grade I met Caralynn Pitts.
Before that, seems to me all I did was hate. I had reason. As everyone in Harlinville knew and let me know, I was trash. The Deweys were so low-down you couldn’t get lower if you dug straight to China and kept on going. My daddy was skinny, slit-eyed, and silent except in his drunken, grunt-shouting, crazy fits that set him to beating on my mother or me. Maybe it was the dark and dust of the coal mine—he worked Old Ben Number Three—tha
t got inside him, poisoned him to turn him mean like that.
My mother might have tried to be a good momma, I don’t know, but by the time I was able to think anything about it, she must have just given up. In a day she never said more than ten words to me. Sometimes in a week, maybe she didn’t say ten words to me. At night, she cried an awful lot. I think that’s what I mostly remember about my momma, her crying that way.
So trash, no-account trash, bad as any and worse than most you find in southern Illinois, that’s what I was; and if you’re trash, you start out hating yourself and your folks and hating the God Who made you trash and plans to keep you that way, but soon you get so hate filled, you have to let it out or just bust, and so you get to hating other people. I hated kids who came to school in nice clothes, with a different shirt everyday, the kids who had Bugs Bunny lunchboxes with two sandwiches on bread so white it made me think of hospitals, the kids who lost teeth and got quarters from a tooth fairy, the kids whose daddies never got drunk and always took them on vacations to Starved Rock State Park or ’way faraway, like Disneyland or the Grand Canyon. I hated all the mommas up at the pay laundry every Monday morning, washing the clothes so clean for their families. I hated Mr. Mueller at the Texaco, who always told me, “Take a hike, Bradford Dewey,” or “Boy, jump in a hole and pull it in after you,” when I wanted to watch cars go up on the grease rack, and I hated Mr. Eikenberry, the postmaster. Mr. Eikenberry had that breeze-tingly smell of Old Spice on him. What my daddy smelled like was whiskey and wickedness.
If you hate somebody, you want to hurt them, and I thought of hateful, hurting things happening to all the people I hated. There wasn’t a one in Harlinville I didn’t set my mind on a wish picture for, a hate-hurt picture that left them busted up, bleeding and dead. I imagined a monster big as an Oldsmobile grabbing up Rodney Carlisle—his father owned the hardware store on the square—and ripping off his arms and legs, a snake as long as the Mississippi River swallowing Claire Bobbit, Patty Marsel, Edith Hebb, all the girls who used to tease me, and an invisible vampire ripping the throats out of all the teachers at McKinley School.
You might think maybe that I really did try to hurt people, I mean, use my hands, punch them in the nose or fling stones at them, or hit them on the head with a ball bat or something like that, but that is not so. Never in my whole life have I done that kind of hurt to anyone.
What I did was to find another way to get people. What I did was, I started lying. It’s this way: You tell someone the truth, it means you trust them. It’s like you got something you like them enough to share with them. Doesn’t have to be an important piece of truth, either, it can be a little nothing: “I went to the show last night and that was one fine picture they had,” or “It’s really a pretty day,” or “My cat had kittens,” or anything at all. You tell someone the truth, it’s just about the same as liking them.
So when you lie to a person, it’s because you got no use for them, you hate their guts—and what makes it really so fine is you’re doing it without ever having to flat-out say what you feel
So I lied, lied my head off. I told little lies, like my Uncle Everett sent me five dollars because I was his favorite nephew and I did so have a wonderful birthday gift for Rodney Carlisle but I wasn’t giving it to him because he didn’t ask me to his party; and I told monster whopper lies, some of them super-crazy, like I was just adopted by the Deweys but my real parents were Hollywood movie stars, or once I saw a ghost who had this big red butt like a baboon, or I had to kill this three-hundred-pound wolf with just my bare hands when it attacked me out at the junkyard.
I didn’t really fool anyone with my lies, you know. That wasn’t what I was trying to do. All in all, I’d say Miss Krydell, the third grade teacher, was right when she used to say, “Bradford, you are a hateful little liar.”
But all that changed when Caralynn Pitts came and showed me the beautiful junkyard sea.
You’ve probably had to do it yourself, I bet—stand in front of the whole class and tell who you are and all because you’re the new kid—and you’re supposed to be making friends right off. It was the first week in May, already too hot and too damp, an oily spring like you get in southern Illinois. The new girl up by Miss Krydell’s desk was Caralynn. She had this peepy voice about one squeak lower than Minnie Mouse. Her eyes and hair were the same shade of black, and she was wearing this blue and dark green plaid dress.
Caralynn Pitts didn’t say much except her name and that she lived on Elmscourt Lane, but in a town the size of Harlinville, everyone knew most everything about her a week before she’d even moved in. Her daddy was a doctor and he was going to work at the county hospital and her momma was dead.
Well, Caralynn Pitts wasn’t anything to me, not yet. I went back to drilling a hole in my desktop with my yellow pencil. Some kids do that sort of a thing without even thinking about it, just something to do, but with me, well, I could feel hate running down my arm into the grinding pencil and all the time I was doing that, I was mashing my back teeth together, if you know what I mean.
It was a week later I talked to Caralynn Pitts for the first time.
It was ten o’clock, the big Regulator clock up near the flag ticking off the long, hot and miserable seconds, and that was “arithmetic period,” so, like always, Miss Krydell asked who didn’t do the homework, and then she started right in on me, first off, of course: “Bradford Dewey, do you have the fractions?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Please stand, Bradford, and stop the mumbling. It would help, too, if you were to take the surly look off your face.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Didn’t you do the homework?”
I actually had tried to do it but, when I was working at the kitchen table, my daddy came up and popped me alongside the head for no reason except he felt like it, so I lit out of the house.
Not that I was going to tell Miss Krydell any such thing. “Ma’am, I did so do the homework. I don’t have it, is all.”
“Why is that?” said Miss Krydell.
I felt this good one, a real twisty lie getting bigger, working its way out of me. “What it was, see, I was on the way to school and I had my fractions, and next thing I knew, the scurlets come up all around me. And that’s how I lost my homework.”
“The scurlets,” said Miss Krydell. You just know the kind of face she was making when she said that. “Please tell us about ‘the scurlets.’”
There was a laugh from the first row and someone echoing it a row over, but Miss Krydell gave the classroom her special poison radiation eyes and it got dead quiet real quick.
I said, “Well, the scurlets aren’t all that big. No bigger than puppies. But they are plenty mean. There’s a lot of them around every time it gets to be spring.”
“Oh, is that so?” Miss Krydell said.
“Yes, ma’am. It was running away from the scurlets so they wouldn’t get me that I dropped my homework, and I couldn’t go on back for it, could I? See, the scurlets have pointy tails with a stinger on them, and if they sting you, you swell up and turn blue and you die. And when you’re dead, the scurlets eat you up . . . I was really running with it now. “They start on your face and they bite out your eyes, first thing . . .”
“That will be enough, Bradford.”
“. . . I guess for a scurlet, your eye is kind of like a real tasty grape. It goes ‘pop’ when they bite down on it—”
“Enough.”
I stop right there. Miss Krydell says, “You are a liar, Bradford, and I am sick and tired of your lies. You’ll stay after school and write ‘I promise to tell the truth’ five hundred times.”
I sat down, thinking how much five hundred was, how much I hated Miss Krydell, and how bad my hand was going to feel when I finished writing all that rubbish.
The day went on, and, it was strange, but every time I happened to look around the room, there was Caralynn Pitts looking at me with those black eyes big as the wolfs in “Little Red Riding Ho
od.” I didn’t quite know what to make of that. I did not know if I liked it or not or what.
After school, I wrote and wrote and wrote, each “I promise to tell the truth” sloppier than the one before it. Miss Krydell didn’t take her eyes off me, either, so I couldn’t do it in columns, which is a lot easier way. With my hand feeling like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, Miss Krydell finally let me go.
I cut back of the school through the playground to take the long way home. I heard this shh-click like someone running on the gravel, and then she was calling my name—somehow I knew it was her, right off—so I stopped and turned around.
She ran up to me and, before I could say anything, she said, “You can see things, can’t you?”
Not knowing what to make of that, I said, “Huh?”
“See things,” she says.
I figured Caralynn Pitts had hung around school just to tease me and pick at me the way Claire Bobbit, Patty Marsel, and Edith Hebb always did, and so I answered kind of nasty, “Sure can.” I pointed over at the monkey bars. “You go hang by your knees over there and I can see your underpants. What do you think about that?” Caralynn said, “You can see things other people don’t, can’t you, Bradford? Like the scurlets.”
Then Caralynn started talking real quiet, like she was in church or something. “Bradford, I can see things, all kinds of things, too. I can see tiny people living under sunflowers and I can see giants jumping from cloud to cloud and bugs that fly in moonlight and spell out your name on their wings and once I saw a stone in the sunshine and it was trying to turn itself into apple jelly!”
I said, “What are you talking about?”
“Both of us, we can see things, so that means we ought to be friends.”
I said, “No sense to what you’re talking, Caralynn. I can’t see anything much, nothing like what you’re saying, and if you can, then you sound crazy.”
Masques IV Page 24