Masques IV

by J N Williamson

  “Did you ever sit Valerie down and demand to know what was making her imagine she is contented; fulfilled? Did you confront her?”

  “In a way,” he replied vaguely. “I asked if I was the last to know of her damnable ecstasy. It seems Val admitted it to two friends. One of them got quite angry, I understand. The second believed Valerie was just making it up.”

  “That’s not like Val,” I mused. “I doubt she’s ever imagined a thing.”

  “Well, I counted on that, of course.” Something in Mel’s tone informed me that he hadn’t said it all, that he was getting to it at last. “Before telling me, she went to a doctor. I gather he gave her a complete examination, asked many of the questions we’ve asked, but he confessed it was beyond his expertise and sent her home. I spoke to him on the phone. Good health is over his head, that’s the size of it.”

  “He’s a doctor,” I murmured, relieved to hear Valerie’s condition did not appear to be contagious. “Of course it is.”

  Laughter from the ballroom where the convention awards were being presented trickled to my ears when the door opened briefly and one of the losers fled to the rest room. When I next looked at Mel, he summoned his courage and finally started to explain the reason for his wife Valerie’s singular condition of happiness.

  “I did not say,” he began, “that Val did not accompany me to this city. You just assumed it. She’s here.”

  “Where?” I turned my gaze in every direction. “In the hotel?”

  “No, in this metropolis of commercial sin,” he said. “In its suburbs, to be more precise. At another, newer, more sumptuous hotel.”

  A gleam of insight became an icicle at the back of my head. Dimly, I recalled hearing that another writers’ convention was going on here at the same time.

  Seized by panic, I leapt to my feet. “Where in heaven’s name is Carol?” I checked my watch once more. “Mel, I’m sorry. But if we don’t get to the airport by 3:40—”

  “I know,” said my fellow writer with a meaningful nod. “Yet if you catch that plane, you will be flying home . . . alone.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked it while my heart thundered in my chest.

  “You’ve been deep in your next novel or you might have seen it for yourself.” Mel spoke with infinite gentleness, and clear regret. “Your wife, too, is supremely happy.” He blinked his eyes shut, snapped them open. “She is with Valerie this minute. In a way, she has been with Valerie for weeks now.”

  I could no longer stand. I toppled back into my lobby chair, gaping at him.

  “Carol and Valerie are collaborators,” Mel continued remorselessly, getting it all said. “No; don’t think of Casablanca or other theaters of war. Think of the frilly, very feminine dress Carol was wearing when you arose this morning.”

  I nodded, but my mind was a blank. It contained no memory of my wife’s apparel. For the fraction of an instant, it contained no recollection of Carol’s face. “Collaborators?” I said feebly.

  “Both of us should have seen the signs,” Mel admitted. “The sudden preference for large quantities of time alone. Few complaints when we were late for meals. Happiness predicated upon absolutely nothing real. Their eyes raised, fixed upon sights and scenes only they could see.”

  “They are writers?” I cried, and I suppose my mouth fell open. “Our wives?”

  “Unreasoning tolerance of one’s surroundings, that’s the first clue. Smirking. Joy which surpasseth understanding when nothing whatever has improved.” Mel was relentless. He gripped my biceps as if to prevent me from hurting myself. “No poorly-concealed anxiety when the mortgage goes unpaid. No threat to leave unless we abandon our plans to attend the convention—instead, real interest in being here . . . where each woman keeps her little secret and mysteriously melts, seemingly alone, into the big city.”

  “They’ve sold their book?”

  “Far worse,” Mel hissed, bracing my arms to keep me from falling from the chair—“they were nominated for a major award!”

  “Oh, dear God,” I gasped, weeping briefly against my friend’s shoulder. Then I stared up at Mel. “But, how? They cannot have put much time into it. My meals, my clean clothes, have been done on time. Carol hasn’t been a moment late typing my pages.” An idea occurred to me. “Now I think of it, she has had a faraway look of late. She did have her hair done before we flew here. Rather girlishly, as I recall, but there were only going to be other writers of horror here, and I—”

  Mel gave me a solemn nod and assisted me so that I could rest my head back against the chair. Quickly, he lit two cigarettes, and I took the second one between shaking fingers. He went on sadly nodding.

  Valerie’s condition of absolute ecstasy; the novel finished fast, and already nominated for an award. Carol’s frilly costume, her girlish hair style. Valerie, untouched and unmoved by sex with her husband. Carol, leaving me alone in the lobby . . . keeping to herself . . . wandering off to another hotel with her collaborator to be feted in the most romantic of ways.

  “It’s a romance novel the two of them wrote,” I gasped into my friend’s persistent nodding. “They’re—romance writers!”

  Only Mel’s already-tested, steady gaze kept me from going over the deep end.

  “I’ve had time to get used to it,” he said softly after gesturing at me to stop using such words at an audible level. “Not that I have; not that I ever can. I knew no other way to break the news to you than face to face. But I have thought of two ameliorative facts that might hearten you and ease the blow.”

  I mumbled, “Go ahead. But they’ll do no good.”

  “My Valerie,” Mel said in a whisper, “doesn’t mind having intercourse now. She—doesn’t notice it, as I remarked.”

  I looked hopefully at him from between half-hooded lids. “She did tell you it was ‘fine’?”

  “She did,” he said. “Off in her own little world, it seems. And the other fact . . .”

  “Yes?” I prodded him.

  “The demand for those so-called romantic novels turns out to be virtually insatiable.” Mel’s eyes seemed to be in bold face. “Carol and Valerie can knock one out in less time that it takes a publisher to accept one of our contracted novels!” His lifted hand made certain no lip-readers detected what he was whispering. “Our wives can sell one of those babies every couple of months for up to ten grand each. Ten grand”

  “Several books a year,” I asked, “and they’re splitting the take?”

  “Val told me,” Mel said, “fifty-fifty.”

  “Upfront, right?” I said, double-checking. “On acceptance?” Mel was nodding again. “They’re something like dot-to-dot books, or fill-in-the-missing-word. It’s Follow the Magic Formula time, said Valerie.” Mel had a look to him then that was the first living demonstration of the clichéd “dancing eyes” that I had ever seen. “Fill in the words just so, and the check follows like day the night. The girls will have a feeling of accomplishment over this, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, and found I was smiling. Laughing, really. In waves that kept coming up to the moment I saw Carol and Valerie hurrying into the lobby.

  “Why are you laughing?” Mel demanded under his breath. I noticed our wives were also trying to subdue a mood of hilarity.

  “Because it just dawned on me that they’ve done a collaboration,” I explained, holding it down.

  “Go on,” he said—“but hurry!” Carol and Val were drawing nearer. “Well, the author’s byline on romance novels is always sweetly feminine or borrows a man’s name such as ‘Alex’ or something, and is so pretentious that no one in the real world could possibly believe that it was anything but a pseudonym.”

  The smile was restored to Mel’s face. “So there’s no chance in the world they they would take either of our names and ruin them!”

  “Right,” I hissed back at my friend, slapping his knee. “Kuntzedale and McWilton are safely preserved in horror!”

  We were on our feet to make it a foursome a
gain, our wives’ wearing the most apologetic of expressions, and I saw clearly that my term “girlish” for Carol’s new hair style might well have been far too hasty.

  My Private Memoirs of the

  Hoffer Stigmata Pandemic

  Dan Simmons

  Just back from Transylvania—“I am not making this up,” as Dave Barry might express it—Dan Simmons went rapidly to work on his story for Masques IV “because it stayed on my mind while I was out of the country.”

  A lot of things have been on this thoughtful and original writer’s mind since his prize-winning first story appeared in Twilight Zone in 1981. That was apparent when his first novel, Song of Kali, became one of the most popular choices for a World Fantasy Award ever. I heard about it from several of the genre’s leading lights before I’d found a chance to read it and, for once, the seeming hype was absolutely well-earned praise; Kali made me a Dan Simmons fan when I’d read only half of it.

  That happened a lot in 1985.

  Hyperion (demonstrating the writer’s versatility) reaped a Hugo for the graduate of Indiana’s Wabash College and St. Louis’ Washington University. In a return to horror, all Dan did was win the Bram Stoker Award from Horror Writers of America for Carrion Comfort. Along the line, his story in the third Masques, “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites,” was selected for the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and then reprinted in Simmons’ magnificent story collection, Prayers to Broken Stones. Right now I am halfway through reading his 1991 novel, Summer of Night, and, with Stephen King—who says so on the back of the dust jacket—“I am in awe . . .”

  In Dan’s newest short story, “My Private Memoirs of the Hoffer Stigmata Pandemic,” we have before us a futuristic satire at once perspicacious and epigrammatic, comedic and cautionary and painfully sad. In its nearly bitter and sardonic mood, it reminds us that we are all contaminated by society’s opportunities and temptations and, in the process, Dan quite probably creates a new language with which to examine ourselves with greater, cleaner conscientiousness.

  That’s quite a lot for a short story to do, but it’s not entirely unexpected. Dan Simmons wrote it.

  My Dearest Son—

  The fact that you will never read this does not matter. Peter, my son, I think it is time I explained the events of thirty years ago to you. I feel a great urge to do this, even though there is much I do not understand—much that no one understands—and the time before the Change has long since become vague and dream-like for most of us. Still, I think your mother and I owe you an explanation, and I shall do my best to provide one.

  I was watching television when the Change came. I would guess that a majority of Americans were in front of their TVs that evening. As luck would have it, I was tuned to the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather; and because we lived in the Eastern time zone then, the news was live.

  Now some think that because the Change began first in our hemisphere, that it was the result of the Earth passing through some belt of cosmic radiation. Other “experts” suggest that it was a microvirus that came filtering down through the atmosphere that day and just spread like algae in a stagnant pond. The religionists—back then when there were religionists—used to talk about God’s judgment beginning with America because it was the Sodom and Gomorrah of its day. But the truth is, no one knew then where the hell the Change came from, or what caused it, or why it began in the Western Hemisphere first, and the truth is that no one knows now.

  And we don’t really give a damn, to tell you the truth, Peter.

  It came, and I was watching the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather when it came. Your mother was cooking dinner, You were in the crib that we kept in the dining room. Dan Rather was on the screen talking about Palestinians when suddenly he got a startled expression on his face sort of like that time a few years earlier when protesters got in the studio and started screwing around while he was on the air, only this time he was alone.

  What was happening was that Dan’s face was melting. Well, not melting exactly, but flowing, shifting, sort of running downhill like it had been turned into wax and held over a hot stove.

  For a minute I thought it was the TV or the damn cable company again and I was halfway to the phone to give the cable people a piece of my mind when I saw that Dan Rather had stopped talking and was grabbing his face as it flowed and shifted and reformed like silly putty, so I put the phone down and sat back in my chair and yelled “Myra, come in here!”

  I had to shout again but finally your mother came in, wiping her hands on a dish towel and complaining that dinner would never be done if I kept yelling at her and . . . she stopped in mid-sentence. “What’s happening to Dan?” she said then.

  “I dunno,” I said. “Some sort of joke, maybe.”

  It didn’t look like a joke. It looked awful. Dan’s aging-but-still-handsome face had quit running like melted wax but was twitching and reforming into something else. The muscles and bones under the skin of his face were moving around like rats under a tarp. His left eye seemed to be . . . well, migrating . . . moving across his face like a chunk of white chicken floating in a bowl of flesh-colored soup.

  There were shouts from off-camera, the picture blurred and bounced, then cut away to the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather logo, but a few seconds later we were back live to the shot of Dan and the news desk, as if someone in the control room or whatever you call that place where the director works had decided that this is news and to hell with it.

  Dan had gotten up and was stumbling around then, his hands still holding his face, obviously peering in monitors as if they were mirrors. Whatever had happened, I could see that the silly-putty part was over. Nothing was moving under those splayed fingers any more. Dan was making sort of choking sounds, although he’d ripped his microphone thingee out so the sounds were distant and echoey. Then Dan dropped his hands.

  “Jesus Christ,” said your mother. She never cursed, never took the Lord’s name in vain. “Jesus H. Christ,” she said a second time.

  Dan Rather’s face had turned into something out of one of those Tales from the Crypt shows we used to avoid on HBO. But not really like that, because no matter how good make-up is, you can always tell that it’s make-up. Just like you could tell that this was real.

  Dan Rather’s face had Changed. His forehead had sort of collapsed so his combed mop of graying hair—we’d noticed he’d just gotten a haircut that week—was down about where the bridge of his nose had been two minutes before. He didn’t have a nose any more, just an open-holed scoop of a snout—a sort of tapering, anteater-like proboscis that sloped down below his jaw and ended in a pulsing pink membrane that looked like you imagine your eardrum might look. If it was infected. And every time it pulsed, you could see right into Dan’s face—I don’t mean into his eyes or anything, I mean inside his face—all the green, mucusy things in there, and bones and flesh from the inside and other things, glistening things.

  Dan’s left eye had stopped migrating about where his left cheek-bone used to be. That eye seemed much larger now and was bright yellow. His other eye was fine and looked familiar, but above it and below it, the red wattles began growing. These wattles hung down from what used to be his cheek and what had once been his brow and they seemed to congregate along that scaly, bony ridge that had grown out of his right cheek like the whatchamacallits on the back of a stegosaurus.

  And Dan’s teeth. Well, we soon knew what everything meant—the hypocrisy proboscis, the power-abuser scales on the cheek, the Ambition teeth curling in and out of the skin around the flesh-sutured mouth like that—but you have to realize that this was the first time that we’d seen the Change and we didn’t have any idea that the stigmata had something to do with a person’s IQ or temperament or character.

  Dan Rather tried to scream then, the Ambition teeth cut through cheek muscle, and your mother and I screamed for him. Then the director did cut away—to a Preparation H commercial—and your mother said, “How about the other channels?”

 
“No,” I managed to say, “I’m sure it’s just Dan.” But I clicked over to ABC and there was Peter Jennings pulling at what looked like a pink, half-eviscerated squid that had attached itself to his face. It took us almost a minute of slack-jawed staring to realize that this was his face.

  Tom Brokaw had been the least affected, but he’d clapped his hands over the power-abuser scales erupting from his cheek, jaw, and neck and run from the set. We saw it later on tape. But right then, all we saw was the empty NBC set and all we heard was a sound like a coyote gargling rocks. We found out later that this was John Chancellor screaming when the mucus began erupting from his pores.

  Finally I clicked off the TV, too shocked to keep watching. Besides, it was all commercials by then. So I turned to your mother to say something, but the Change had started on her by then.

  I pointed and tried to say something, but my mouth was too dry and it felt like it was full of jagged potato chips or something. Your mother pointed at me and screamed, the sound seeming filtered coming as it did through the rows of baleen that had replaced her teeth and made her face look something like the grill of a ’48 Buick. The rest of her face was still flowing and dripping and clumping.

  I felt my own face twitch. My hands went up to my cheeks, but the cheeks were no longer there. Something else was: something that felt like a cluster of fleshy, pulsing grapes. Something had grown out of my forehead enough to block the vision in my left eye.

  Your mother and I looked at each other again, pointed again, screamed in unison, and ran for the bathroom mirror.

  I should say right up front, Peter, that you were fine. When we finally could think again, we went into the dining room and peered down into the crib with some trepidation, but you were the same healthy, handsome ten-month-old who had been there half an hour before.