SOMETHING WAITS

by Bruce Jones

  As he stood listening to the tumbling spray below he suddenly tensed, leaned toward the lip of the bluff and cocked his head, listening. A gull? The wind? Far out over the black rolling waves, he saw movement, then the distinct form of a swimmer, clearly in distress. In between the booming surf he detected a plaintive, terrified cry. A woman’s cry.

  He found a narrow path through the boulders, picked his way down carefully in deepening darkness. Kicking off his shoes as he went, he swept across a short, hard-sand beach and plunged into the foam without hesitation.

  A scholarship swimmer in college, Les drove through the water with measured confidence and practiced strokes, summoning UCLA training and life-saving summers on Martha’s Vineyard. He knifed the small waves neatly, diving under the high ones, maintaining speed and control, one eye on the distant shape floundering against the horizon. Eye contact was the key. The sea was cold, but it was not yet November, he’d stayed in decent shape through the years and the steady, contained exertion warmed him; he could do this. He swam strong and without fear, but every time he topped the next swell he seemed no closer than the last; yet the thrashing arms and tangle of long flowing hair ahead did not appear to be moving under the current, which in any case was against Les with the incoming tide. He glanced behind him once to be certain he was making progress, wasn’t caught in a rip, but the shoreline was indeed receding, the upstairs glow in Cushion’s Victorian growing dimmer. Still, for every dozen yards he gained, the flailing figure seemed to magically draw away a dozen more. A growing dread began to drag at Les’ heart, though his muscles refused to tire. The real horror came from somewhere deep inside his mind, not in thinking he wouldn’t reach the woman in time, but that he might! And the further he was drawn out to sea, the more the terror welled, the dread of what would happen when he finally reached the waving victim. It was of vague, uncertain origins, this feeling--yet very real. Yet unable to abandon some poor soul to the deep, his body continued plowing on, even as his mind urged turning back: swim away, swim away—before it’s too late! Too late and he was met with something too awful to comprehend, some unknown terror just beyond the edge of reason. And all the while the desperate wailing of the drowning woman echoed to him over the hills of foam.

  Then, all at once, Les knew instinctively he was close, would be upon her over the next rise. He stopped swimming abruptly, limbs frozen with fear. He dog-paddled cautiously in one place. The sea carried him lazily to the crest. He looked down the trough, saw the top of a tangled, matted scalp in the lea of the next swell. He was gripped by a near irrepressible urge to backwater, flee. Instead, he rode the wave down solemnly, reached out for the stringy head, pulled the submerged face from the water—

  Les vaulted up in the lumpy garage bed, a scream behind his lips.

  Heart crashing in his chest, he jerked about in all directions…slowly satisfied it was indeed only a dream. His clothes were soaked with sweat. The little room was still, dark as pitch, only the distant crash of surf reached him through the single open window. Les crept from bed, padded to the window, shut and locked it fast.

  * * *

  Next morning he rose early and stumbled down the gravel path to the house. The fog had thinned just enough to reveal the smiling steps, uneven porch.

  Cushion was seated at the kitchen table over scrambled eggs and coffee. Abbie began breaking eggs into a wide black skillet as Les came through the door. Cushion chuckled at the sight of their guest. “Huh! Ain’t the most comfortable bed around, eh?”

  Les sat at the table, found his hands were trembling slightly atop the checkered cloth.

  “Have some coffee, son! Look like you need it! Rats come callin’, did they?”

  Les told him about the dream. The other man listened with interest but had little to comment. Even so both he and Abbie watched Les intently throughout the telling of the nightmare, not once interrupting. Abbie became so transfixed she burnt his eggs. It was at that moment, watching her glittering, unswerving eyes, Les began to have doubts about Cushion’s claim the girl was feeble minded. Those quick eyes radiated intelligence.

  After breakfast, Cushion stretched and belched and suggested they have a look at Les’ car. He ordered Abbie to change the sheets on the garage attic bed. As she bent to gather the plates from the table, back briefly to her husband, she surreptitiously pressed a small piece of folded paper in Les’ palm, at the same time keeping an intense blue eye on Cushion.

  It wasn’t until an hour later, while Cushion’s head was buried under the hood of the import, Les was able to unfold the note quietly:

  HE’S MAD!

  They worked on the car all morning, broke for lunch, then went back at it until late afternoon, when Cushion finally straightened, dripping sweat, shrugged and wiped his brow with a greasy sleeve. “This thing ain’t goin’ nowhere without them replacement parts.” He eyed the dark sky, wincing. “Have to wait till the wind chases this overhang east. Then I’ll drive my truck down to Point Royal, pick you up the replacements.”

  At dinner, Les kept trying as discreetly as possible to catch Abbie’s eye. But she seemed to have grown mysteriously contrite, avoiding confronting him altogether. Cushion, meanwhile, prattled on and on with dirty jokes and sordid stories, putting away a great deal of scotch while he rambled, belching loudly and relieving himself of gas with a Cheshire grin. “Take that, Mister Shell Oil!”

  It wasn’t until he was ready to push from the table and join Cushion on the porch for cigars that Les found the second note tucked discreetly under his dinner plate. Like the first, it was hastily hand scrawled:

  MUST SEE YOU! NOT HIS WIFE!

  He and Cushion retired to the porch, but the thickening fog and chill made conversation brief. Les excused himself and cut across the yard to the garage and the little one-window room. He lay there for hours staring up at the ceiling, half afraid to succumb to sleep for fear of what might lurk in his dreams. He suddenly wanted out of this place, away from this weird couple, this soothing fog. Wanted it very badly.

  Fatigue eventually prevailed. Les closed his eyes…drifted. And with a tenacious, crawling certainty the dream was on him again. Once more he walked the empty shoreline beside a gray, troubled sea. Once more the helpless cries echoed to him over dark, oily waves…and once more he found himself diving obediently into the pounding surf, stroking smoothly toward distant, waving arms. And soon enough plagued by that same indefinable sense of dread and fear. Again he drew inexorably toward the wailing victim--toward the moment he’d know she’d be just over the next swell. Again the wave carried him up, up…again he saw the top of the matted scalp, reached for it. And this time the dream went on. This time when, despite his icy fear, his hand grasped the tangled scalp and pulled, a face emerged from the dark water. Not the pale, exhausted face of a struggling woman, but the decayed flesh, sunken sockets and grinning rictus of a death’s head…a livid, shining skull over which a skein of fish-plucked skin still clung grotesquely.

  Les shrieked, pushing the horror from him. He flowered in terror, turned and plowed back toward shore, chest heaving like a bellows, arms hammering the water. Abruptly his way was barred by a pair of clawed, putrescent hands rising from the wave before him. Les screamed, tried to back-paddle, but the dripping arms reached out, encircled and drew him tight against the mummified face, picket fence teeth. He shrieked, white lips skinned back in terror—gaping mouth immediately flooded with sea water. Les choked, struggled, fought. Then, pulled helplessly against the nightmare face, he slipped beneath the surface, kicking and screaming, water pouring into his lungs, closing greedily over his head…

  He woke wide-eyed under clinging sheets, the surf pounding beneath his window.

  But his attention was immediately arrested by another sound—the high-pitched wail of a girl’s voice from the old Victorian house across the way. Les stumbled from bed, lurched to the little window and peered outward with sleep-matted eyes. A dim light from the Cushion’s second floor window glowed lambent b
ehind a swirl of masking fog. But the sounds of screaming and splashing were clear enough, and the drum-like banging beneath it. Abbie was having her nightly bath.

  * * *

  By morning most of the roiling white mist had lifted. Les came down the path to the big house and found Cushion preparing flapjacks in the messy little kitchen. Abbie was nowhere in sight.

  “Sleep any better, sonny?” Cushion grinned affably.

  “Not much.”

  The other man’s smile died slowly, a cloud passed over the ruddy face. “The dream again?”

  “Afraid so. Worse than ever.”

  Cushion stared at him a long moment, smelled burning milk and turned back to his stove with a shrug. He changed the subject. He’d have to get up to the service station, he told Les, if he wanted his car operational by nightfall. Les confirmed that he did. They ate flapjacks with honey and drank coffee in silence.

  Afterward, Cushion offered Les a ride into town with him. Les begged off, claiming he was still logy from the bad night’s sleep, might take a nap. Cushion reluctantly conceded, changed clothes and was soon clanking down the broken driveway and turning his rusted open bed truck onto the steep coast road. Les stood on the front porch and watched the patched tires and hanging back bumper. As soon as Cushion was out of sight, Les began searching the house for Abbie.

  She was nowhere to be found.

  He searched upstairs and down, checking every casement and corridor until he came to the high vaulted antebellum relic that must have been the master bedroom. The door was locked. He heard nothing inside but knew instinctively Abbie was somewhere behind it. He stood looking at the antique glass knob indecisively for five full minutes before putting his shoulder to the wood and heaving inward. The door gave inward with a rifle crack.

  Abbie was there—gagged and spread-eagle, bound to the posts of the big canopy bed with clothesline. Les rushed to her, tore at gag and ropes hastily and helped her up. She pushed away quickly, leapt from the bed in a banner of yellow hair and began digging through an old bureau drawer across the room. As Les watched, she withdrew a pad and yellow pencil stub, hurried back to him, the pencil flying frantically across the paper. She handed him the pad, big eyes flicking fearfully to the clock atop the dresser. Les sat on the edge of the bed, looked down at the pad.

  NOT HIS WIFE!

  Les handed back the pad, urged her on. Slim fingers flying, Abbie scratched out the whole harrowing tale.

  Abbie was, she claimed, not Cushion’s wife but his daughter. Cushion’s real wife, her mother, had died in a tragic accident twenty years before. Abbie was only six. If Cushion drank to excess now, he was apparently far worse in her youth. Each night he’d rumble into the drive from town, drunk as a lord, swearing and cursing and accusing his shrinking wife of unfaithfulness in his absence. Often cursing turned to slapping, slapping to beating.

  On a particularly violent evening, little Abbie was shut in her room while Cushion chased his terrified wife about the old house with a kitchen knife, knocking her against the walls, kicking her down the long flight of stairs, screaming like a madman over and over: “Whore! Adulteress!”

  After an hour of this, he settled into a stupor at the foot of the stairs with his bottle. His beleaguered wife, battered and bleeding, dragged herself painfully up the stairs with the help of the bannister, crawled to the bedroom and shut herself in the bath. There she lay in a painful heap until strong enough again to draw herself a hot bath, rinse away crusting blood.

  It was while attempting to enter the filling tub the tragedy occurred: she slipped in the smooth lip and struck the hard porcelain side, twisting her spine. Paralyzed and helpless, she called out to her husband for help but got little response from the foot of the staircase. Somehow the washcloth became lodged in the old-fashioned drain and the tub began filling rapidly. Unable to raise herself, Abbie’s mother saw her fate rising quickly around her. Insane with fear, she began shrieking for her husband and flailing at the sides of the tub, beating them like a drum, the hollow booming filling the house.

  Cushion became aroused at last by the sound of his daughter banging frantically at the locked bathroom door. Drunk and weaving, he staggered up the stairs clawing at the rail, stumbling and cursing and falling back again. No matter how much ground he gained, his wife’s painful cries seemed further and further away. When he at last reached the second floor the pleading cries from the bedroom had ceased. Cushion kicked open the bathroom door and staggered to the tub. His wife lay quietly beneath the water’s surface, staring up with wide, sightless eyes. She was dead. It was at that moment Cushion lost his hold on reality.

  I tried to tell him she was dead, Abbie wrote sobbing, but he wouldn’t listen, would hear of it. And finally he made certain I couldn’t tell him anymore…

  Her eyes lifted to Les and she opened her mouth wide…and wider. Les looked down in horror at the truncated root of all that remained of the poor girl’s tongue. A chill traced his spine. Abbie’s blue eyes, filled with tears, pleaded helplessly with him. She scribbled one final line:

  TAKE ME AWAY!

  Before Les could respond, there was the banging thunder of a door crashing open below. Abbie’s eyes jerked to the clock: her face went ashen. She sprang back into bed, gestured anxiously at Les to retire the ropes.

  Footsteps sounded heavily on the big staircase.

  Les wrestled with the lengths of cord, but his hands shook so badly they were all but useless. He managed a sloppy semblance of rearranged cords and barely got the last knot tied when the bedroom door started to open. He jumped to the bathroom, slipped inside, shut the door softly behind him.

  Cushion’s deep basso boomed within the bedroom. “Whore! Been entertaining yer friends while I’m out, have we? Where is the yellow bastard? I’ll open his insides!”

  Abbie’s whimper of terror was barely heard behind the bathroom door.

  Les backed away, eyes locked on the silvery knob, trying not to breathe, certain the thundering of his heart could be heard all the way to the next room. The back of his legs collided with something hard. He whirled about to find the big tub behind him. His mind calcified.

  Cushion’s wife was there…lying a foot beneath decades of hardening scum lacing the water’s surface, her face a hellish mask of decay, long hair a billow of seaweed about two vacuous, lichen-crusted holes that had once been eyes as blue as Abbie’s.

  Les screamed. Not from the sight before him, but from the memory of someone else’s screams, someone’s fevered splashing—Abbie, forced to take her nightly bath…

  The bathroom door exploded inward behind him. Cushion stood there smiling malignantly, a weird light in his mad eyes, a 12 gauge shotgun gripped in his hands. “There’s the whoremonger!”

  Les launched himself at the single window. The gun bucked once. A blinding light heightened the white bathroom tile, accompanied by a ringing boom. Les was flung backward as if thrown. He hit the diseased water hard, throwing a geyser of new blood and old decay. His gaping scream was choked by an ocean of congealed putrescence. Long dead hands flopped up lazily to embrace him.

  Then, pulled helplessly against the nightmare face, he slipped beneath the surface, kicking and screaming, water pouring into his lungs, closing greedily over his head…

  A few readers have informed me that my short stories are—to put it politely—“oversexed.” I’m not particularly concerned. When often accused of the same label, John Updike replied: “Everyone’s interested in sex.” And who’s going to argue with him? But there’s another reason a few of these tales may appear overly titillating (what genius concocted that word!): some of them were written in my relative youth and published in what were referred to back then as “men’s magazines.” I was asked to be sexy. Hey, I was young, and as Marilyn Monroe once modestly confessed: “I needed the money.” At least I was in good company; while I was churning out verbiage for a poor man’s Playboy called Escapade, some kid named Stephen King was simultaneously stomping the vineyards
of the slightly classier Cavalier with his own early fiction. The following yarn, however sexy, has a different genesis altogether, and a different pedigree for that matter. I was approached in 1977 by Zebra Books editor Andrew Offutt to contribute something to a collection of original sword and sorcery tales entitled Swords Against Darkness, Vol. 1. That I was not invited back for Vol. 2 may owe not a little to the fact I hadn’t the least idea what a sword and sorcery story was-- as you’ll soon see. But I had read some Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasy as a kid. So, ever plucky, I plunged blindly ahead with the genre-tangled anomaly below. Maybe the best thing about the whole Swords project was the cover art by legendary Frank Frazetta--that and sharing space with fantasy icons like Poul Anderson and Manly Wade Wellman. I can say with unabashed accuracy that of all my scribbling through the years, this story holds the dubious honor as the one most reprinted. After the Zebra book outing, it appeared in comic book form-- issue number six of the BJA sci-fi title “Alien Worlds”. At the time I was writing all the stories for the comic—four per issue--and simply ran out of steam. Yes, I stole from myself. With Frank Brunner’s illustrative help, the tale turned out rather well in graphic story form, I think, though I’m not sure it’s science fiction. Not long afterwards (probably not long enough) the tale appeared again in a now out-of-print paperback collection of my stories called TWISTED TALES. To some a collector’s item now, the book boasted a cover and several interior illustrations by ole pal Richard Corben. All this was made more confusing because “Twisted Tales” is also the title of another line of BJA comics partner April Campbell and I were packaging for San Diego publisher Pacific Comics. Whew! At any rate (as Robert Bloch’s agent always said) now, at long last, the poor, tattered, homeless story has a final resting place in this tediously long foreward. So you see, kids, if you want to be a really-for-real professional writer, always be ambivalent. But most of all learn to think green—recycle! And maybe you too can endlessly torture a beleaguered reading public with the likes of something as unceasingly ubiquitous as: