The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 3: Dialing the Wind (Neccon Classic Horror)

by Charles L. Grant

  Automatic; she had put herself on automatic the moment the first police car arrived, and now, with Rowan hovering uncertainly at the front door, she nodded, and smiled, and didn’t ask why he hadn’t called, didn’t say a word at his confusion, his fear, at why he only nodded back and turned around.

  She shut the door.

  Stood in the dark.

  Looked down the hall toward the kitchen when the telephone rang. She knew it would be Adelle, offering love and comfort, and she knew she didn’t want it.

  Through it all, however many hours of it there had been and she didn’t want to know, she let part of her mind deal with those who needed answers to questions they didn’t know how to ask, while the rest of her thought about Stacey, and the preacher, and the laying on of hands.

  Now she thought of Harry.

  Now she thought of living.

  Now she walked into the kitchen and turned the radio on.

  It’s dumb, she thought; voices in the air don’t bring back the dead, don’t make people stay just because other people want them, don’t repair shattered hearts just because lovers want their loving to go on and on and on, the way it is in the movies.

  She lifted the hand that had taken the first shock.

  It hadn’t hurt. It should have.

  It had killed Stacey. It shouldn’t have.

  A slow smile then, slow and knowing.

  The difference then between true love and truly loving — the first is an affliction on the young by the young, and the second is the way love really was, was really meant.

  Stacey loved, but she was selfish.

  Caroline was loving and only wanted Harry in her arms, his health returned, his smile, the way his eyes narrowed when he considered how to make love to her tonight, the way his hands slipped into his pockets when he was angry with others and too polite to show it, the way his chin tucked toward his chest when he was getting ready to tickle.

  Stacey couldn’t know any of that about her Nick. Stacey was dead.

  And all the other young lovers who only believed in their own loneliness’, not their love.

  It’s dumb, she thought; you’re a grown woman who knows that voices in the air don’t kill, don’t maim, don’t suck the life from a woman and . . . give it elsewhere? Hoard it? Feed on it? Bless and keep it?

  Harry is dead.

  “Yes,” she said, in the dark, in her home.

  And through the back door she heard the mandolin playing, the fiddle, the dulcimer, the guitar, the gentle quartet that told her it was fine, all right, not to worry, just lay on your hands and feel the power.

  “No,” she said, in the dark, all alone.

  The telephone rang.

  She closed her eyes and saw the dream.

  And she spent the rest of the night then, one hand on the radio, the other dialing for the wind, weeping, and laughing, and feeling the power bring her husband back home, while the preacher said heal and the mandolin said love and the hair on her head turned white and trembled, and feathered to the floor.

  Part II: The Sweetest Kiss

  The wind crept in behind Saturday’s new sun, a breeze that at first did little more than ruffle leaves; but as it slipped down Pointer Hill and crossed the farmland valley, it exploded, rearing over the village, shredding, the night’s clouds, trampling nests and flowers, bending trees to the point of snapping, and snapping the flagpole in front of the town hall. Wires hummed and clotheslines stiffened; lampposts vibrated and window glass turned brittle; an automobile turning onto Mainland Road was caught in a broadside that slammed it close to a ditch.

  And when the explosion was over, the wind remained, weaker now and weakening.

  It slapped a heavy branch against the bedroom window of a house on Thorn Road — the sound of a whip, the scrape of glass against rough glass — and left a leaf behind, caught on the upper pane. A lawn chair toppled on the back porch and was pushed against the wall; a hillock of mown grass in the front yard stripped itself from the top like foam off a wave, spilling in the gutter, the dried browning blades scattering over the tarmac; a pink rubber ball was chased down the driveway and into the street where a passing automobile crushed it without a sound and passed on.

  A draft slid under a partially open sash and rattled the shower curtain on its rod, ruffled a bath towel, slipped under a tissue and nudged it toward the sink.

  Someone groaned, a high complaining voice, and settled back to sleep.

  Dust in the basement rose in bending streams from a polished hardwood floor and twisted into a cloud that tore itself apart against the paneled walls, the tables, the television, the pool table where a red billiard ball trembled for a moment, shifted, and settled.

  And in the kitchen Bruce leaned against the sink, coffee cup in hand, and watched the forsythia outside the sink window take the dying wind in stride, like a spindly green plant at the bottom of the sea, dancing with the current. The shrub was tall enough to prevent him from seeing the house next door, which was, at the moment, all right with him. All he wanted, for now, was the house in silence.

  All he wanted was some place before the world came at him again.

  He turned then, slowly, as if slowly sighing, and leaned back, setting the cup on the counter and shoving his hands in his jeans pockets.

  The room, like all the rooms in the fifteen-year-old Tudor, was large, all wood tones and country-style, an island counter in the tiled floor’s center overhung with a copper hood to which copper pots and pans, knives and colanders were fixed through the holes in their handles. A smile. He remembered Betsy, at seven, climbing up there to reach a skillet, the weight of it such a surprise that she was knocked to the floor. More surprised than hurt. Shrieking. Bringing parents and sister in expecting to find a murder.

  “Daddy,” she had wailed, “it jumped off and hit me!”

  The ghost of the scene was instantly replaced by another nearly as strong: Lisa when she was twelve, leaning over a huge wooden bowl overstuffed with salad, elbows jutted at determined right angles as she tried desperately to toss it without littering counter or floor, and failing so miserably that she added tears to the dressing.

  “Daddy,” she had sobbed, “why doesn’t it stay!” He shook his head in fond reminiscence and after a long moment walked to the back door, opened it, and strode out onto the porch. He righted the lawn chair, watched it wobble, and folded it and lay it back down. The wind was still strong though the sky was bright and clear, and he slapped at a fall of brown hair that tried to stab at his eyes. Behind him he heard the utensils rattling on the hood as the wind took the house, but he didn’t close the door.

  The yard was nearly half an acre deep, studded with trees he’d refused to cut down, a long garden on the right where Cora tended her vegetables the same careful way she tended her house and daughters. Imagined indentations where swings and slides used to be before they had been abandoned, and rusted, and finally dismantled and carted away. A hedge along the back grown high and thick to keep Mrs. Yorr from sending her dogs over to yellow the grass.

  The wind tore a leaf from the maple in the back corner and whipped it to the ground.

  He shivered, thinking the temperatures odd for late August, and stepped gratefully out into the sunlight, and frowned when he realized how really warm it was. Or would have been, without the wind.

  A chill tramped his spine, someone walking over my grave, and he decided that catching a summer cold now would not be the brightest of ideas, not when too much was going on, too many things changing; it would be all Cora needed to start her litany again.

  He turned then to head back inside and make himself a proper breakfast.

  The wind shifted to a slow sigh.

  And he heard the music.

  And someone tapped lightly on a window, and he looked up, squinting, finally scowling and shading his eyes and seeing a face there, in a gap between white curtains. A step back and a frown, a tilt of his head.

  My god, Nancy?

  He s
hivered again, without the wind, and turned his head slightly to concentrate on the music.

  A fiddle calling over the voice of the wind and slower, not quite the beginning of a ballad, not quite a dance; a bow drawing memories, drawing sighs, drawing blood, as a dark guitar crept beneath it and a mandolin kept in shadow and a dulcimer added songbirds that huddled in the trees and whispered promises of sunlight, promises of night until the fiddle began insisting and the music overtook the wind and the howling and the song made him step back, scowling now, ignoring the tapping, glaring as though he could see straight through his house to the other side of Thorn Road.

  It was Tallman Evers. He knew it. When first he heard the music, he had asked around the neighborhood and was told of the man and his three musician friends, who talked with their songs and didn’t really bother anyone, and besides, they’d once been famous, or so a few people recalled, and it was something of an honor to have them play in Oxrun Station.

  Bruce didn’t care.

  He didn’t like the instrument, he didn’t like the tune, and as he looked back to the window, the wind stopped, and the fiddle died with it.

  And the pale face in sunlight wasn’t Nancy, after all.

  “Good lord,” Cora said, five minutes later in the kitchen and not really scolding, “I almost put my hand through the glass. Were you dreaming or what?”

  “Sorry,” he said, absently kissing the offered sallow cheek. “As soon as you showed your face, that damned music started up.” He pointed vaguely toward the front of the house.

  She stopped squeezing the orange she held in her left hand. “Music?”

  “Yeah, you know, that Evers guy across the street.” She nodded automatically. “Oh.”

  “I tell you,” he said, taking his seat at the table that sat between work island and door, “I honest to god don’t know what people around here see in him. If you want music, you turn on the stereo, right? What the hell does anyone want with a stupid concert? In the morning, for god’s sake. On a weekend, for crying out — ”

  “Bruce, don’t start.”

  He quieted immediately. He’d heard it himself — a temper daring him to lose it. It was happening too frequently these days, more since the summer began and he caught himself counting the days until the season was over.

  A gust scraped the forsythia against the pane, and he wondered why he’d mistaken his wife, just for that moment, for Nancy, whose last name suddenly, curiously, hid itself from him. He scratched the side of his nose. Barter? Nancy Barter? No. His finger dropped to the small mole on his chin. Painter. That was it — Nancy Painter. Nuts. No.

  Boy, he thought, but wasn’t concerned. It had been over twenty years. He couldn’t even see her face.

  The shrub settled.

  Cora finished making the juice, rinsed off her hands, dried them on a towel, pulled her quilted blue robe around her and hurried to the doorway where she called to the girls to hurry up, time’s wasting, she wasn’t running a cafeteria here and if they wanted to eat they’d better get downstairs before their father ate it all.

  He knew every word; he’d heard them all for almost eighteen years.

  “You look nice,” he said when she took the seat opposite him.

  She smiled.

  She looked, he thought, awful. Her face had grown too thin, her neck too long, her shoulders too bony, her hands too scrawny. Her hair, once waist-length and raven-winged, was clipped short and feathered and made her skin seem more white because she’d given up on makeup as something she didn’t need just because she was a woman.

  When the lapels of the robe fell open, he could see the laddered surface of her breastbone, and he remembered a time when the sight of it had driven him crazy.

  She drew her breakfast to her: one slice of unbuttered toast, one cup of decaffeinated coffee, one glass of juice, one small plastic glass with several vitamins inside.

  “If you don’t eat,” he said lightly, “you’re going to waste away to nothing.”

  Her smile was forced. “I get what I need, dear, you know that.”

  “And if you get sick,” he said, more harshly than he’d intended, “you won’t have any reserves to draw on.”

  “Oh?” She leaned away. “You’d rather have me fat, the way I used to be?”

  “You were never fat, Cora.”

  “I was overweight. It’s the same thing.” She picked up the juice. “I, at least, am taking care of myself.” A quick grin. “For my old age.”

  “Your old age my — ”

  A footstep on the tile: “Dad, Lisa says you’re going to New York with us! Is that true? Is it?”

  Cora’s look was only mildly sympathetic, not offering any help. And he wrinkled his nose at her while turning to face his oldest daughter. Betsy was a taller, fuller version of her mother, with only his rather ordinary blue eyes to remind him she was his. Her hair, hastily pulled back in what, in his day, had been called a ponytail, glistened from a recent shower and inadequate drying; her clothes — clinging shirt and jeans and tennis shoes, with a gold necklace to accentuate her throat — was something he wished she’d change. To an old burlap bag, maybe, or a granny dress, or a nun’s habit. She was too beautiful by far, and when he looked at her he ached.

  “I’d thought of it, yes,” he said carefully as she flounced into her chair.

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Dad, I’m not a child, you know.”

  He knew it.

  Jesus, how he knew it.

  “But he knows all the neat places,” Lisa said, racing across the floor, skidding, prevented from slamming into the wall by the quick snap of her mother’s arm. “I mean, he knows, you know?”

  Something crossing the porch window distracted him for a moment, made him blink when Betsy demanded that she and her sister be allowed to go alone. For a change. For god’s sake.

  Lisa stuck her tongue out at her. A shorter Betsy, save for the curly brown hair and the freckles and the way, on her, the same clothes made her seem like a tomboy. “He can go if he wants to.” She winked at him. “It’s his money, you know.”

  “Well . . .” Betsy turned to him, expression suddenly earnest. “Dad, don’t you trust me?”

  He only looked at her.

  Her cheeks began to flush. “Jesus, I’m going to college in a couple of weeks! Don’t you think I ought to be able to shop in the city on my own?”

  “With Lisa,” he reminded her.

  “What’s the matter with me?” Lisa demanded. “I’m seventeen, you know. I mean, that’s not a baby, you know.” She glared at the bowl of cereal in front of her. “I’m going to college next year. Christ.”

  “Language,” Cora said quietly.

  “Right.”

  “Besides, two young women, alone in New York, might not be such a good idea.”

  “Mother!”

  “The way things are down there.”

  “We can take care of ourselves!”

  “Don’t shout.”

  Bruce backed away without moving, listening as sweet voices turned to vinegar, became weapons, finally turned it all off and concentrated on his cereal. And when he was finished, the argument now in its silent sullen stage, he stood and made his way to the basement door. No one stopped him. With vitamins in hand Cora suggested a compromise, and the argument began again.

  He opened the door and before he took a step down, he looked over his shoulder and saw them, the copper hood neatly cutting off their heads, three bodies waving arms, swaying, jerking, drawing his gaze up to the knives on their rack. Hanging there. Dully. Their points aiming at the wood.

  Nancy Arrow, he thought then, the door closing behind him. Son of a bitch, Nancy Arrow.

  Now what the hell made him think of her after all these years?

  There were four rooms downstairs, three of them belonging in some way to the house, the fourth his office, banned to all but him and the occasional evening client who couldn’t make it to his second floor, Centre Street firm. A tiny room, a narrow windo
w at ground level to the backyard, one weary leather armchair, and bolted to the back wall a wide blonde wood plank on which he kept a portable tape deck and his computer. The walls were unfinished cinder block, no decoration save a color print — fox and hounds leaping over a deadfall, riders in the distance raising the alarm.

  Beside the computer were three dark plastic boxes of diskettes, most of them containing the records of the people whose taxes he prepared, those whose investments he shepherded, the companies whose futures he charted, and predicted.

  Until this year he’d been enormously proud of his success.

  From a table and rickety stool in a corner of the living room in a two-family house over in Harley, to this; from his great-uncle as his first client, to so many now that he was able to pick which ones he’d do personally and which ones he’d leave to his two assistants in the office; from deciding to stay at home or leave, whatever his mood.

  Until this year.

  Nancy Arrow.

  The stool was still here, red paint mostly chipped to memory, left rear leg still uneven enough to keep him from daydreaming. He sat on it, absently pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and dusted off the screen. But he didn’t turn the computer on. Instead he raised an eyebrow at his face, reflected in dark gray; dismayed at the way the skin seemed no longer so elastic, at the eyebrows that almost met in disorder over the bridge of his sharp nose, at the slight bulges under the jawline that threatened to sag into jowls.

  Nancy Arrow. I’ll be damned.

  A plain man he was, in a safely plain job he’d heard enough jokes about to last him through several lifetimes. Except this was his only one, and he had the sudden growing feeling it had somehow gone wrong. And the worst part of it was, he could only blame himself if the worst was to happen. One error. One stupid mistake that had cost Harvey Athland Senior several thousand when the touted tax shelter had been disallowed, when the recommended stock had dropped to nothing. One lousy distraction — of all things, his daughters arguing in the next room — and his attention had wandered, and Athland in his rage began to spread rumors that maybe Bruce Kanfield wasn’t as sharp as his reputation.