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

by Charles L. Grant

  The telephone rang.

  He considered ignoring it, knelt beside it instead and grabbed up the receiver.

  “Mr. Kanfield?” It was Rowan. “Yes.”

  “Mr. Kanfield, that woman — ”

  “Is here with me now,” he said, settling on the floor. “I’ll have her over in a few minutes so you can ask her your questions and get off my back.”

  “Sir?”

  He groaned silently at the man’s lack of perception.

  “The woman I was with the other day, remember? You asked me about her not an hour ago.”

  “Oh.” Muffled voices in the background; someone shouting. “That’s just fine, Mr. Kanfield, thank you. But I was going to say that the woman who lives behind you, a Mrs. Helen Yorr, has filed a complaint against you, and I think you’d better call that lawyer of yours.”

  He sat up abruptly, scowling. “Complaint? Complaint for what? Kicking her goddamn dog?” He looked up to Nancy; she wasn’t there.

  “No sir.”

  He stood awkwardly. She wasn’t in the office.

  “For killing them.”

  Neither was she in the outer office.

  “Someone cut their throats early this morning.”

  He covered the mouthpiece with one hand. “Nancy?”

  “And cut off their legs.”

  Corbin Vanders had his offices three doors up and across the street. By the time Bruce reached them, he was sweating again.

  “Killing dogs?” the bearded man said incredulously.

  Bruce could only nod. Where was Nancy?

  “Ridiculous.”

  “I’m going to need you, Corb.”

  Where the hell was she?

  He’d checked every shop on the block, every doorway, every alley, and would have run straight to the park if, suddenly, he didn’t fear that the first cop who saw him would shoot him down.

  “The trouble is,” Vanders said, toying with a pencil, “I can’t help you.”

  “What?” Bruce almost lunged at him. “What are you talking about, Corb? You’ve gotta help me, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I have to stay out of it,” Vanders answered calmly. “You see, Helen is my client, too. 1 can’t represent both of you, and since both of you are friends, I’m going to have to represent neither of you.”

  “That’s insane!”

  Vanders spread his hands. “I’m sorry. But I’ll give you the name of someone —”

  Bruce left, slamming every door he passed through, and stood on the sidewalk. The heat hunched his shoulders. Sweat stained his chest. And he decided that the first thing he had to do, if he was going to face all this nonsense alone, was go home and change his clothes. Take a shower. Find a suit. Tell his family, if they were there, what was happening and not to expect him for dinner.

  But Cora was in the kitchen when he arrived, and he could hear the girls downstairs, laughing about something as they played a game of pool.

  “Cora,” he said, and stopped.

  She was at the island, chopping lettuce for a salad.

  daddy, why won’t it stay?

  “I heard,” she said before he could speak. “Where were you last night?”

  He blinked slowly.

  She placed the knife beside her and faced him, her expression brooking no nonsense, no flattery, no evasion. “You’ve been seeing another woman, haven’t you.” Her hands twisted spastically in her apron. “Deny it, you goddamn bastard, and I’ll cut your balls off.”

  sweet

  “Cora, I am about to be arrested for the god damn killing of some goddamn dogs.”

  kiss

  “And unless I can get Nancy to cooperate, I’m going to be arrested for killing Athland, too.”

  mine

  “Nancy?” Cora’s eyes shut tightly. “Oh, you bastard! Oh, you goddamn bastard!”

  you’re mine

  He walked up to her; she backed away. “Cora, all I’ve been doing —”

  “I know what you’ve been doing.”

  He braced himself on the counter. “Oh really?” Her eyes opened; he wished they hadn’t. “For weeks I’ve known. Mooning around here, moaning about dying and losing your shirt and being alone for the rest of your life . . . you think you’ve been kidding anyone? Do you really think you’ve fooled anyone?”

  “Damn it, Cora, Nancy Arrow was a friend of mine. 1 told you about her often enough. Jesus, all we did —”

  She slapped him.

  He stumbled one step back.

  “Nancy,” she said tonelessly. “Nancy Arrow.”

  “Yes,” he said, one finger at his cheek.

  “Never heard of her.”

  I don’t want to die, he thought.

  “From high school, remember? We were going together when I met you.”

  Don’t want to die.

  “I said I never heard of her.”

  He picked up the knife and slashed the blade across her face. She was too startled to cry out, and he slashed her again, slicing open the bridge of her nose, peeling back her left cheek. When she screamed at last, he punched her, and she fell, and he reached down and drew the knife down from the hollow of her throat, between her breasts, to her stomach.

  Slowly.

  Very slowly.

  Before straightening, and turning, and walking to the basement door where he heard Betsy calling.

  “What?” he demanded.

  His daughter came up the stairs, trying to look around him. “Was that Mother?” she wanted to know. “Those dogs, Dad. How could —”

  “Shut up,” he said; and the knife caught her belly just as he saw her eyes widen at the blood on his face. On his shirt. On his hands. On his legs. And she stumbled backward, one hand clutching at the open wound, the other scrabbling frantically for the railing, until her legs stiffened, then collapsed, and she rolled down to the floor.

  He followed.

  Lisa screamed.

  Once. And no more.

  “Detective Rowan, please.”

  “Speaking. Mr. Kanfield? Mr. Kanfield, is that you?”

  “I didn’t kill him, Rowan.”

  He hung up, and wiped the blood off the telephone.

  Time enough, he decided, to wash himself off and put on clean clothes.

  Blood.

  Where did it all come from?

  He drove to the park and left his car at the curb even though a patrolman began yelling from down the block.

  He walked through the open gates and trotted up the path. He knew now why Nancy wouldn’t talk to the police. It was so obvious he felt stupid. She was the one who had killed Athland. To protect him. To save him. And she had probably slaughtered the terriers as well. To save him from aggravation at a time when he needed all the strength he had left. It was crazy. It was insane. It was the mad act of a woman who loved him so much she didn’t care about herself, as long as he was all right. It was the first battle in a war she would wage against the world, because in her life he and only he was important, was what counted.

  Now it was his turn.

  Now he had to save her before Rowan in his plodding way figured it out, discovered where she was staying and arrested her, and broke her down, made her talk, and took her away from him.

  He ran.

  Away from him.

  Never.

  Not again.

  He had lost her once because he had been too young and therefore blind; he wouldn’t lose her a second time because he was a coward. As she had fought for him, so would he for her; as she had risked her life, so would he; as she had love for him, so he had for her.

  From that very first kiss on the knoll in the park they had somehow been bound, and now it was up to him to be sure the binding held.

  Faster; a whistle blew far behind him.

  Darting through the shrubs to the slope, upward now and slowing, panting, finally gasping to his knees when he reached the top and hands grabbed him under the shoulders and tried to pull him up.

  “Hurry,” she
said. Yellow dress.

  Red hair.

  “I’m trying,” he said, one hand out for balance.

  “Hurry,” she said.

  And fairly dragged him through the bushes, to the place where they’d lain, and they fell together on the needles and the leaves and the fallen wildflower blossoms.

  Holding each other; holding their breath.

  “I’m yours now,” he said when he could speak without choking. “God, Nancy, I’m yours now. You were right. I’m —”

  She giggled.

  He raised himself up on an elbow and stared. “What?” he asked, a puzzled smile flickering.

  “You’re mine.”

  He nodded. “I know. And you’re mine.”

  She shook her head. “No, Bruce. I’m not yours.” The frown deepened.

  “I never was.”

  A breeze rode in from the valley.

  The branches stirred, and parted, and let the sun in to highlight the way the flesh on her face was stiff and laced with cracks, the way her dress was yellowed, the way the points of her elbows pierced the skin without her bleeding, the way her eyes watched him as he backed away to his knees.

  Dead, he thought, and covered his face.

  “You’re dead,” he whispered, looking out between his fingers to see her lips part and turn to dust, to see her teeth blacken and rattle down into her throat, to see her dress get blown away by the breeze that exploded into a wind that tore the leaves and cracked the branches and flung dust at his eyes and made him turn as he sobbed with fear.

  Dead; she was dead.

  Dear god, he’d loved a ghost.

  “Ghost,” he whispered hoarsely.

  “No,” Nancy said.

  And as he pulled his hands away he saw blood drying on his knuckles, blood drying on his wrist.

  “You’re a ghost!” he screamed. “Jesus, you made me kill them all!”

  “No,” she said.

  He reached for air, to strangle, to hold. “But you’re mine, goddamn it! Goddamn it, you said you’re mine.”

  And Nancy Arrow laughed, in the shadows, in the wind, and said, “I’m not a ghost, my darling.”

  Blood on his shirt, on his trousers, on his shoes.

  “To be a ghost, I have to die.”

  Cora; Jesus, Cora!

  “How can I die?”

  All the blood; Lisa!

  “I never was.”

  Part III: As We Promise, Side by Side

  The heat did not die with the setting of the sun; it shifted instead to the back of a breeze that barely moved the curtains, barely stirred the leaves, barely rose high enough to slip into bedrooms and pass over those who tried to sleep without sheets; it touched lawns of dying grass, beds of dying flowers, made mock of the sprinklers that hissed in the dark; it kept night things from prowling, night birds from singing, and made lovers of the night look forward to dawn.

  Engines overheated even under the stars. Tempers overheated at the lift of a raised brow. And Lois sat on the porch steps and thought about moving to someplace like Maine. Surely Maine, in late September, didn’t have heat waves like this. And it was, she told herself, a lot easier getting warm again when you’re cold than getting cool again when you’re drooping from the heat.

  Besides, how difficult could it be? You pack your bags, you put them in the car, you drive away from Oxrun Station never to be seen again. How hard is that? So what’s the big deal?

  Her shoulder lifted as she took a slow resigned breath, lowered when she exhaled and rubbed a palm across the damp back of her neck, trapping beneath it curls and coils of pale blonde hair before drawing it down over her shoulder, her breast, watching it flop on her thigh. The arm was leaden. The thigh was hot. She considered going inside and changing from jeans to shorts, and changed her mind because the effort would be, right now, too great.

  Besides, going to Maine would mean giving up the house.

  And though a marriage had died here, bludgeoned out of existence by indifference and arrogance and a hundred other things that had no name, it was also the place where she knew all the corners, all the cobwebs, all the boards that creaked and all the walls that weren’t true.

  How could she leave?

  Above and behind her, poking out of the bedroom window, the air conditioner banged, sputtered, settled back to a growl. She glanced up at it, hidden in the dark, and nodded.

  Easily, she thought; I could get out of here in a second.

  A cyclist hushed past, heading up Western Road toward Chancellor Avenue a block away, white helmet glowing in the light of the street lamp at the corner. She watched him, flickering in and out of still shadow, until there was nothing left but that white helmet, until even that was gone.

  A brief frown; a tilt of her head; following his image until that, too, was gone.

  He rode by every night, never stopping, never slowing, too fast for her to see his face, too quick to guess his age; a twilight ghost, she had thought once, always timing his exercise for just after sunset, when the foliage and the chimneys blended into the early night. She had once deliberately walked to the curb to catch a better glimpse of him, pretending to light a cigarette when he popped out of the dark at the end of the block. Tires silent. Silent pedals. Veering gently to the other side just before he reached her.

  She’d almost called out to him, to bid him a good evening, but something in the way he held his head stopped her. It was as if, just for a moment, he had turned slightly to look at her, and just for that same moment she couldn’t see his face, didn’t know if he had one.

  She hadn’t tried it again. Nor had she been able to rid herself of a faint unnerving belief that he was only biding his time, that one of these nights he was going to pull over and greet her.

  And when he did . . .

  Maine, she thought, briskly rubbing one bare arm; definitely Maine.

  Across the street then, behind a low barberry hedge and the screen of two young willows, a yellow bulb snapped on, and she stiffened for a moment, held her breath, and relaxed when a screen door opened and the shadow of a woman stepped out onto a porch twice the size of her own. It was only April, sneaking out for a cigarette because her husband had quit three months ago and refused to let even an ashtray sneak back into the house.

  Lois sympathized. She had had a husband like that, once upon another lifetime ago. And once the honeymoon had been relegated to photograph albums and old letters cached in the backs of desk drawers, once Paul had decided he was the man of the house, even she hadn’t been blind enough to miss the coming fire.

  The conflagration that began the day he had protested loudly, almost madly, when she’d refused to quit her job at Kanfield Investments. He had unilaterally decided it was time to put her degree in storage and start a family; and he left six months later, more confused than angry, when she told him for the hundredth time she was only there for the training, that sooner or later she was going to strike out on her own, come hell or high water, and the babies would come when she thought she was ready.

  He had suggested, more calmly, that the cost was too great.

  She had argued quite reasonably that it wouldn’t cost her a thing.

  It had, at the end, with a judge and the lawyers and all the papers to be signed, but she didn’t mind. Not now. Not after four years that often seemed like forty. Working out of the house he’d left her in lieu of alimony hadn’t been easy, especially when the firm had died; but a few of Kanfield’s old clients knew her and knew what she’d done for them, and they had agreed, temporarily, to let her prove what she could do.

  It was nerve-racking.

  It was driving her up the wall.

  And she suspected that she loved it.

  If only, she thought then, Todd were here. Now. Sitting right here. So I could —

  She put a cautioning finger to her lips and laughed silently when she felt a blush begin to work her cheeks. It was incredible how she reacted even to his image, floating calmly there above the sidewa
lk, his head cocked just so, his left eye closed, his right forefinger resting against his cheek in an attitude of I’m listening but I don’t believe one word you’re saying. The blush warmed. She pinched her cheeks. Then she deliberately forced him away before she did something stupid — like run inside call him and ask him over.

  Not yet.

  Too soon.

  Not yet.

  Damn it.

  A bat flickered through the trees in the yard, too fast for her to follow.

  But as she turned her head anyway, lifting her face to try to catch some relief from the desultory breeze, she was distracted by the sound of a guitar drifting out of the dark.

  Thank you, she thought then; thanks for coming tonight.

  The first time she’d heard it, just about a month ago, just after the firm had shut down and forced her out on her own, it had frightened her without her knowing why. There had been no source; just the music. Curious music that she’d sworn had been somehow written just for her.

  A song with her name as the title.

  A song that was only played on the cold side of midnight.

  But in time she grew used to it, came to expect it, came to like it. For a while she had even walked around the streets, following it patiently like a spoor, eventually tracking it down to Thorn Road only two weeks ago, and realizing what she ought to have known all along — that it was Willy Peace and his friends, playing for themselves on the back porch of an old Cape Cod that never showed the street its lights.

  She hadn’t walked around the side to see the musicians; that, she thought, would have killed it.

  So she listened now in the heat, as the guitar waltzed around her so slowly she grew sleepy and sagged, feeling the bass notes touch her heart and match it beat for beat, while a fiddle lamented as if it were lost in autumn fog, and a mandolin played hide-and-seek with the melody it knew, and a dulcimer hammered her name sweetly, like the hurried whisper of a child who had the best secret in the world and only a minute left to tell it.

  Her head snapped up then, and her eyes snapped open, and she rubbed them harshly with the heels of her hands.

  The guitar.

  She heard her name.

  A one-sided smile drew back her lips, a shake of her head and a motionless shrug put the conceit in its place.