by Jack Dann
After the children went to bed, Martin wanted to talk about it, but she wouldn’t. “Not now,” she said. “I have to think. I don’t know what happened, and I have to think.”
“Rose, we can’t just leave it at that. You said some things I never had thought of before. I had no idea you felt left out of our decisions. I honestly believed you wanted it like that.”
She put her hands over her ears. “Not now! Please, Martin, not now. I have to think.”
“And then hit me with it again, that I don’t talk things over with you?”
“Shut up! Can’t you for the love of God just shut up?”
He stared at her and she took a deep breath, but didn’t soften it at all. “Sure,” he said. “For now.”
That night she finally fell asleep breathing in time to the clicking of the dogs’ nails on the porch floor. She dreamed. She floated downstairs with a long pale silk negligee drifting around her, like a bride of Dracula. She could see herself, a faint smile on her lips, her hair long and loose. It didn’t look very much like her, but that was unimportant. The air was pleasantly cool on her skin, and she glided across the yard, beckoning to her dogs to come. There was a moon that turned everything into white and black and gray and the world now was not the same one that she had known before. Her horse was waiting for her and she floated up to mount it. Then they were flying across the fields, she on the horse, the dogs at one side. They were painfully beautiful running, their silver hair blowing; stretched out they seemed not to touch the ground at all. They looked like silver light flowing above the ground. Her horse ran easily, silently, and there was no sound at all in this new world. The field gave way to the forest where the light from the moon came down in silver shafts, aslant and gleaming. The dogs disappeared in the shadows, appeared, dazzling bright in the moonlight, only to vanish again. They ran and ran, without a sound and she had no fear of hitting anything. Her horse knew its way. They reached the end of the motionless woods, and there was a meadow sprinkled with spiderwebs that were like fine lace glistening with dew that caught the moonlight like pearls. They slowed down now. Somewhere ahead was the game that they chased. Now the dogs were fearful to her. The golden eyes gleamed and they became hunting machines. First one, then the other sniffed the still air, and then with a flicker of motion they were off again, her horse following, not able to keep up with them. They were on the trail. She saw the deer then, a magnificent buck with widespread antlers. It saw the dogs and leaped through the air, twenty feet, thirty feet, an impossible leap executed in slow motion. But the dogs had it, and she knew it, and the buck knew it. It ran from necessity; it was the prey, they the hunters, and the ritual forced it to run. She stopped to watch the kill, and this was as silent as the entire hunt had been. The dogs leaped and the deer fell and presently the dogs drew away from it, bloody now, and stood silently watching her. She woke up. She was shivering as if with fever.
###
Martin took her to school, and when she got out of the car, he said, “I’ll be back before you’re through. I’ll pick you up.” She nodded. The dogs were on the porch when they got home that afternoon.
That night he asked her if she was ready to talk. She looked at him helplessly. “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything to say.”
“How about what’s bugging you?”
“The dogs. Nothing else.”
“Not the dogs.”
“That’s all, Martin. They’re haunting me.”
“Live dogs can’t haunt anyone.” He picked up his book and began to make notes.
Tuesday he met her after school again. The dogs were on the porch when they got home. She didn’t look at them.
On Wednesday Martin had a late class and wouldn’t be home until after six. “Will you be all right?” he asked, when he dropped her off.
“Yes. Of course.”
He reached for her arm, and holding it, looked at her for a moment. He let her go. “Right. See you later.”
When she turned into the county road after school the dogs were there waiting for her. She felt dizzy and faint, and stopped, steadying herself with one hand on a tree. She looked back toward the school, a quarter of a mile down the highway. She shook her head. Stupid! Stupid! She started to walk, trying not to look at the golden eyes that watched her. For three nights they had shared a common dream, and she felt suddenly that they knew about it, and that was the link that bound them together. She walked too fast and began to feel winded and hot. It was as quiet on the little road as it was in the fields and woods of her dream. No wind blew, no leaves stirred, even the birds were silent. She picked up a stick, and looked quickly at the dogs, slightly behind her, so that in order to see them she had to turn her head slightly. They trotted silently, watching her.
Each night in the dream she got closer to the deer before the kill, and that night she was afoot, standing close enough to touch it when the dogs leaped. In her hand was a knife, and when the dogs felled the animal, she braced herself to leap also.
“No!” She sat up throwing off the covers, thrashing about frantically, moaning now. Martin caught her and held her still until she was wide awake.
“Honey, you’ve got to tell me. Please, Rose. Please.”
“I can’t,” she moaned. “It’s gone now. A nightmare.”
He didn’t believe her, but he held her and stroked her hair and made soothing noises. “I love you,” he said over and over. “I love you. I love you.”
And finally she relaxed and found that she was weeping. “I love you, Martin,” she said, sobbing suddenly. “I do. I really do.”
“I know you do,” he said. “I’m glad that you know it too.”
On Thursday she learned that the teacher she was subbing for was well and would return the following day. Martin picked her up after school and she told him.
“I don’t want you to stay home all day with those dogs,” he said. “I’ll get them in the car somehow and take them to the pound. No one is going to claim them.”
She shook her head. “You can’t,” she said.
“I can try.”
But he couldn’t. They refused to budge from the porch on Friday morning. Rose watched from inside the house. She hadn’t slept at all during the night. She had been afraid to, and she felt dopey and heavy-limbed. All night she had sat up watching television, drinking coffee, eating cheese and apples and cookies, reading. Listening to the clicking nails on the porch.
“I’ll stay home, then,” Martin said when they both knew that the dogs were not going to go with him. “Or, maybe you could trick them into getting in the car.”
But they knew she couldn’t. The dogs wouldn’t move for her either. He approached them with the idea of trying to carry them, and they both growled, and the hairs on their necks bristled.
“Martin, just go. We’ll have all weekend to decide what to do with them. They’ll sit out there and I’ll stay in here. It’s all right. You’ll be late.
He kissed her then, and she felt surprise. He never kissed her when he left. Only when they were going to go to bed, or were in bed already. “Stay inside. Promise?”
She nodded and watched him drive away. The dogs looked at her. “What do you want from me?” she demanded, going out to the porch, standing before them. “Just what do you want?” She took a step toward them. “What do you want?” She realized that the screaming voice was her own and she stopped. She was very near them now. She could touch them if she reached out. They waited for her to touch them, to stroke them. Suddenly she whirled around and ran back inside the house. They didn’t try to get in this time. They knew she would be back.
She went to the kitchen feeling dull and blank and heavy. She poured coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with it, and then put her head down on her arms. Drifting, drifting, the warmth of sleep stealing over her. Suddenly she jumped up, knocking over her coffee. No! She knew she must not sleep, must not dream that dream again. She made more coffee and cleaned up the mess she had made, then was
hed the dishes. She put clothes in the washer, made the beds, peeled apples to make jelly, and all the time the clicking back and forth went on. She turned on the radio, and found herself listening over the music for the noise of their nails. She turned it off again. At noon she looked at them from Juliette’s room. They turned to watch her, stopping in their tracks when she lifted the curtain. The light caught in the gold eyes, making them look as if they were flashing at her. Signals flashing at her. She let the curtain fall and backed away.
Then she went to Martin’s study and took down his rifle. She loaded it carefully and walked out the back door, letting it slam behind her. She didn’t turn to see if they were coming. She knew they were. At the back of the barn she waited for them. She thought of how beautiful they were running, how silky and fine their hair was, alive and blowing in the wind. They came around the corner of the barn, walking quietly, very sure of her. She raised the rifle, aiming it carefully, as Martin had taught her. The large gold eyes caught the sun and flashed. She shot. The first dog dropped without a whimper. The other one was transfixed. He hadn’t believed she would do it. Neither of them had believed her capable of doing it. She aimed again and shot. She was looking into the golden eyes as she pulled the trigger. She saw the light go out in them.
She dropped the rifle and hid her face in her hands. She was shaking violently. Then she vomited repeatedly and after there was nothing left in her, she retched and heaved helplessly. Finally she staggered to the house and washed out her mouth, and washed her face and hands. She didn’t look at herself in the mirror.
She put the rifle back and went out to the barn again, this time with a spade. She dug the grave big enough for them both, behind the barn where she could cover it with straw so that it wouldn’t show. And when she was ready for them, she stopped. She would have to touch them after all. But the hair was just hair now, the silkiness and aliveness was gone. Just gray hair. She dragged them to the grave and covered them and hid the place with straw.
###
The children asked about the dogs, and she said they had run off just as mysteriously as they had come. Jeffrey said he was glad, they had been spooky. Juliette said she dreamed of them last night, and she was sorry they were gone. Annamarie didn’t comment at all. but ran to the phone to call Jennifer.
Martin didn’t believe her story. But he didn’t question her. That night she told him. “I killed them.”
A tremor passed over him. He nodded. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right.” she looked at him. “You’re not surprised or shocked or disgusted? Something?”
“Not now. Maybe later. Now, nothing.”
She nodded too. That was how she felt. They didn’t talk about it again that night, but sat quietly, with the television off, neither of them reading or doing anything. They went to bed early and held each other hard until they fell asleep.
The Howling Tower
by Fritz Leiber
In the daylight of the “real” world, we dominate the dog, as we do all other creatures; but in the ever-terrifying world of darkness and dream and nightmare, it is the dog which hounds us, which pursues us across the dark landscape of nightmare. Perhaps this ancient fear was born in the dawn of memory, during the Stone Age times when our ancestors could easily have been the prey of packs of wolves competing for food. But as Patricia Dale-Green has written in her book Lore of the Dog, “At dusk—in canem et lupum—dog and wolf are scarcely distinguishable.” In primordial fear, we have become the prey of our most powerful archetype.
In the story that follows, two of the most famous characters ever to be created in the sword-and-sorcery genre—the legendary swordsmen Fafhrd and his companion the Gray Mouser—must journey through the wastelands of Nehwon to the sinister howling tower, one of the deadly gateways into the netherworld of wraiths, sorrow, and death.
Born in Chicago in 1910, the multi-talented Fritz Leiber is an Ancestral Figure in the field of heroic fantasy, not only having coined the term “Sword & Sorcery” but having himself written some of the very best work ever to appear in that particular sub-genre. Leiber is also an Ancestral Figure in the Science Fiction field—being one of the major writers of both Campbell’s “Golden Age” Astounding of the forties and H.L. Gold’s Galaxy in the fifties, for instance—and is also considered to be perhaps the finest practitioner of the supernatural horror tale—especially updated “modern” or “urban” horror—since Foe and Lovecraft. He has won six Hugos, four Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards—one of them the prestigious Life Achievement Award—and a Grand Master of Fantasy Award. His other books include The Big Time, The Wanderer, Our Lady of Darkness, and The Green Millennium, and the collections The Best of Fritz Leiber, and Ghost Light.
* * *
The sound was not loud, yet it seemed to fill the whole vast, darkening plain, and the palely luminous, hollow sky: a wailing and howling, so faint and monotonous that it might have been inaudible save for the pulsing rise and fall; an ancient, ominous sound that was somehow in harmony with the wild, sparsely vegetated landscape and the barbaric garb of the three men who sheltered in a little dip in the ground, lying close to a dying fire.
“Wolves, perhaps,” Fafhrd said. “I have heard them howl that way on the Cold Waste when they hunted me down. But a whole ocean sunders us from the Cold Waste and there’s a difference between the sounds, Gray Mouser.”
The Mouser pulled his gray woolen cloak closer around him. Then he and Fafhrd looked at the third man, who had not spoken. The third man was meanly clad, and his cloak was ragged and the scabbard of his short sword was frayed. With surprise, they saw that his eyes stared, white circled, from his pinched, leathery face and that he trembled.
“You’ve been over these plains many times before,” Fafhrd said to him, speaking the guttural language of the guide. “That’s why we’ve asked you to show us the way. You must know this country well.” The last words pointed the question.
The guide gulped, nodded jerkily. “I’ve heard it before, not so loud,” he said in a quick, vague voice. “Not at this time of year. Men have been known to vanish. There are stories. They say men hear it in their dreams and are lured away—not a good sound.”
“No wolf’s a good wolf,” rumbled Fafhrd amusedly.
It was still light enough for the Mouser to catch the obstinate, guarded look on the guide’s face as he went on talking.
“I never saw a wolf in these parts, nor spoke with a man who killed one.” He paused, then rambled off abstractedly. “They tell of an old tower somewhere out on the plains. They say the sound is strongest there. I have not seen it. They say—”
Abruptly he stopped. He was not trembling now, seemed withdrawn into himself. The Mouser prodded him with a few tempting questions, but the answers were little more than mouth noises, neither affirmative nor negative.
The fire glowed through white ashes, died. A little wind rustled the scant grasses. The sound had ceased now, or else it had sunk so deeply into their minds that it was no longer audible. The Mouser, peering sleepily over the humped horizon of Fafhrd’s great cloaked body, turned his thoughts to far-off, many-taverned Lankhmar, leagues and leagues away across alien lands and a whole uncharted ocean. The limitless darkness pressed down. Next morning the guide was gone. Fafhrd laughed and made light of the occurrence as he stood stretching and snuffing the cool, clear air.
“Foh! I could tell these plains were not to his liking, for all his talk of having crossed them seven times. A bundle of superstitious fears! You saw how he quaked when the little wolves began to howl. My word on it, he’s run back to his friends we left at the last water.”
The Mouser, fruitlessly scanning the empty horizon, nodded without conviction. He felt through his pouch.
“Well, at least he’s not robbed us—except for the two gold pieces we gave him to bind the bargain.”
Fafhrd’s laughter pealed and he thumped the Mouser between the shoulder blades. The Mouser caught him by the wrist, threw him
with a twist and a roll, and they wrestled on the ground until the Mouser was pinned.
“Come on,” grinned Fafhrd, springing up. “It won’t be the first time we’ve traveled strange country alone.”
They tramped far that day. The springiness of the Mouser’s wiry body enabled him to keep up with Fafhrd’s long strides. Toward evening a whirring arrow from Fafhrd’s bow brought down a sort of small antelope with delicately ridged horns. A little earlier they had found an unsullied waterhole and filled their skin bags. When the late summer sunset came, they made camp and munched carefully broiled loin and crisped bits of fat.
The Mouser sucked his lips and fingers clean, then strolled to the top of a nearby hummock to survey the line of their next day’s march. The haze that had curtailed vision during the afternoon was gone now, and he could peer far over the rolling, swelling grasslands through the cool, tangy air. At that moment the road to Lankhmar did not seem so long, or so weary. Then his sharp eyes spied an irregularity in the horizon toward which they were tending. Too distinct for trees, too evenly shaped for rock; and he had seen no trees or rock in this country. It stood out sharp and tiny against the pale sky. No, it was built by man; a tower of some sort.
At that moment the sound returned. It seemed to come from everywhere at once; as if the sky itself were wailing faintly, as if the wide, solid ground were baying mournfully. It was louder this time, and there was in it a strange confusion of sadness and threat, grief and menace.
Fafhrd jumped to his feet and waved his arms strongly, and the Mouser heard him bellow out in a great, jovial voice, “Come, little wolves, come and share our fire and singe your cold noses. I will send my bronze-beaked birds winging to welcome you, and my friend will show you how a slung stone can buzz like a bee. We will teach you the mysteries of sword and axe. Come, little wolves, and be guests of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser! Come, little wolves—or biggest of them all!”