"The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands" copyright © 1981 by Stephen King. "Yours,—Guy" copyright © 1981 by Robert F. Young. "The Belonging Kind" copyright © 1981 by John Shirley and William Gibson. "Calling Collect" copyright © 1981 by Barry N. Malzberg and Arthur L. Samuels. "Hearing Is Believing" copyright © 1981 by Ramsey Campbell. "Threshold" copyright © 1981 by Deirdre L. Kugelmeyer. "A Visit To Brighton" copyright © 1981 by Alan Ryan. "Echoes From a Darkened Shore" copyright © 1981 by Cherie Wilkerson. "The Blue Chair" copyright © 1981 by Tabitha King. "Meow" copyright © 1981 by Tanith Lee. "The Giveaway" copyright © 1981 by Steve Rasnic Tem. "Need" copyright © 1981 by Lisa Tuttle. "Waiting for the Knight" copyright © 1981 by Beverly Evans. "Under My Bed" copyright © 1981 by Al Sarrantonio. "The Hour of Silhouette" copyright © 1981 by Juleen Brantingham. "Snow, Cobwebs, and Dust" copyright © 1981 by John Keefauver. "The Spider Glass" copyright © 1981 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This Berkley Book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading, and was printed from new film.
SHADOWS 4
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Doubleday edition published 1981
Berkley edition / April 1985
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1981 by Charles L. Grant.
Introduction copyright © 1981 by Charles L. Grant.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 245 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10017.
ISBN: 0-425-07650-4
A BERKLEY BOOK® TM 757,375
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Wickerman eBooks
Introduction
To do an anthology, to fill it with the types of stories its premise dictates, there have to be rules. Rules for length, for style, for content. But one of the nicest things about being an editor is: since you made up the rules in the first place, you can also break them when the occasion warrants. Thus, I've set myself against the traditional in dark fantasy fiction (vampires, werewolves, and so forth), against including science fiction, humor, and poetry, and against settings other than the contemporary. I also have a deadline: after thus and such a date, no more.
In theory, it works. In practice, I've discovered that there are stories crossing my desk for each volume that I cannot pass up without condemning myself to nightmares. So Shadows has had its share of vampires (though of very special kinds), of having stories included a week after I thought I'd finished working, and of pieces that might not, at first glance, seem to fall within the tone of the book.
This volume breaks almost every one of my rules.
And the best part about that is, as long as you and I, as readers, enjoy the offerings, who cares?
And enjoy I trust you will. Perhaps not all, since we all differ in tastes, but enough so that the title of this series continues to work—if not on your imagination, then at least on your dreams.
Charles L. Grant
Budd Lake, New Jersey
1980
* * *
Shadows 4 begins and ends with Kiplingesque tales. Book-ends, if you will, which settle us not too comfortably into our chairs, start the fire in the grate, and place brandy at our elbows. If there's a wind out there, so much the better; if not, then the wind you're hearing can be blamed on this homage by Stephen King, one of the few who can break Shadows' rules, not with a bludgeon, but with the cool slice of a razor.
* * *
THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT SHAKE HANDS by Stephen King
When dinner was over, those of us who made up the club's winter attendance—old bachelors all—retired to the large second-floor lounge to drink brandy and swap tales.
It was a bitter, snowy night outside, and a huge blaze had been laid in the hearth. Havelock switched off the overhead light, bathing the old, high-vaulted room in maroon, leaping shadows. Conversation lagged, and we looked into the flames with varying degrees of introspection—I imagine we saw our respective pasts played out in the leaping flames. We were certainly all too old to have any romantic, daring plans for the future, and it was thoughts of romance that the night engendered—perhaps the dark romance of the doomed.
I suppose we all jumped a little when Tremain's scratchy, almost querulous voice broke the silence; I know that I did. Tremain was usually the most close-mouthed of men, offering little yet absorbing everything as he constantly lit and relit his briar pipe with his weathered and gnarled old hands. Yet, on the few occasions I had heard him recount a story I had gone home with plenty of food for thought—and the feeling that the man must have seen some passing queer things in his time, things that would cause more frequent speakers to fall silent and consider.
"I once saw a man murdered right in this room," said Tremain now, "although no juror would have convicted the killer. Yet, at the end of the business, he convicted himself—and served as his own executioner!"
There was a pause while he lit his pipe, a tall man whom time had overloaded with invisible sacks of age. Smoke drifted around his seamed face in a blue raft, and he shook the wooden match out with the slow, declamatory gestures of a man whose joints have been clotted with arthritis. He threw the stick over the fire screen and watched the flames char the wood. His sharp blue eyes brooded beneath their bushy salt-and-pepper brows. His nose was large and hooked, his lips thin and firm, his shoulders hunched almost to the back of his skull. In the dim and shifting light, I could almost fancy that it was not a man at all that sat there, but a fierce and introspective eagle.
"Don't tease us, Clint!" growled Fred Varney. "Bring it on!"
"No fear. Be patient, Freddy." And we all waited until Tremain had his pipe fired to his complete satisfaction. When a fine bed of coals had been laid in the large briar bowl, Tremain folded his large, slightly palsied hands over one knee and said:
"Very well, then. I'm seventy-nine and what I'm going to tell you occurred when I was twenty-five or thereabouts. It was 1919, at any rate, and I was just back from the Great War. My fiancée had died only five months earlier, of influenza. She was only twenty-two, and I fear I drank and played cards a great deal more than I should. She had been waiting for three years, you understand, and during that period I received a letter faithfully each week. Perhaps you may understand why I indulged myself so heavily. I had no religious beliefs, finding the general tenets and theories of Christianity rather comic in the trenches, and no family. And so I can say with truth that the good friends who saw me through my time of trial rarely left me. There were fifty-three of them—more than most people have!—fifty-two cards and a bottle of Cutty Sark whiskey. I had taken up residence in the very rooms I inhabit now, on Brennan Street. But they were much cheaper then, and there were considerably fewer medicine bottles and pills and nostrums cluttering the shelves. Yet I spent most of my time here, for there was almost always a poker game to be found.
"I was in the game room playing patience the first and only time I met Henry Brower. There were four of us who were ready to sit down and play; we only wanted a fifth to make the evening go. When Jason Davidson told me that George Oxley, our usual fifth, had broken his leg and was laid up in bed with his cast at the end of a damned pulle
y contraption, it seemed that we should have no game that night. I was contemplating the prospect of finishing the evening with nothing to take my mind off my own thoughts but patience and a mind-blotting quantity of whiskey when the fellow across the room said in a calm and pleasant voice, 'If you gentlemen have been speaking of poker, I would very much enjoy picking up a hand, if you have no particular objections.'
"He had been buried behind a copy of the Times until now, so that when I looked over I was seeing him for the first time. He was a young man with an old face, if you take my meaning. Some of the marks I saw on his face I had begun to see stamped on my own since the death of Rosalie. Some—but not all. Although the fellow could have been no older than twenty-eight from his hair and hands and manner of walking, his face seemed marked with experience and his eyes, which were very dark, seemed more than sad; they seemed almost haunted. He was quite good-looking, with a short, clipped moustache and darkish blond hair. He wore a good-looking brown suit and his top collar button had been loosened. 'My name is Henry Brower,' he said.
"Davidson immediately rushed across the room to shake hands; in fact, he acted as though he might actually snatch it out of Brower's lap. And an odd thing happened: Brower dropped his paper and held both hands up and out of reach. The expression on his face was one of horror.
"Davidson halted, quite confused, more bewildered than angry. He was only twenty-two himself—God, how young we all were in those days—and a bit of a puppy.
" 'Excuse me,' Brower said with complete gravity, 'but I never shake hands!'
"Davidson blinked. 'Never?' he said. 'How very peculiar. Why in the world not?' Well, I've told you that he was a bit of a puppy. Brower took it in the best possible way, with an open (yet rather troubled) smile.
" 'I've just come back from Bombay,' he said. 'It's a strange, crowded, filthy place, full of disease and pestilence. The vultures strut and preen on the very city walls by the thousands. I was there on a trade mission for two years, and I seem to have picked up a horror of our Western custom of handshaking. I know I'm foolish and impolite, and yet I cannot seem to bring myself to it. So if you would excuse me . . .'
" 'Only on one condition,' Davidson said with a smile.
" 'And that is?'
" 'That you draw up to the table and share a tumbler of Clint's whiskey while I go for Baker and French and Jack Willden.'
"Brower smiled at him, nodded, and put his paper away. Davidson made a brash circled thumb-and-finger, and chased away to get the others. Brower and I drew up to the green-felted table, and when I offered him a drink he declined with thanks and ordered his own bottle. I suspected it might have something to do with his odd fetish and said nothing.
" 'It's good to be here,' Brower said reflectively. 'I've shunned any kind of companionship since I returned from my post. It's not good for a man to be alone, you know. I think that, even for the most self-sufficient of men, being isolated from the flow of humanity must be the worst form of torture!' He said this with a queer kind of emphasis, and I nodded. I had experienced a form of the loneliness of which he spoke, in the trenches and again after learning of Rosalie's death. I found myself warming to him in spite of his self-professed eccentricity.
" 'Bombay must have been a fascinating place,' I said.
" 'Fascinating . . . and terrible! There are things over there which are undreamed of in our philosophy. Their reaction to the motorcar is amusing: the children shrink from them, yet follow them for blocks. They find the airplane terrifying and incomprehensible. Of course, we Americans view these contraptions with complete equanimity—even complacency!—but I assure you that my reaction was exactly the same as theirs when I first observed a street-corner beggar swallow an entire packet of steel needles and then pull them, one by one, from the open sores at the end of his fingers. Yet here is something that natives of that part of the world take utterly for granted.
" 'Perhaps,' he added somberly, 'the two cultures were never intended to mix, but to keep their separate wonders to themselves. For an American such as you or I to swallow a packet of needles would result in a slow, horrible death. And as for the motorcar . . .' He trailed off, and a bleak, shadowed expression came to his face.
"I was about to speak when the boy appeared with Brower's bottle of scotch, and directly following him, Davidson with the others.
"Davidson prefaced the introductions by saying, 'I've told them all of your little fetish, Henry, so you needn't fear for a thing. This is Darrell Baker, the fearsome-looking fellow with the beard is Andrew French, and last but not least, Jack Willden. Clint you already know.'
"Brower smiled and nodded at all of them in lieu of shaking hands. Poker chips and three fresh decks of cards were produced, money was changed for markers, and the game began.
"We played for better than six hours, and I won perhaps two hundred dollars. Darrell Baker, who was not a particularly good player, lost about eight hundred (not that he would ever feel the pinch; his father owned three of the largest shoe factories in the state), and the rest had split Baker's losses with me about evenly. Davidson was a few dollars up and Brower a few down; yet for Brower to be near even was no mean feat, for he had had astoundingly bad cards for most of the evening. He was adroit at both the traditional five-card draw and the newer seven-card-stud variety of the game, and I thought that several times he had won money on cool bluffs that I myself would have hesitated to try.
"I did notice one thing: although he drank quite heavily—by the time French prepared to deal the last hand, he had polished off almost an entire bottle of scotch—his speech did not slur at all, his card-playing skill never faltered, and his odd fixation about the touching of hands never flagged. When he won a pot, he never touched it if someone had markers to change or if someone had 'gone light' and still had chips to contribute. Once, when Davidson placed his glass rather close to his elbow, Brower flinched back abruptly, almost spilling his own drink. Baker looked surprised, but Davidson passed it off with a remark.
"Jack Willden had commented a few moments earlier that he had a drive to Albany staring him in the face later that morning, and once more around the table would do for him. So the deal came to French, and he called seven-card stud.
"I can remember that final hand as clearly as my own name, although I should be pressed to describe what I had for lunch yesterday or whom I ate it with. The mysteries of age, I suppose, and yet I think that if any of you other fellows had been there, you might remember it as well.
"I was dealt two hearts down and one up. I can't speak for Willden or French, but young Davidson had the ace of hearts and Brower the ten of spades. Davidson bet two dollars—five was our limit—and the cards went round again. I drew a heart to make four, Brower drew a jack of spades to go with his ten. Davidson had caught a trey which did not seem to improve his hand, yet he threw three dollars into the pot. 'Last hand,' he said merrily. 'Drop it in, boys! There's a lady who would like to go out on the town with me tomorrow night!'
"I don't suppose I would have believed a fortuneteller if he had told me how often that remark, with its later ironic overtones, would come back to haunt me at odd moments, right down to this day.
"French dealt our third round of up cards. I got no help with my flush, but Baker, who was the big loser, paired up something—kings, I think. Brower had gotten a deuce of diamonds that did not seem to help anything. Baker bet the limit on his pair, and Davidson promptly raised him five. Everyone stayed in the game, and our last up card came round the table. I drew the king of hearts to fill up my flush, Baker drew a third to his pair, and Davidson got a second ace that fairly made his eyes sparkle. Brower got a queen of clubs, and for the life of me I couldn't see why he remained in. His cards looked as bad as any he had folded that night.
"The betting began to get a little steep. Baker bet five, Davidson raised five, Brower called. Jack Willden said, 'Somehow I don't think my pair is quite good enough,' and threw in his hand. I called the ten and raised another five. Ba
ker called and raised again.
"Well, I needn't bore you with a raise-by-raise description. I'll only say that there was a three-raise limit per man, and Baker, Davidson, and I each took three raises of five dollars. Brower merely called each bet and raise, being careful to wait until all hands were clear of the pot before throwing his money in. And there was a lot of money—slightly better than two hundred dollars as French dealt us our last card face down.
"There was a pause as we all looked, although it meant nothing to me; I had my hand, and from what I could see on the table it was good. Baker threw in five, Davidson raised, and we waited to see what Brower would do. His face was slightly flushed with alcohol, he had removed his tie and unbuttoned a second shirt button, but he seemed quite calm. 'I call . . . and raise five,' he said.
"I blinked a little, for I had fully expected him to fold. Still, the cards I held told me I must play to win, and so I raised five. We played with no limit to the number of raises a player could make on the last card, and so the pot grew marvelously. I stopped first, being content simply to call in view of the full house I had become more and more sure someone must be holding. Baker stopped next, blinking warily from Davidson's pair of aces to Brower's mystifying junk hand. Baker was not the best of card players, but he was good enough to sense something in the wind.
"Between them, Davidson and Brower raised at least ten more times, perhaps more. Baker and I were carried along, unwilling to cast away our large investments. The four of us had run out of chips, and greenbacks now lay in a drift over the huge sprawl of markers.
" 'Well,' Davidson said, following Brower's latest raise, 'I believe I'll simply call. If you've been running a bluff, Henry, it's been a fine one. But I have you beaten and Jack's got a long trip ahead of him tomorrow.' And with that he put a five-dollar bill on top of the pile and said, 'I call.'
Shadows 4 Page 1