The Second Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®: 20 Tales by Modern and Classic Authors

by Fritz Leiber

  The driver unlocked the gate. Then, hurrying with the box up to the veranda, he yelled over his shoulder, “Where do you want it?”

  Gormley panted up behind him.

  “Second room off the hall. Just under the oak. It was once the master library, I believe.”

  “You go ahead with the light,” the driver told him, kicking the door open.

  Gormley smiled sympathetically in the darkness. Yes, this great galoot of a man was afraid. Of what he didn’t know. But he was familiar with at least some of the evil that this house had spawned. And besides that, he had the simple man’s instinctive primal fear of what cannot be seen or heard, only vaguely felt.

  And his fear was right. It could save him. Fear is the symptom of evil.

  They stepped warily across the great hall. The ring of light danced.

  “Whew! What a stink!” The driver, talked loudly. “I’ve smelled lots of old houses. Damp rot. Termites. But this! What d’you think it is, Professor?”

  “Perhaps it is the odor of evil itself.”

  “Hey, I just thought of something. What are you gonna use for light in this weird old joint? No lights, you know.”

  “My machine will provide me with light,” Gormley murmured. “Light is an excellent dispenser of surface evil in itself.”

  “Yeah? Well, here we are. Put your light to working, Professor. I’m scramming.”

  Then the dwindling footsteps and the driver’s dark-whistling was gone and Gormley was alone. But not quite alone…

  The light pouring from his machine dazzled the eyes to look at it. Actually, it was many lights in one. Light rays and other rays, visible and invisible. These other rays did more than repel surface evil. They were calculated to destroy evil or at least to send it howling back to the dark dimensions that gave it life.

  He looked around him at the musty paneling, the empty bookcases. In one corner the paneling was torn. That was where Albert Fast’s strippers had admitted defeat. In this room.

  This room had to its evil credit three murders, two suicides. In a cache behind these bookcases malignant drugs had been hidden. A sash from those rotting drapes had been used to strangle a woman. Just above this room, in the odd rambling way the house had to be built if the tree was to be saved, was the great gibbet-branch itself.

  Gormley busied his mind with a theory about oak trees. He made notes on it. Oaks were sacred to the ancient Druids. Or were they? Was it not rather their parasitic companion, mistletoe? He remembered the first scene in the opera Norma, where the high-priestess of the Druids is seen gathering mistletoe for an important ritual. Mistletoe, symbol of love and happy times. Why? Because it kept evil at bay—evil which the oaks attracted? On this oak tree no mistletoe would grow…Anyway, it was not this house itself that attracted evil. The evil that had happened in it had strengthened itself, fed on it. But the evil was there before. It was not houses themselves; but something elemental in nature. Oak trees, perhaps. Or perhaps just places, invisible faults in the dimensional shield where evilness could come through. They could be on land, or in the middle of the ocean, or high in the air.

  Partially the evil things that happened here were man’s responsibility. But only partially. The creeping evil from the dark dimensions had saturated and fed it. For evil loves evil. Evil begets evil…

  An impatient clatter at the front door told him Albert Fast had arrived. The door had been left unlocked so Gormley waited for the big man to burst in. It was patent to Fast’s character to announce his arrival by noise. He blinked in the library doorway.

  “Trying to blind a man?” he grumbled. He looked for a chair and, as there was none, pulled up a packing box and lowered his overdressed carcass on it with an expression of annoyance at its hardness. “Everything set?” he demanded.

  “Everything.”

  “Good. Let’s get going. This joint is like a wet tomb.” He shivered, his narrow eyes flicking, around him with distaste and active fear.

  Gormley told him about Dudley Smith.

  The big man exploded into profanity.

  “Who does he think he is? Muscling in on my preserve!”

  “He is in, Albert, just a little. After all, he did give me the parts. You kept me going. But never mind. I don’t want much of anything. It’s between you two.”

  Fast’s rage mounted. “I’ll wait just five minutes. After we get through the machine goes home with me. I’ll put that two-bit faker in his place!”

  To keep peace Gormley began to tell him about the machine.

  “Lights,” Fast grunted. “If that’s all there is to it, I’ll install five-hundred-watt lights all over this house. What’s more, I’m beginning to think there’s nothing to this ghost stuff. Why doesn’t something show itself?”

  “The reason we feel no manifestation of evil is proof that my machine does work. If I were to switch it off here—”

  Fast blinked down at the lights, twitching his flabby shoulders in mounting impatience. “Maybe. Or maybe you just don’t want to turn the lights off because then I would know it was a fake. Like I told you before, I’m from Missouri. You got to prove to me there is something wrong with this house. Otherwise I don’t need you and your machine.” His eyes narrowed on the little scientist. “All right, go ahead. Prove it!”

  Gormley stood over the machine protectively.

  “I’m going to have to confess something, Albert.”

  “So it is a phony.”

  “No, no! I’ve tried it before. Many times. But every time I was alone. I didn’t like to think of anyone else coming to harm. When I was alone in the presence of an evil force I felt its power, and yet there was no overt demonstration because—”

  Smith’s yell from the front hall interrupted.

  Dudley Smith blinked owlishly as he stepped within the argent rays of the machine. Fast glared at him. He greeted the big man with a nod and a supercilious smile. Gormley didn’t matter. It was between them.

  Suddenly Fast laughed loudly.

  “You wouldn’t want it anyway, Smith. It’s a fake.”

  “Really?” The tall man brushed some dust from his sleeve elegantly. “I don’t think that matters particularly, not to me. I’ve been making some telephone calls since I left you, Dr. Gormley. I think we’re in business.”

  “But if the machine is a fake—”

  Fast stopped suddenly. He looked at Gormley suspiciously. Maybe he had been a little hasty. He scowled at them both.

  Dudley Smith put a cigarette in a jeweled holder and paced the room while he smoked, casting possessive glances at the machine.

  “Just a minute!” Fast blustered; “Gormley, you’re into me for eight hundred bucks. I started you out before you even saw Dudley Smith. I fed you, kept you going while you were building it. Anybody else has claims on your work, I’ll buy them off!”

  “Dr. Gormley,” Smith put in smoothly, “I am prepared to set you up for life in any kind of a laboratory you wish. All I ask in return is your signature on certain publicity documents from time to time.”

  Gormley only stared. Fast reared up like an angered bull.

  “I’ll go one better,” he bellowed. “Look here!” He pulled out his wallet and removed a check from it. “Here’s my certified check made out to you. Five thousand dollars. This is yours, Gormley. To set you up, keep you quiet, and to de-ghost this house.”

  Dudley Smith laughed. Fast didn’t like it. He got up heavily and grabbed the tall man by the arm. Smith stopped laughing. His hand snaked toward an inner pocket.

  “Don’t!” Gormley cried; “Don’t you see what you’re doing—both of you?”

  They looked across the machine at him. Their looks said, ‘keep out of this.’

  Fast held out the check. “Take it.” It was a command. “All you got to do
is prove to me that this evil of yours exists here in this house, and that your machine can destroy it. How long will it take for your machine to clean it up?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Gormley said. “The evil is strong. It has had much to feed on—”

  “You’re hedging again,” Fast warned. “I got to have proof there’s anything to all this. Shut it off!”

  “No-o!”

  “Do what I tell you,” Fast gritted. “Shut it off.”

  Gormley shook his head in terror.

  “Go ahead,” Smith sneered. “Show him it’s a fake so you and I can get down to business.”

  Gormley brushed his hand over his eyes. This was getting way out of hand. He was just beginning to realize what he had started. But in that instant Albert Fast’s hand whipped down and flicked off the switch.

  Darkness invaded.

  The room vanished. They were no longer there. They were in limbo, in black nothingness. This was the natural habitat of live evil. The odor of evil smote them heavily. For a moment Gormley was faint from it, and from the swirling aura of despair and sadistic triumph.

  He tried to cry out. First he couldn’t. Then came his whimper of protest.

  “No! No!” he wailed.

  His cry was directed at the low animal noises that came from across the machine. He stood frozen. Something unseen held him trapped, powerless to move. The animal sounds thickened. It was as if a wild pig had attacked a hyena.

  Something thin and sharp swished the black air.

  Unseen forms writhed in terrible embrace.

  At last he could move. He fell to the floor, groping for the machine switch. Then he found it and flooded the roiling air with light. The living evil bounded back to its lair, faster than sight or sound.

  They lay atop one another on the floor. Albert Fast’s blunt fingers were deep in the radio station owner’s neck. Fast’s body was slashed in many places by the thin sharp blade Smith still clutched. Their heads drooped, eyes glazing as he stared.

  When at last he could tear his eyes from this horror, he stumbled away from Castongua Mansion with his machine. He should have warned them. He had tried to. Evil loves evil. Evil begets evil. There had been no sudden evidence of evil in those other houses because Gormley was not of himself evil, not receptive to evil. But when it encountered Fast and Smith, with their insatiable greed and hatred for those who stood in their way…

  * * * *

  Back in his frigid loft he shivered and started to light the fire. It was then he noticed the check, Albert Fast’s certified check, clutched in his fist. His heart leapt. How he could use it in his research! For the sake of humanity. And yet—

  He uttered a cry and dropped it in the stove. He set a match to it, watched it curl and blacken and become nothing. No. He couldn’t ever use that money for the sake of humanity. He hadn’t taken it from Albert Fast. Back in that evil-saturated room, he had not voluntarily taken it and clutched it in his fist as if it meant more than life to him.

  No.

  Something had put it there.

  THE ANABE GIRLS, by A. R. Morlan

  Originally published in Challenging Destiny #22, April 2006.

  WannaBeAnaBe: I was thinking that since u and I have the same goal, we could join forces. If you really want to avoid eating, make sure you flick your ashes from your cigarette onto your plate after the first bite, if you are still taking the first bite. From your trigger, I’m guessing you are still eating some food. Check out mine at www.life-diet.com to see what I mean.…

  * * * *

  “Hey Jake, take a look at this.”

  Jacob kept on ratting the hair of the Anabe Agency model sitting placidly before him into a gauzy puff-ball of processed-down-to-colorless brittle strands which hovered over her (if you could still call what sat on the chair in front of Jacob a her) taut-skinned skull like a tumbleweed which had lost its central core of thicker dried branches, until Shane repeated, “Jacob, take-a-look-at-this.”

  Knowing that whichever of the Anabe Girls sitting there (was she Odella or Letje, Radella or Paola?) wasn’t about to wander off in search of a cup of coffee, or a fresh pack of cigarettes, Jacob put down his ratting comb on the table of hair grooming products positioned near his work area, and turned to his fellow hairdresser.

  “What now?”

  Shane was looking at the exposed nape of his Anabe Agency model’s neck, pushing aside his girl’s forward-and-upward ratted mane of crispy-processed hair with one hand, as he probed a small patch of stretched-tighter-neck-flesh with the forefinger of his free hand. For her part, the model (Coretta, Vibeke, perhaps Carling?) didn’t seem to notice that she was staring not at the rush and bustle of the pre-showing backstage chaos surrounding her, but instead at her own baseball-bat thin legs, and bas-relief patella jutting up sharply under the smooth, hard skin of her knees. A singular trait of the Anabe Agency girls—no bitching, no wiggling around, no constant chomping and cud-chewing of gum…just blessed stillness, and deep focus.

  “The damn bitch does brand them…like freaking range-roaming cattle.”

  Jacob didn’t need to ask who “the damn bitch” was—in the last five years, ever since she’d started agenting her astonishing girls, and inundating every major casting with dozens of her “finds’ the latest wünderkind of the modeling world’s name was known by both constant exposure and earned reputation to anyone and everyone in the fashion world. Ms. Stephanie Steele, also known and loathed as Miss Steal by all the modeling agencies whose girls routinely lost runway slots at major designer casting sessions to her impossibly skinny-emaciated-skeletal walking spaghetti-girls. Not that the other agents, the other agencies, didn’t try to get their girls to diet down to that gold standard of thinness, down past a size two into Zero-land, a place far more magical and lucrative than Fairyland or even Never-Never land could ever hope to be. But little petty nuisances like fainting spells during five-mile runs, heart failure and even the occasional actual death just kept getting in the way of any agency acquiring the perfect stable of übermodels…until Miss Steal came along, with a cadre of ultimate anorexics whose willpower and accompanying success manifested itself in their perverse thinness.

  No, Jacob corrected himself, Anabe Girls went beyond thin…all you had to do was add a “g” and you had what they really were—things, devoid of physical sexual markers like protruding breasts, or rounded buns. Tall, compressed slim-Jim women, who somehow found the energy to move up and down a runway, blink on occasion, and not fidget in the hair and make-up chairs even as they eschewed all manner of food or non-food like bottles of ice water, sticks of celery, or wads of gum.

  These…girls were so calorie-deprived, they didn’t even need two names (a joke already considered old in modeling circles after the Anabe Girls had been on the scene less than a year). So Jacob wasn’t totally sure if Shane was staring at the neck of Luryna or Lenmana as he quitted his station, and walked the five feet across the dressing area to where Shane continued to peer at One-Name’s exposed nape.

  Even through the loose tee-shirt the model wore, Jacob could easily see her spinal column, twin rows of protruding knobs creating small rounded shadows down her back as she leaned forward on the horizontal. Stabbing his forefinger at her long neck, Shane glanced up at Jacob and whispered: “Now this is sick.”

  All Jacob could do was nod dumbly, as he leaned over to peer at the Anabe Girl’s papery-fine flesh, which sported a slightly depressed pair of brown-branded initials—“SS”—just under the bottom of her hairline.

  “Goes to show you how seriously Miss Steal takes her position as CEO over there…the agency initials aren’t good enough for Miss Thingie,” Shane said as he gently pushed the ever-obedient model’s hair back down over her neck, then grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her body back into an upright position. Glancing over at her face, Jac
ob noticed that her expression never changed, nor did her eyes move. And despite the surrounding rumble of hairdressers, make-up people and dressers in the packed room, and the swish and snick of clothes being moved on racks, and shucked off hangers, Jacob was certain he’d heard Miss One-Name’s joints creak and ratchet in their sockets as Shane changed her position in that chair.…

  * * * *

  PerFectLeeThin: My family doesn’t understand what I’m doing—they don’t get how important it is for me to keep shaving another 100 calories off the daily total. It’s like an equation, 105 (weight) minus 100 (daily calorie deduction) equals PERFECTION (excuse my flame). You keep going until there’s nothing on either side of the minus sign. If they knew about the diet pills and the laxatives, and the reason why I only drink ice water, they’d freak. Which is why I am so glad I found this site. Looking at the triggers from all the others who have logged on and downloaded their photos inspires me. Even though I’m not thin enough to have my own trigger just yet. But I am working toward that day. Who know, maybe once I lose another ten pounds, I might be ready to leave my own trigger here. After that, I might get noticed by an agency.…

  * * * *

  “Go on, man, take a look at yours…it isn’t like she’s gotten up out of her chair when you walked away.”

  Jacob didn’t need to take a look over his shoulder to look at his Anabe Girl, still sitting in Zen-like calm on that uncomfortable chair behind him, to know that Shane was right. None of the Anabe Agency models were wont to cause any sort of pre-show problems during their assignments, which only added to their employability. No more supermodel-diva-rants, no threats that the latest Miss Thing wouldn’t dream of getting out of bed for less than $25,000 a day, no more haze of cigarette smoke as you tried to work on their hair or make-up prior to the start of the runway show.

  Perhaps it was their quietude, their sheer complacent willingness to affect any bizarre look, any out-there cosmetics the designers were wont to request prior to getting the girls dressed and shoved out on the runway proper that made them so appealing. Nah, Jacob sadly realized, it wasn’t their meekness that made them so irresistible during runway casting calls. It was their lack of flesh on the damn bones. Said lack which meant that anything draped on their pitiful excuses for bodies would hang and drape and flutter when they walked, in ways those same garments never could—never would—on any other woman with even one percent body fat.