by Harvey Click
His instinct told him to get moving before it did, but instead he stood there and taunted Grimes. “Can’t you make it do anything more interesting?” he yelled. “Maybe you can make it tap dance.”
The thing picked up a rock and hurled it at him. He ducked, but it caught his shoulder and hurt. It was a real rock all right, and another one grazed the side of his head as he sprinted toward the house. He heard hoarse panting a few feet behind him getting closer, and then the thing grabbed the back of his jacket and pulled him down.
It squatted over him heavy and stinking and stared down at his face, demented yellow eyes sunk deep in a clenched ball of brutal features that reminded him of something very familiar, but he couldn’t remember what. Ape lips grinned and drooled, making animal noises almost like words.
Dexter felt in the weeds and found a good sharp stick and rammed the point deep into its right eye. The thing rolled backwards and roared while he scrambled to his feet and ran. He heard it clambering onto the porch behind him as he shoved past Grimes into the house.
Grimes slammed the door and ran his hand quickly over the ten iron studs. “You’re safe in here,” he said. “It can’t get in.”
Dexter sat down on a bench in the foyer and rubbed his shoulder. It was going to hurt for a long time.
“What the hell is it?” he asked
“A voider from the Twisted Zoo,” Grimes said. “Even in that unformed void, things strive to exist. I daresay you brought one of them home with you.”
It pounded on the door, and Dexter jumped up. “Is that locked?”
“I told you, it can’t get in,” Grimes said.
The pounding stopped, but the voider growled and started scratching the wood.
“I hope you’re right,” Dexter said. He sat back down and felt the side of his neck. It was bleeding. “If that thing’s real, you better not let it run around loose out there killing the neighbors. It damn near broke my shoulder.”
Grimes smiled. “Don’t worry, it’ll stay near the house,” he said. “You’re the only one it wants to kill.”
“Yeah, I get the picture. I won your wrestling bout, but I’m still stuck here.”
“It’s your atavistic twin,” Grimes said. “Surely you noticed the resemblance? It’s tied to you like a shadow now, but will be free to roam as soon as it kills you. Maybe you should clean those scratches. I have an ointment that will heal them.”
“What is it, skin of toad and dead man’s hair?”
“No, just something from Walgreens. Let me see if I can find it.”
The growling and scratching stopped as soon as Grimes disappeared into the hallway. No wonder, Dexter thought. Nothing out there but hypnotic illusion that evaporates when hypnotist leaves the room. Maybe there was a hint of truth in the old man’s lies. Void, unformed world, Twisted Zoo—they sounded like mystic-babble names for the R-complex, the ancient reptile brain buried deep beneath the neocortex, and that’s where the thing had come from. Hypnosis had triggered the deepest part of Dexter’s unconscious mind to hallucinate his own unwashed atavistic id-self.
He knew that the power of suggestion can cause wounds and even death. Some people bleed from the palms of their hands because the Jesus story gets under their skin. Once he had watched a mental patient being beaten senseless by invisible fists because an old woman had given him the evil eye. Somehow the man’s nose got broken, just as Dexter’s hands and neck got scratched while he scrabbled around in the yard thinking there was a monster on top of him. He felt ashamed of himself, a thirty-five-year-old boy still scared of shadows.
But what if the thing out there wasn’t imaginary? he wondered. After all, the Talking Horn really talked.
He got up and took one of the swords from the wall. Nice piece of steel, sharp and well balanced. He put his ear against the door and couldn’t hear anything, so he eased it open a few inches and didn’t see anything. He stepped out on the porch with his sword ready. It felt good in his hands, like hard cold logic after an evening of murky madness.
In the unlikely event that Grimes intended to tell him anything true about Mary or the Horn, it could be done over the phone as easily as face to face—and right now Dexter wanted to be far away from this place. The wind had picked up and was tossing tree shadows across the weeds, but they were just shadows and he saw nothing crouching inside them as he climbed down the steps. His Explorer was parked only forty feet away. Moon hanging bright above an ink-smudge cloud, bats dipping and wheeling, everything seemed safe and normal except there was a zoo-stink of fresh animal shit and the yard was too quiet. Not quiet exactly, more like the huffing hush of faint breath.
Maybe it was his own, and he stood still halfway to his car and held his breath and listened and knew it wasn’t his own because the air kept breathing after he stopped. It was there in the brush beside the garage, and he made out its glittering teeth and eyes. Then he saw they were just moonlight gleaming off a garbage can.
He reminded himself that the power of suggestion is stronger than logic, old reptile brain coiled cold and poisonous like a snake beneath the neocortex, nothing to fear but the primordial Doppelganger inside the id, but he still heard hushed breathing somewhere near the garage, hush hush, huff huff. He watched and listened and decided that what he heard was blood pumping in his head. The sound stopped as soon as he reached his car. Nothing like two tons of steel and four good tires to trump the bogeyman, he thought.
He looked back at the house while he fished in his pocket for the keys, expecting to see Grimes on the front porch aiming his walking stick at him to weave a new illusion, but no one was there. It hadn’t been a wasted evening, he told himself. At least he knew who his enemy was, and he knew some ways to make trouble for the old bastard.
The car windows were steamed up, so he didn’t see the thing sitting there in the driver’s seat grinning at him until he opened the door. He stared at it for a second, and that was too long. It landed on him hard and smashed the air out of his lungs. It knocked the sword from his hand and grabbed his feet and dragged him over weeds and thistles and fallen branches into the trees and dumped him face-down in the shallow grave.
Dexter rolled over painfully and rubbed dirt from his eyes. The voider stood above him beating its chest with triumph. It was probably about his height except for the simian stoop, and its features were his own but five million years devolved, a distant relative not distant enough, face more savage than ape and even more savage than human, insane idiotic intelligence drooling from its lips and malevolent yellow eye. It had only one of them now; what was left of the right eye oozed down its cheek like custard from a red socket.
There was no way to climb out of the grave with it reeling up there like a punch-drunk boxer swinging those massive fists, but Dexter tried anyway. It kicked him back down and started heaving loose dirt on top of him.
Suddenly the right side of its face exploded. Flesh rained down, and skull bone gleamed white through mangled gore as the thing reared up and screamed.
Dexter pulled himself dazed and bruised out of the grave and saw it running away through the trees. He saw Grimes standing nearby, smoke still fuming out the muzzle of his shotgun.
“Hurry up,” Grimes said. “A little bit of buckshot won’t slow that thing down for long.”
Dexter started limping toward his car, but when he saw the voider ducking behind it he changed his mind and followed Grimes to the house.
Chapter Eight
Darrel Kane didn’t care for the little crumblies at the bottom of a potato chip bag, all salt and no crunch, but they were the only edibles left in the car. He’d already eaten a jar of peanuts, a bag of pork rinds, three beef jerkies, a pickled pig’s foot, a bag of cheese twists, and four Twinkies, but he was still hungry because he’d been parked out here off some boon-dock back road since sundown and now it was past ten. He should be snug and warm at the safe-house several miles away, where he had another bag of chips and a roll of summer sausage and some pumpernickel unles
s the bozos had eaten his stash, but the Indian bitch had some wild hair up her ass about watching the Radcliff property so she’d sent him out here to freeze his nuts off. He nibbled on the little crumblies until there was nothing left except grease and looked at his watch again. It hadn’t exactly stopped, but it sure didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
Kane heard a car in the distance and hoped it was just traffic noise blowing in from the main road. There’d been only a few cars all night, but whenever one drove by he was afraid its headlights would spot him because his own car wasn’t very well hidden. The driveway to the Radcliff place was around the bend up ahead, but he wasn’t sure this woods was part of the old woman’s property, and he didn’t feel like explaining to some shotgun-toting landowner why he was parked there. “Sorry, buddy, just had to pull over for a quick wank. You know how it is when the urge comes over you . . .”
The noise crept closer, taking its time, and Kane ducked when headlights flickered through the trees. A pickup truck with a camper cap moved slowly past his hiding place, and he watched it crawl away till the trees swallowed its tail lights. He was pretty sure he heard it drive on past the old woman’s place, and pretty sure was good enough for him. Princess Minnehaha could prowl around in the woods and get her leg caught in a fucking bear trap if she wanted to, but he wasn’t in the mood.
Kane started the car and was cranking up the heater when his cell phone rang. He cursed and picked it up.
“Anything out there?” the Indian asked.
“Nothing but me, and I ain’t supposed to be,” he said. “This kinda shit’s not in my job description.”
“Your job description is to follow my orders,” she said. “Where are you?”
“I’m standing in some Goddamn bushes next to the house freezing my balls off. I’m ready to come in now.”
It occurred to him she might hear his car running, and as he leaned forward to shut it off his belly bumped the horn.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Uh, I didn’t hear nothing.”
“You’re sitting in your fucking car,” the Indian said.
“Maybe so, but don’t get your panties in a twist. I can see the house just fine.”
“The next car you hear is probably gonna be mine,” she said, “and if I find you sitting around picking your nose I’m going to cut you a new nostril to pick.”
“I can go peep in those windows all night,” he said, “but I ain’t gonna see nothing ‘cause nobody knows nothing about this Goddamn place. You hear what I’m saying? I mean there’s nothing in Radcliff’s article says anything about this damn place.”
The Indian’s silence sounded creepier than anything she could say. He felt her anger crackling in his ear.
“Okay, fine, I’ll go out and take a look,” he said, “but lemme ask you just one question. This is a female intuition thing, isn’t it? You got some kinda female feeling, so I gotta go out there and traipse around in the dark ‘cause your touchy-feelies are acting up.”
He hung up and got out of the car. Grimes had told him she was in charge, and the old man was going to be pissed off enough when he figured out half Kane’s expense account money had been lost on a few bad horses. He zipped his jacket, but the cold breeze didn’t seem to notice.
“Female intuition,” he muttered. “Just another name for PMS.”
He set off toward the Radcliff house, but with all these trees blocking the moon the house could be any damn place.
***
Naomi Radcliff sat in her study and stared at the dim Tiffany lamp on her desk. She was thinking that old people don’t need Indian magic to communicate with the dead. Just stare at a lamp for a few minutes and there you are, wading through the past and talking with the long deceased.
The dead person she was talking with tonight was her father, Winslow Radcliff, though he was doing all the talking. Naomi was a sleepy little girl, and her father was telling her a story. Some nights he would read from a book, but most nights he’d make up his own tales, and nobody could spin a yarn like Daddy. She could hear his deep soothing voice as clearly as living voices once had sounded when her ears were young and keen.
“Late one night an old beggar dressed in foul-smelling rags showed up at the door,” he said. “He said he was hungry and begged for bread and water, but the princess could see that he was an ogre in disguise.”
No wonder I wade through the past, Naomi thought. There’s no future left.
She was sitting beneath Ebenezer’s portrait. She had felt free from his grim face for a few hours after discovering the empty safe, but then she’d asked Miss Barkley to replace it on the wall. Her life was behind her now like the portrait, nothing left but the past, and the only moments of it worth reliving were those years when she was her father’s special princess.
A tapping at the study door startled her, and Miss Barkley stuck her head in. “It’s past ten,” she said. “Aren’t you sleepy?”
“No.”
The door slammed shut, and Naomi muttered to herself. If Miss Barkley was tired, it surely wasn’t from working too hard. Still, it wasn’t fair to keep her up: she was old enough to need her sleep but not old enough to forget how to sleep. One couldn’t expect much conversation from her, but over the years the two women had developed something that maybe one could call friendship if one weren’t too particular.
We have one thing in common, Naomi thought. We’ve both wasted our lives. She wasted hers protecting the house from cobwebs, and I wasted mine protecting the Horn from thieves. We’ve both done a miserable job.
For a frustrating moment she couldn’t recall Miss Barkley’s first name. Hannah. Hannah Barkley. So much for friendship, Naomi thought, and she waded back into the past.
Daddy had never liked the Talking Horn. Left to himself he probably would have thrown it into the quicksand, but her mother, though she wasn’t blood of Ebenezer, had rigidly upheld the tradition. The year Naomi turned eighteen, the stones chose her as Listener.
“You will be my protector,” Ebenezer had whispered that dark night so long ago. “I choose you to guard the talking talisman and the sacred ritual.”
It was a voice from beyond the grave. It was solid proof of an afterlife far more compelling than the Presbyterian sermons she heard each Sunday, but now that the next world was so near at hand, she no longer wanted it to be the same place where Ebenezer was. She had learned too much about him to want to be anywhere near him. He was a liar, kidnapper, thief, child-killer, and sorcerer, and the place where he moaned out his words each year was the place Presbyterian preachers called hell.
She heard Miss Barkley tapping on the door again. “All right, I’m ready now,” Naomi said. “It’s so filthy in here, I’d rather be in my dusty bedroom. Tomorrow you’d better earn your pay and do some cleaning.”
The door opened. It wasn’t Miss Barkley, but even in the dim light Naomi recognized the figure. It was Death. Death was tall and skinny and dressed in black. One of its eyes stared at her and the other eye stared at the world beyond.
Naomi told herself she wasn’t frightened, but the chilly draft through the doorway made her shiver. She pulled her shawl close around her shoulders and stared Death straight in the eye without flinching. It stepped in swiftly, cold air clinging like mist to its long black coat, and grasped the handles of her wheelchair. It pushed her down the hallway to the parlor.
Miss Barkley was there to watch her die. She was sitting in the priceless oak armchair carved by Ebenezer. No one was allowed to sit in that chair, and Naomi was about to scold her when she noticed that Miss Barkley’s arms and legs were bound to the chair with rope. A gag was tied around her face.
Death let go of Naomi’s wheelchair and stepped in front of her, and she saw that it wasn’t Death after all. It was just common white trash with a cowboy hat.
“I already questioned your friend here,” he said. “Tell me the same things she told me, and I’ll figure you’re both telling the truth. Where’s the Ta
lking Horn?”
“I suppose you mean the telephone,” Naomi said. “It’s in the other room.”
The man grinned and chewed. “Just tell me the truth and no one will get hurt,” he said. “In the morning you’ll think this was nothing but a dream. You won’t even remember my face.”
“I’ll remember your stink,” Naomi said.
He stopped grinning and pulled a knife from his boot. “This ain’t getting off to a real good start,” he said. “Let’s try again.”
“You’re too late,” Naomi said. “It’s already been stolen.”
“Who stole it?”
“I don’t know.”
The tall man peeled off one of his black gloves and scratched the deep scar running down from his dead eye. His fingernails were yellow and dirty, and Naomi noticed that one of them was bruised black.
“I don’t much care for killing women folk,” he said. “But if you want to watch me cut up your friend, I reckon I can give you a good show.”
Naomi wondered why she wanted to protect Mary Ash, of all people. Maybe something she had liked about the girl’s face, or maybe if this monster knew her name it would lead him to Dexter. She was too confused to think.
“I told you I don’t know anything,” she said.
The man jabbed Miss Barkley’s brawny arm with the point of his knife and made it bleed. She jerked against her ropes, eyes bulging with fear.
“Let’s try and do this nice and peaceful,” he said. “Just tell me who stole it, and we can all be friends.”
Naomi remembered a story her father had told her. “Late one night an old beggar dressed in foul-smelling rags showed up at the door with a gun,” she said. “I never learned his name.”
“That ain’t what your friend said, so I reckon she’s a liar,” the man said. He knelt and traced a varicose vein in Miss Barkley’s leg with the tip of his knife. Blood soaked her white sock red and dripped to the oriental rug. “I’m gonna have to keep bleeding this liar till some truth leaks out,” he said.