Dark Delicacies II: Fear; More Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World's Greatest Horror Writers

by Unknown

  The bitch.

  For my part, my only thought was getting into a boat and trusting to luck that the rescue ship would arrive while night still lay upon the ocean. The richest people in the world were aboard the Titanic, for God’s sake! Other vessels must be racing one another to pick them up.

  Mustn’t they?

  In addition to the regular lifeboats the Titanic carried four canvas collapsible boats, and two of these were assembled and put in the lifeboat davits as the last of the wooden boats was lowered away. The other two, lashed uselessly to the top of the officers’ quarters, were too tangled up in rope to be dragged to the side, but men swarmed over them, trying to get them into shape to be floated off if and when, God help us all, the ship went under.

  And under she would go. I knew it, could hear with the hyperacute senses of the UnDead the snapping creak of her skeleton cracking under the weight of water pulling her down, and the whole stern end of her—God knows how many tons!—that was by this time lifted completely clear of the glass-smooth, obsidian ocean. The lights were beginning to glow red as the generators began to fail. As I fought my way through the mob to one of the collapsibles, a dapper little gentleman who’d been helping with the ropes turned to the officer in charge and said, “I’m going aboard.” When the officer—who’d been fighting off would-be male boarders for some minutes—opened his mouth to protest, the dapper gentleman said, “I’m Bruce Ismay; President of the White Star Line.” He stepped into the boat.

  As it swung clear of the deck I reached the rail: You may be President of the White Star Line, but if there’s room for you, there’s room for me…

  And I froze. I could have batted aside any of the officers who tried to prevent me, and the leap would have been nothing. For one moment, just before the men began to lower, less than two feet separated the boat’s gunwale from the rail; with a vampire’s altered muscle and inhuman strength, I’ve cleared gaps four and five times that with ease.

  Two feet of space, with running water not all that far below.

  Had I been assured of the return of my immortal soul by so doing, I could not have made that jump.

  And by the time I fought my way to the place where the other serviceable collapsible was being lowered, it was away. A number of passengers jumped at this point, when the boats were close enough to have picked them up. If you walked forward, it wasn’t all that far to the surface of the sea. I made my way to the roof of the officers’ quarters and joined the struggle to get the remaining two collapsibles unraveled from the snarl of ropes, get their canvas sides put up (the designer of the damn things is another on the long list of persons I hope will rot in Hell), and get them to the rails: if one fell upside-down (which it did) it was too heavy and too clumsy to be righted. I could feel the angle of the deck steepening, could tell by the dark water’s advance that the ship was being pulled forward and down.

  At 2:15 the bridge went under. A rolling wave of black water swept over the roof of the officers’ quarters and floated the right-side-up collapsible free. I scrambled aboard, fighting and clawing the army of other men trying to do the same thing; glancing back I could see the Titanic’s stern, swarming with humanity like ants on a floating branch, lift high out of the ocean. It was a fearful sight. Voices were screaming all around me and if I’d ever had a doubt that a vampire could pray, and pray sincerely, it was put to rest in that moment. I shrieked God’s name with the best of them as I threw myself into that miserable canvas tub, and we oared away, gasping, from the great ship as she snapped in half—dear God, with what a sound!—and her stern crashed back, the wave propelling our boat on its way.

  I saw her lights beneath the water as the bow pulled down, dragging the stern after it. The stern rose straight up for a moment, venting steam at every orifice and wreathed in the despairing wails of those wretches still trapped aboard; pointed briefly like a stumpy accusing finger at the beacon-cold blazons of the icy stars…

  … then sank.

  With my trunk aboard.

  And no rescue-boat in sight.

  It was twenty minutes after two in the morning. Dawn in the north Atlantic comes, in mid-April, at roughly five A.M.; first light about a half-hour before that.

  Dear God was all I could think. Dear God.

  The men—mostly crewmen—around me in the boat were praying, but I was at something of a loss for words. What I really wanted was for a light-proof, unsinkable coffin to drop down out of the heavens so I could go on killing people and drinking their blood for another few centuries. Even in my extremity, I didn’t think God would answer that one.

  So I waited.

  The collapsible’s sides never had been properly put up. We started shipping water almost immediately and barely dared stir at the oars, for fear of altering the boat’s precarious balance and sending us all down into those black miles of abyss. This consideration at least kept the men in the boat from rowing back to pick up swimmers, whose voices hung over the water like the humming of insects on a summer night. Some sixteen hundred people went into the sub-freezing water that night—I’m told most of the other boats, even those lightly laden, held off for fear of being swamped. One American woman tried to organize the other ladies in her boat to stage a rescue at this point and was roundly snubbed: so much for the tenderheartedness of the fair sex.

  The cries subsided after twenty minutes or so. The living don’t last long in water that cold.

  Then we could only wait, in fear perhaps more excruciating than we’d left behind us on the Titanic, for the canvas boat to slowly fill with water and sink away beneath our feet.

  Or in my case, for the earth to turn, and the sun to rise, and my flesh to spontaneously ignite in unquenchable fire.

  It was small consolation to reflect that such an event would briefly keep my fellow passengers warm and, one hoped, would take their minds off their own upcoming immersion.

  Should the boat sink before I burst into flames, I found myself thinking, my best chance would be to guide myself, as best I could, toward the Titanic wreck. The short periods of volition permitted by even a long succession of noons and midnights would never be enough to counteract the movement of the slow, deep-flowing ocean currents. Staying in the wreck itself would be my best and only chance.

  I could hear Simon’s voice in my mind, speculating about how divers were already learning to search for ships foundered in shallow waters, for the sunken treasures of the Spanish Main and the ancient Mediterranean. In time I fancy they shall discover even Atlantis, or at the very least whatever galleons went down chock-full of treasure in mid-ocean. You can be sure that whatever science can invent, treasure-hunters will not be long in adapting to their greed.

  The richest men and women in the world had been my fellow passengers. Very few of them stuffed their jewels in their pockets before getting into the lifeboats. Of course the treasure-hunters would come, as soon as science made it possible for them to do so.

  And even as I thought this, I sent up the feeblest of human prayers: Please, God, no…

  As if He’d listen.

  At 3:30, far off to the southeast, a flicker of white light pierced the blackness, followed by a cannon’s distant boom.

  A slight breeze had come up, making the ocean choppy and the air yet more bitterly cold. Tiny as a nail-clipping, a new moon hung over the eastern horizon. Men had begun to fall off the collapsible, which was now almost up to its gunwales in seawater that hovered right around the temperature of ice: fall silently, numb, dead within sight of salvation. I could see all around us the ocean filled with the pale-gleaming blobs of what the sailors called “trash” and “growlers,” miniature icebergs the size of motorcars or single-story houses, ghostly in the starlight. Among them, or west and south in the clearer water, I could make out the dark shapes of the other lifeboats. Could hear the voices of the passengers in them, tiny occasional drops of sound, like single crickets in the night.

  It wanted but an hour ‘til first light. I think I would have
wept, had it been possible for vampires to shed tears.

  The sky was staining gray when one of the lifeboats was sighted, slowly inching toward us. How far we’d drifted I don’t know; I’d sunk into a lethargy of horror, watching the slow growing of the light. It might have been the effect of the water in the boat, which was up to our knees by this time; there were only a dozen men left, and a woman from third class. I could barely move my head to follow the lifeboat’s agonizingly lentitudinous approach.

  Everything seemed to have slowed to the gluey pace of a helpless dream. It was as if time itself were slowly jelling to immobility with the cold. Far across the water—perhaps a mile or two, in the midst of the floating ice—loomed the dark bulk of a small freighter. All around it the lifeboats were creeping inward, some from miles away, like nearly frozen insects painfully dragging themselves toward the jam-pot that is the Heaven of their tiny lives.

  And I could see that, even if the lifeboat reached us—and each second it seemed that we’d go down under their very noses—there was no way under God’s pitiless sky that it would reach the freighter before full light.

  Don’t make me do this, God. Don’t make me…

  Like the laughter of God, light flushed up into the gray sky, turning all the icebergs to silver, the water to sapphire of incredible hardness and depth. At the same time my frozen flesh was suffused with unbearable heat, my skin itching, writhing… my flesh readying to burst into flame.

  Hiding in a boiler on the wreck, curled in some corner of the grand staircase or the Palm Court Lounge, I would have only to wait for the treasure-hunters to come.

  The cold and darkness would only seem eternal.

  Would hope in those circumstances be more cruel than the comfort of despair?

  I closed my eyes, tipped myself backward over the side.

  I was about to find out.

  DOG

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  JIM AARON THOUGHT maybe he ought not to go riding because the front tire of his bike felt as if it might be losing air. Nothing serious, but a long ride could cause problems. He had noticed that the tire felt a bit flat when he checked it yesterday morning after his ride, but this morning, after the fight with his wife over some stupid, unimportant thing, he had forgotten all about it. He was just glad to leave the house. If he wanted to put air in the tire, he had to go in the house to get the air pump out of the closet, and he didn’t want to do that, lest he stir things up again.

  He sat on the bike at the end of his drive and looked back at the brick house with its well-trimmed shrubs and felt something he couldn’t identify. Anger. Disappointment. He couldn’t place it, but whatever it was, it was gnawing at his insides like some kind of trapped, starving rat.

  He felt that he should be happier than ever. Six months ago, he had become a millionaire, and through no effort of his own. He had been working as a columnist for a newspaper, and it was a job he enjoyed, but then came the discovery of oil and gas on land he had forgotten he owned. Some godforsaken piece of wilderness out in the sticks, covered in brush and woods and full of snakes and chiggers. But just before his aunt died, she had sent in the oil and gas researchers, and by the time they got to it, found gas and oil, his aunt was gone, and she had left the land and the oil to him. It was pumping enough every month to give them more money than he made in a year as a humor columnist. A few papers had picked up his column, and it looked as if it were on its way, but now there was no need. He was up to his neck in money.

  Thing was, he and his wife fought all the time now. Over money, of course. How it should be spent, what they needed to own. The house they had now was very nice, very comfortable, and they had a gardener, but somehow it hadn’t made things better. They had been living okay, not special, but okay, and they were happy then, and now they had plenty of money, so why weren’t they happy? Even sex, something they enjoyed a lot before and were good at, had gone out the window. As of late he had begun to feel emasculated, and he felt his wife sensed it and responded in kind, treated him like a neutered pet instead of a man.

  The money had made him worthless, and he missed writing the column, wished now he hadn’t quit the job when the money came in. Should have stayed at it, he thought. He considered possibly getting his old job back, or maybe trying to write a humor book. Right now, however, it was all just a daydream from the seat of a bicycle.

  Whatever the problem, Jim decided he didn’t want to go back into that house for the air pump, or for that matter any other reason, at least not for a while. Not until Gail cooled off and he did the same. Besides, the exercise was good for him. Made him feel good, kept him healthy. He just wouldn’t ride far, spare the tire, come back to the house, and find some way to make it up to Gail. Fact was he couldn’t quite remember what it was they were fighting about.

  Jim eased the bike out onto the street. It was a small street, and the traffic was near nonexistent this time of morning, and only picked up in the afternoon when residents of the neighborhood came home from work. Besides, he had discovered at the far end of the street a little path that went off in the woods, and he could ride there without worrying about traffic at all. He wouldn’t go too far, in case the tire was actually losing air through a small hole instead of by common wear and time, but it would be a nice short ride, something to get the blood pumping and maybe clear his head of domestic cobwebs.

  He pedaled off, coasting mostly. It was a great day, with only one dark cloud in the sky. It looked as if someone had wadded up a piece of carbon paper and tossed it into a blue box full of huge puffs of white cotton. He lifted his head and looked up at it, felt the heat of the sun on his face.

  A dog barked as he rode by the Langston home. It was their poodle, Cuddles. Cuddles was white and untrimmed. He looked like a small ball of soft white wire. Cuddles continued to bark and run alongside for a while, then finally left the chase to go back home.

  It only took about twenty minutes to reach the end of the street, and by that time, Jim had worked up a pretty healthy sweat. He didn’t feel the least bit winded and had pedaled a lot of his frustration out. He thought of Gail, decided he had to make things up to her somehow, get back on track. Besides, after six years of marriage, they couldn’t be that far off track, not in just six months, when they should be happiest of all. He realized he was losing focus again, falling back into thinking about this morning, and that wasn’t what he needed. What he needed was to be in the moment, feel the wind on his face, feel his body working the bike, the road beneath the wheels bouncing him along.

  The woods at the end of the road were thick, and the path was of white sand, but it had not become so hot yet that it was like powder. Later in the year the East Texas sun would hammer it until it came apart, and if you were to pick up a handful of sand, it would run through your fingers like water. Now, however, there had been enough rain, and spring was not a complete memory, so it was packed solid.

  Jim eased off the street and onto the narrow, white sand path and stopped long enough to look at his watch. He wanted to time himself from here till the end of the path. He figured that would take about twenty to twenty-five minutes. The path got bumpier as you went in, ran alongside a creek on its right-hand side, and to the left the woods were thick with brambles with a few paths cut through them for hikers and bike riders. At least that was the intent. The place was considered community property, and the division manager, Gad Stevens, had cut paths through the woods for the kids to ride their bikes. Or to be more exact, he had roughed out some paths; their completion was some time away. The paths had to be trimmed wider, needed to be raked down. They were way too bumpy for bikes, and unlike the white sand path, they were of clay, and though they could be hard, they could also attract and hold water. He had heard Gad discussing the matter with a fellow at the filling station up the street, across the highway, while he was pumping gas next to him. They had talked, and he had listened. It wasn’t that wonderful a conversation, but Gad was a loud talker, and as a columnist, over the ye
ars, Jim had learned to be observant, at least in certain ways. All kinds of tidbits could become columns.

  He checked his watch. It was thirty seconds off the hour. Maybe, he thought, it might be a good idea to only ride to the big hill and back. That way, if the tire went down, he wouldn’t have to push the bike as far. He pushed his weight down on the handlebars. If the tire was low, it didn’t feel that low. It seemed sturdy. Maybe it had been his imagination.

  As he was considering this, he looked back over his shoulder, saw something that surprised him. Trotting down the street was what at first he thought to be a calf, but was in fact a very large black-and-tan dog. He had never seen the dog before. It was the size of a Great Dane, but it was much wider. It moved in powerful strides, held something in its mouth he couldn’t make out. It looked like a mop head. A very dirty mop head. The dog spotted him, stopped, turned its head slightly and studied him.

  Heavens, thought Jim, that dog is really, really big, and its breed… Jim couldn’t tell. A mixed dog. Maybe part Dane; part Saint Bernard… German shepherd? The animal seemed to have attributes of all those dogs, yet appeared to be something quite alien. A real mutt.

  Jim turned back to his watch. He had let the second hand pass the hour mark.

  To hell with it, he thought, eased the bike onto the path and began to ride at a brisk, if not full-out rate. As he rode, he heard something that at first made him think of the tire, that it might be losing air. But no, it was coming from the rear.

  He glanced back, saw the source of the sound. Behind him, he saw the huge dog, loping along, the mop in its mouth. It was gaining on him, and the dog’s paws striking the path were making a kind of thudding sound. Jim biked on, glancing back from time to time, and one of those times he was surprised to see just how close the dog was, and now he could see what was in its mouth, and it caused Jim to let out with an involuntary burst of air.