Fantastic Tales of Terror

by Eugene Johnson

  My head spun. The taste of blood filled my mouth. Blood ran down my chin as I spat and picked myself up. I snatched the Coly Bisley from my belt and took aim. On any other day, I was an excellent marksman—my prize sombrero, now cast aside in the mud, was testament to that—but pain and disorientation threatened to spoil my aim.

  I fired.

  Again and again, the muzzle flash illuminated the night. I fired until all bullets were expended, and still I pulled the trigger a few more times for good measure. Spoiled aim or not, I hit her at least twice, but she seemed unaffected.

  The ghostly woman glided to the bank and—gently—picked up the other children. She cuddled both of the infants to her breast. She was weeping still, as if she could not abide the very actions she took.

  I cast the useless pistol aside. My legs trembled. With my first step, I almost collapsed. But I kept my legs beneath me. I took a second step. A third. I splashed into the water once more.

  “Don’t!” I cried through a mouthful of blood.

  The woman dropped both infants into the water. For a second, they seemed to float. Then, they sank beneath the dark surface. In less than another second, they had vanished.

  I stood before the woman now—closer than I liked—and looked into her black, oily eyes.

  She spoke.

  Her words sounded as if they were uttered from beneath the surface of the river, from beneath the deluge of those dark and inhuman tears. There was desperation in those words, as if she needed me to understand. But I did not. Even if she had spoken clearly, I would not have comprehended. I was the fool who had come to Mexico without a talent for their native tongue.

  Behind me, I heard the calls of men. I heard footsteps along the bank. I heard a thunderous concussion.

  For the second time that night, I felt myself thrown by an outside force. I staggered forward, my knees giving out underneath me, and collapsed against the woman. She wrapped her arms around me. Her embrace was cold—oh so frigid!—but had she not held onto me, I would have surely fallen. Trembling, I glanced down at myself, and I saw blood soaking through my shirt. There was no pain. There was only numbness and iciness, but I knew I had been shot.

  I had been shot in the back, but the bullet had torn through my flesh, torn through my chest. My blood spattered the ghostly woman’s white shawl. Shakily, I raised my head to look into her dark eyes. She gazed back at me, piteously, and whispered in her strange, otherworldly tongue. Although I did not recognize the words, I understood her meaning.

  I was dying.

  The woman looked past me as my killers cried out again.

  “La Llorona!”

  I turned my head to look upon the men. There were two of them, and they were staggering away in fright. One of them held a smoking rifle. The other aimed his rifle into the air and fired it wildly, as if trying to scare the woman—La Llorona—off. They hooted and hollered as they fled into the darkness.

  La Llorona spoke softly to me.

  Her cold arms pulled away from me.

  “No!” I whimpered. “Please, no!”

  This apparition had terrified me. Now, though, I did not want her to release me. I had written death . . . courted death . . . many times, but now I did not want to feel the final shroud of death pulled over my face. I clutched at her, but my trembling fingers could not find purchase.

  I sank to my knees in the rushing water.

  La Llorona looked down at me and spoke softly.

  Slowly, I fell backwards. My blood uncoiled into the rushing water all around me. The river was not deep here, but it would cover my face once I was on my back. I thrashed about, trying to stand, but whatever strength I had left rushed out with my blood.

  I gasped for breath. Even that was denied to me. My asthma playing one last, cruel trick on me as I sank beneath the water.

  Through a rippling curtain of water, La Llorona stared at me.

  The river was far deeper than I imagined—impossibly deep—and I found myself tumbling through cold darkness. Water filled my mouth, rushed in my ears, blinded me as I rolled through the void. As I spun head over feet, I glimpsed one of the infants the woman had tossed into the water. The child—it was a boy—floated only a few feet from me. The swaddling cloth had fallen away from the child. Blisters and sores covered his body, red and swollen and angry, and diseased, black, necrotic “veins” of discoloration seemed to crawl from one open sore to the next, connecting them. I reached out, but the darkness swallowed the child up.

  Or perhaps it was I who was enveloped by emptiness.

  This, I knew, is how it felt to drown, not in the waters of the river, but in the depths of the black tears of La Llorona.

  Had I died already?

  Was this some endless Purgatory?

  And then—nothing.

  No pain. No fear. No confusion. I saw nothing, heard nothing. I felt myself sinking—into the depths but also into nothingness. I was weightless for a time, and then even the sensation of weightlessness vanished. There was no movement. The passing of time ceased to exist. I had been wrong before. This—this!—was death.

  But only for a short while.

  It was not agony that awakened me. My wound caused me no more pain. It was the wailing of infants.

  I opened my eyes and winced against the brightness. I was indoors now. I could see as much even though my eyes burned. But after the impenetrable darkness that had consumed me, even the meager glow of a dying candle might be blinding. I squeezed my eyes shut, then slowly opened them, letting only a little light in at a time. I ran my hands over my stomach. I was shirtless now, but I found no bandaged wound. After a moment, I opened my eyes. I am not ashamed to admit, I looked to myself first rather than tending to the crying infants around me. I sat up, gasping, finding no sign of injury at all. I was stretched out on a small bed, covered in a thin blanket.

  I felt as though I had awakened from a dream. That must be it! I had dreamed of the ghostly woman and of the infants. The cries of the infants around me must have somehow invaded my dreams!

  I was in an infirmary tent not too dissimilar from those that might have been set up near the battlefield in the war. Now, though, instead of mortally injured men crying out in pain, the tent was filled with bassinets, many of which contained a mewling, kicking baby. I saw no other adult.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The ground beneath my bare feet was hard-packed earth, but at least it was dry. Sitting on a chair next to the bed was my clothing, also dry, and I quickly grabbed them up and started to dress. My mind reeled as I saw my shirt, tears in the cloth stitched together, but the telltale reddish brown stains of blood set into the cloth. Once more I checked my stomach for a wound that was not there.

  I moved toward one of the bassinets and looked at the crying child within. I could not tell if this was one of the children I had seen at the river or not. One baby looks the same as the next to my eyes. This child, though, displayed none of the blisters or sores I had seen upon the baby’s flesh as I sank beneath the water. Once more I ran a hand across my stomach. My shirt was stained by blood, but no bullet hole could be found beneath.

  Light flooded into the tent as a flap was drawn back and a woman entered. Like the woman I had seen at the river, she was dressed all in white. She carried an infant in her arms. The infant, I saw, was dripping wet.

  The woman paused for a second, looking at me curiously. Then she said something in Spanish and hurried across the room. Using a cloth, she dried the baby and placed it into one of the empty bassinets. She stood over the bassinet for a moment or two, regarding the child.

  “La Llorona?” I asked.

  The woman turned toward me, shook her head, and touched her cheek, using her finger to trace a line of a tear that was not there.

  She spoke again, for all the good it did, and she motioned toward the entrance to the tent. She wanted me to see what I would find beyond. Or maybe she only wanted to be rid of me. Either way, I obliged her.

  I st
epped out of the tent and found myself in a small village. There were no permanent structures here, only more tents clustered together upon the grassy banks of a winding river. The air here smelled good, and the sun shone upon my face and warmed me. A lush forest rose up around the village.

  As I took note of my surroundings, a group of children ran past, laughing and squealing. The youngest might have been four. The oldest, twelve. They were happy and carefree.

  Elsewhere in the village, women in white hurried past. Some of them carried baskets of bread or buckets of water. Others carried swaddled infants. None of them were crying, and none of them paid me any mind. I wondered if I had been taken in by some sort of convent.

  I walked toward the river, where I saw another woman in white standing ankle-deep in the rushing, crystal clear waters. She was not crying. Instead, she smiled happily as she scanned the water flowing past her feet. Still, she reminded me of La Llorona, and I called out to her. She paid me no mind as she stared into the river. She stood almost statue-like for a very long time.

  When she finally moved, it was with a sudden quickness. She reached into the water with a splash. And when she pulled her hands back up, she held a crying baby in her hands. She shushed the baby, held it close, bouncing it gently, trying to console it. Carrying the child, she hurried to the bank and walked past me, barely acknowledging my presence. I watched as she took the child to the infirmary tent. Another white-clad woman passed me. She waded out into the river and assumed a statue-like stance, watching the water.

  I laughed—laughed to assure myself that I was not going mad.

  I turned in place, looking across the river and the tents and the women in white and the playing children.

  “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.”

  Though the people around me spoke Spanish, I realized that I was no longer in Mexico. I was no longer in the world I knew. I was in some . . . other place. Perhaps this was the world that lies beyond death, though I felt very much alive. Perhaps this was some hidden realm La Llorona and her sisters in white had discovered. Here, they took sickly children—and the occasional injured gringo—to heal them. Perhaps I had been brought here for a great purpose. The tents, I knew, could be replaced by permanent structures. There were trees and stones aplenty to raise homes and schoolhouses. The children might need a man of letters to share his knowledge. I stood upon the foundation of a new society in—

  A new world.

  How long had people been coming here?

  There were no buildings, it was true, suggesting that this place was only newly discovered. Or perhaps the women in white moved from place to place, following the path of La Llorona in the real world. Could there be other people beyond the expanse of the forest? Other societies? Other cities? How long had La Llorona been casting babies into the waters of the river? Was she the only agent of this world at work in our own? Could it be that some of those infants had grown to adulthood here, in a place that might very well be free of sickness and pain, and might they have set out to explore and build on their own?

  The laughing children ran by once more, happy in this world.

  And if I—in my arrogance—thought I might help them build something better, might teach them of the “civilized” world, then I was entertaining cruelty.

  Between cruelty and curiosity, I would much rather indulge one than the other.

  Might I get myself into even more trouble in this world? Well, of course. After all, at first glance it looked very much like the world I had known up until now.

  “A gringo,” I mused, “in . . . wherever the Hell I am.”

  THE LONDON ENCOUNTER

  VINCE A. LIAGUNO

  She was well into her fourth glass of vodka and third Seconal when she heard the knock at the door. It was just past midnight, the overcast London sky as black as her mood. She paused, cigarette halfway to slightly parted lips, and considered answering it.

  Probably just a fan wanting to see the goddamn ruby slippers.

  She laughed aloud to no one in particular in the empty parlor of the mews flat she and Mickey were renting in the Chelsea suburb and took a long drag of the cigarette. She and Mickey—her husband of only three months—had fought earlier. They had been watching television—some laborious documentary on the royal family—when he had started in on her about the drinking. At that point, she was barely halfway through the second vodka and had exploded.

  She liked to think anger was a sign of passion in a marriage, and she should know; Mickey was her fifth. She knew from experience with the others that the control started shortly after the honeymoon. The nagging would start disguised as innocuous concern over the amount of sleeping pills she took or—in tonight’s case—her preference for an evening cocktail or two. Nagging turned to hounding, the hounding to open contempt. How she despised that arrogant male dominance, yet always seemed to find herself craving its stabilizing force in her life.

  Tonight—last night, she corrected herself, glancing at the mantle clock—she had run from their flat in a tirade of profanity, screaming all the way down Cadogan Lane. She had no doubt the neighbors thought her a vulgar American of the worst sort. By the time she had walked off the rage and returned—popping the first Seconal—Mickey was gone. Likely off at the particular kind of gentlemen’s clubs he had such fondness for and the patrons with whom he seemed to share such affinity.

  A second knock at the door.

  She heard the sound as if muffled through layers of gauze, the Seconal’s anesthetic effect kicking in with its comforting numbness. Mickey wouldn’t be knocking—unless he’d forgotten his keys. She rose from the settee on wobbly legs, expertly balancing vodka glass in one hand, lit cigarette in the other. She was nothing if not a pro.

  “Who is it?” she asked through the door, the annoyance in her slurred voice impatient and unmistakable.

  The response that came back was barely audible through the wood of the door, as if the light drizzle outside had dampened the caller’s words, drowning them out. Or, more likely, the voice broke apart en route from ears and mind having been diluted and then fragmented as it traveled through the filter of the red devils in her system. Although muted and garbled to her conscious mind, subconsciously, she heard an accent, clipped and enunciated. Decidedly British.

  Inhibitions lowered by the combination of booze and barbiturates, she threw the door open. Somewhere, deep in the recesses of the rational part of her mind the drugs and alcohol were suppressing, she knew this to be a reckless act bolstered by artificial nerve. She knew this on an instinctual level, just like she knew a man’s—often a husband’s—secret predilections or sexual proclivities.

  “Yes?” she demanded impatiently. “What do you want? An autograph? You have some goddamn nerve coming to my home at this hour.” In her mind, the words came out with precision and a hint of conceit. (She was, after all, a goddamn celebrity despite the appearance of her modest lodgings.) In reality, the words blended into each other with careless incoherence.

  “Well?” she said when her caller didn’t immediately answer. She stood in the open doorway, cigarette hand gripping the door but doing a poor job of keeping her from swaying. The air—despite being the end of June—had a slight chill, the light rain cooling her. She shuddered involuntarily as she considered her nocturnal visitor.

  He was tall. Toweringly so, actually—or so it seemed through the sieve of her drug-addled perception. She was an unreliable narrator to the unfolding events, which she would readily admit to herself had she been of mind to do so. The man’s face was shrouded in shadow beneath a tall top hat, his long torso cloaked in a lengthy, voluminous cape-like garment. There was something out of place about the man’s appearance, but she was in no condition to identify what exactly it was.

  “Good evening, Miss Garland.” The words were soft-spoken, genteel, and incongruous to his imposing frame. “My sincerest apologies for calling on you at such a late hour but I’ve . . . just gotten in, as it we
re.”

  “Jesus,” she said with no pretense of hiding her disgust, “even when you’re being downright rude, you Brits are so goddamn polite about it.” She took a swig of vodka before adding, “So? What do you want?”

  “I’m a huge admirer, Miss Garland. And although my visit must appear to be quite unorthodox to you at this ungodly hour, I can assure you that I’ve traveled very far to meet you. Farther than you could ever imagine.” The man’s voice had an odd quality, like an echo in a cavernous chamber. She squinted to see his face, which seemed obscured by black grains of sand, shifting and ever-moving. She blinked to try and clear the optical illusion. The red dillies were working overtime on her sensory perception tonight.

  “Listen, Mack,” she said, unassuaged, “I don’t give a good rat’s ass where you’re from or how far you came, but the show’s over. Miss Garland has left the building. Got it, pal?”

  “I’ve upset you,” the man said, that oddly hollow voice suffused with an unmistakable note of regret. The effect was disarming. “I’ve thoughtlessly inconvenienced you, Miss Garland, and irrevocably cast myself in the poorest of lights. Please, accept my humblest of apologies. I bid you goodnight.” Tipping the brim of his hat, he turned to leave.

  She guzzled the rest of her vodka, looking down at the empty glass. She thought about her five-week supper club run at the Talk of the Town last December, a sudden flash of the crowd growing ugly, catcalling and throwing things—empty cigarette packs, crackers, rolls—onto the stage. She had been a few minutes late, yes—but that was no excuse for the abject rudeness of the crowd. It wasn’t she who had changed, nor had her talent diminished—it was the crowds who grew vulgar and crass. Long gone were the MGM days and the throngs of adoring fans who lined up with their darling little autograph books, politely gushing praise and citations of favorite pictures. On days when she was in a rush, fans were happy just to get a glimpse of her, waving as she was ushered away from the studio or into a theater at a movie premiere. Now they heckled and hollered their impoliteness on whim.