The Best New Horror 2
Page 51
“Who shot me? An’ Cooper, he said Creech, then he hollered fer Creech an’ Colonel Lightfoot. Colonel Lightfoot says, boys, we got to bury this. An’ Creech goes back to his home place an’ fetches a spade an’ a ol’ shovel, them bein’ all he’s got. He’s shakin’ so bad they jest rattled together, do you see? Colonel Lightfoot an’ this Cooper, they seed he couldn’t dig, so they goes hard at it. Pretty soon they looked around, an’ Creech was gone, an’ the soul-sucker, too.”
The old man paused dramatically. “Next time anybody seed the soul-sucker, ’twas Creech. So he’s the one I seed, or one of his kin anyhow. Don’t never shoot anythin’ without you’re dead sure what ’tis, young feller.”
Cued by his closing words, Sarah appeared in the doorway. “Supper’s ready. I set a place for you, Mr Cooper. Pa said. You sure you want to stay? Won’t be fancy.”
The Nebraskan stood up. “Why, that was very kind of you, Miss Thacker.”
His granddaughter helped the old man rise. Propped by the cane in his right hand and guided and supported by her on his left, he shuffled slowly into the house. The Nebraskan followed and held his chair.
“Pa’s washin’ up,” Sarah said. “He was changin’ the oil in the tractor. He’ll say grace. You don’t have to get my chair for me, Mr Cooper, I’ll put on till he comes. Just sit down.”
“Thank you.” The Nebraskan sat across from the old man.
“We got ham and sweet corn, biscuits, and potatoes. It’s not no company dinner.”
With perfect honesty the Nebraskan said, “Everything smells wonderful, Miss Thacker.”
Her father entered, scrubbed to the elbows but bringing a tang of crankcase oil to the mingled aromas from the stove. “You hear all you wanted to, Mr Cooper?”
“I heard some marvelous stories, Mr Thacker,” the Nebraskan said.
Sarah gave the ham the place of honor before her father. “I think it’s truly fine, what you’re doin’, writin’ up all these old stories ’fore they’re lost.”
Her father nodded reluctantly. “Wouldn’t have thought you could make a livin’ at it, though.”
“He don’t, pa. He teaches. He’s a teacher.” The ham was followed by a mountainous platter of biscuits. Sarah dropped into a chair. “I’ll fetch our sweet corn and potatoes in just a shake. Corn’s not quite done yet.”
“O Lord, bless this food and them that eats it. Make us thankful for farm, family, and friends. Welcome the stranger ’neath our roof as we do, O Lord. Now let’s eat.” The younger Mr Thacker rose and applied an enormous butcher knife to the ham, and the Nebraskan remembered at last to switch off his tape recorder.
Two hours later, more than filled, the Nebraskan had agreed to stay the night. “It’s not real fancy,” Sarah said as she showed him to their vacant bedroom, “but it’s clean. I just put those sheets and the comforter on while you were talkin’ to Grandpa.” The door creaked. She flipped the switch.
The Nebraskan nodded. “You anticipated that I’d accept your father’s invitation.”
“Well, he hoped you would.” Careful not to meet his eye, Sarah added, “I never seen Grandpa so happy in years. You’re goin’ to talk to him some more in the mornin’? You can put the stuff from your suitcase right here in this dresser. I cleared out these top drawers, and I already turned your bed down for you. Bathroom’s on past Pa’s room. You know. I guess we seem awful country to you, out here.”
“I grew up on a farm near Fremont, Nebraska,” the Nebraskan told her. There was no reply. When he looked around, Sarah was blowing a kiss from the doorway; instantly she was gone.
With a philosophical shrug, he laid his suitcase on the bed and opened it. In addition to his notebooks, he had brought his well-thumbed copy of The Types of the Folktale and Schmit’s Gods Before the Greeks, which he had been planning to read. Soon the Thackers would assemble in their front room to watch television. Surely he might be excused for an hour or two? His unexpected arrival later in the evening might actually give them pleasure. He had a sudden premonition that Sarah, fair and willow-slender, would be sitting alone on the sagging sofa, and that there would be no unoccupied chair.
There was an unoccupied chair in the room, however; an old but sturdy-looking wooden one with a cane bottom. He carried it to the window and opened Schmit, determined to read as long as the light lasted. Dis, he knew, had come in his chariot for the souls of departed Greeks, and so had been called the Gatherer of Many by those too fearful to name him; but Hop Thacker’s twisted and almost pitiable soul-sucker appeared to have nothing else in common with the dark and kingly Dis. Had there been some still earlier deity who clearly prefigured the soul-sucker? Like most folklorists, the Nebraskan firmly believed that folklore’s themes were, if not actually eternal, for the most part very ancient indeed. Gods Before the Greeks seemed well indexed.
Dead, their mummies visited by An-uat, 2.
The Nebraskan nodded to himself and turned to the front of the book.
An-uat, Anuat, “Lord of the Land (the Necropolis),” “Opener to the North.” Though frequently confused with Anubis, to whom he lent his form, it is clear that An-uat the jackal-god maintained a separate identity into the New Kingdom period. Souls that had refused to board Ra’s boat (and thus to appear before the throne of the resurrected Osiris) were dragged by An-uat, who visited their mummies for this purpose, to Tuat, the lightless, demon-haunted valley stretching between the death of the old sun and the rising of the new. An-uat and the less threatening Anubis can seldom be distinguished in art, but where such distinction is possible, An-uat is the more powerfully muscled figure. Van Allen reports that An-uat is still invoked by the modern (Moslem or Coptic) magicians of Egypt, under the name Ju’gu.
The Nebraskan rose, laid the book on his chair, and strode to the dresser and back. Here was a five-thousand-year-old myth that paralleled the soul-sucker in function. Nor was it certain by any means that the similarity was merely coincidental. That the folklore of the Appalachians could have been influenced by the occult beliefs of modern Egypt was wildly improbable, but by no means impossible. After the Civil War the United States Army had imported not only camels but camel drivers from Egypt, the Nebraskan reminded himself; and the escape artist Harry Houdini had once described in lurid detail his imprisonment in the Great Pyramid. His account was undoubtedly highly colored—but had he, perhaps, actually visited Egypt as an extension of some European tour? Thousands of American servicemen must have passed through Egypt during the Second World War, but the soul-sucker tale was clearly older than that, and probably older than Houdini.
There seemed to be a difference in appearance as well; but just how different were the soul-sucker and this Ju’gu, really? An-uat had been depicted as a muscular man with a jackal’s head. The soul-sucker had been . . .
The Nebraskan extracted the tape recorder from his pocket, rewound the tape, and inserted the earpiece.
Had been “like to a man, only crooked-legged an’ wry neck.” Yet it had not been a man, though the feature that separated it from humanity had not been specified. A dog-like head seemed a possibility, surely, and An-uat might have changed a good deal in five thousand years.
The Nebraskan returned to his chair and reopened his book, but the sun was already nearly at the horizon. After flipping pages aimlessly for a minute or two, he joined the Thackers in their living room.
Never had the inanities of television seemed less real or less significant. Though his eyes followed the movements of the actors on the screen, he was in fact considerably more attentive to Sarah’s warmth and rather too generously applied perfume, and still more to a scene that had never, perhaps, taken place: to the dead mule lying in the field long ago, and to the marksmen concealed where the woods began. Colonel Lightfoot had no doubt been a historical person, locally famous, who would be familiar to the majority of Mr Thacker’s hearers. Laban Creech might or might not have been an actual person as well. Mr Thacker had—mysteriously, now that the Nebraskan came to cons
ider it—given the Nebraskan’s own last name, Cooper, to the third and somewhat inessential marksman.
Three marksmen had been introduced because numbers greater than unity were practically always three in folklore, of course; but the use of his own name seemed odd. No doubt it had been no more than a quirk of the old man’s failing memory. Remembering Cooper, he had attributed the name incorrectly.
By imperceptible degrees, the Nebraskan grew conscious that the Thackers were giving no more attention to the screen than he himself was; they chuckled at no jokes, showed no irritation at even the most insistent commercials, and spoke about the dismal sitcom neither to him nor to one another.
Pretty Sarah sat primly beside him, her knees together, her long legs crossed at their slender ankles, and her dishwater-reddened hands folded on her apron. To his right, the old man rocked, the faint protests of his chair as regular, and as slow, as the ticking of the tall clock in the corner, his hands upon the crook of his cane, his expression a sightless frown.
To Sarah’s left, the younger Mr Thacker was almost hidden from the Nebraskan’s view. He rose and went into the kitchen, cracking his knuckles as he walked, returned with neither food nor drink, and sat once more for less than half a minute before rising again.
Sarah ventured, “Maybe you’d like some cookies, or some more lemonade?”
The Nebraskan shook his head. “Thank you, Miss Thacker; but if I were to eat anything else, I wouldn’t sleep.”
Oddly, her hands clenched. “I could fetch you a piece of pie.”
“No, thank you.”
Mercifully, the sitcom was over, replaced by a many-colored sunrise on the plains of Africa. There sailed the boat of Ra, the Nebraskan reflected, issuing in splendor from the dark gorge called Tuat to give light to mankind. For a moment he pictured a far smaller and less radiant vessel, black-hulled and crowded with the recalcitrant dead, a vessel steered by a jackal-headed man: a minute fleck against the blazing disk of the African sun. What was that book of Von Daniken’s? Ships—no, Chariots of the Gods. Spaceships none the less—and that was folklore, too, or at any rate was quickly passing into folklore; the Nebraskan had encountered it twice already.
An animal, a zebra, lay still upon the plain. The camera panned in on it; when it was very near, the head of a huge hyena appeared, its jaws dripping carrion. The old man turned away, his abrupt movement drawing the Nebraskan’s attention.
Fear. That was it, of course. He cursed himself for not having identified the emotion pervading the living room sooner. Sarah was frightened, and so was the old man—horribly afraid. Even Sarah’s father appeared fearful and restless, leaning back in his chair, then forward, shifting his feet, wiping his palms on the thighs of his faded khaki trousers.
The Nebraskan rose and stretched. “You’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a long day.”
When neither of the men spoke, Sarah said, “I’m ’bout to turn in myself, Mr Cooper. You want to take a bath?”
He hesitated, trying to divine the desired reply. “If it’s not going to be too much trouble. That would be very nice.”
Sarah rose with alacrity. “I’ll fetch you some towels and stuff.”
He returned to his room, stripped, and put on pajamas and a robe. Sarah was waiting for him at the bathroom door with a bar of Zest and half a dozen towels at least. As he took the towels the Nebraskan murmured, “Can you tell me what’s wrong? Perhaps I can help.”
“We could go to town, Mr Cooper.” Hesitantly she touched his arm. “I’m kind of pretty, don’t you think so? You wouldn’t have to marry me or nothin’, just go off in the mornin’.”
“You are,” the Nebraskan told her. “In fact, you’re very pretty; but I couldn’t do that to your family.”
“You get dressed again.” Her voice was scarcely audible, her eyes on the top of the stairs. “You say your old trouble’s startin’ up, you got to see the doctor. I’ll slide out the back and ’round. Stop for me at the big elm.”
“I really couldn’t, Miss Thacker,” the Nebraskan said.
In the tub he told himself that he had been a fool. What was it that girl in his last class had called him? A hopeless romantic. He could have enjoyed an attractive young woman that night (and it had been months since he had slept with a woman) and saved her from . . . what? A beating by her father? There had been no bruises on her bare arms, and he had noticed no missing teeth. That delicate nose had never been broken, surely.
He could have enjoyed the night with a very pretty young woman—for whom he would have felt responsible afterward, for the remainder of his life. He pictured the reference in The Journal of American Folklore: “Collected by Dr Samuel Cooper, U. Neb., from Hopkin Thacker, 73, whose granddaughter Dr Cooper seduced and abandoned.”
With a snort of disgust, he stood, jerked the chain of the white rubber plug that had retained his bath water, and snatched up one of Sarah’s towels, at which a scrap of paper fluttered to the yellow bathroom rug. He picked it up, his fingers dampening lined notebook filler.
Do not tell him anything grandpa told you. A woman’s hand, almost painfully legible.
Sarah had anticipated his refusal, clearly; anticipated it, and coppered her bets. Him meant her father, presumably, unless there was another male in the house or another was expected—her father almost certainly.
The Nebraskan tore the note into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet, dried himself with two towels, brushed his teeth and resumed his pajamas and robe, then stepped quietly out into the hall and stood listening.
The television was still on, not very loudly, in the front room. There were no other voices, no sound of footsteps or of blows. What had the Thackers been afraid of? The soul-sucker? Egypt’s mouldering divinities?
The Nebraskan returned to his room and shut the door firmly behind him. Whatever it was, it was most certainly none of his business. In the morning he would eat breakfast, listen to a tale or two from the old man, and put the whole family out of his mind.
Something moved when he switched off the light. And for an instant he had glimpsed his own shadow on the window blind, with that of someone or something behind him, a man even taller than he, a broad-shouldered figure with horns or pointed ears.
Which was ridiculous on the face of it. The old-fashioned brass chandelier was suspended over the center of the room; the switch was by the door, as far as possible from the windows. In no conceivable fashion could his shadow—or any other—have been cast on that shade. He and whatever he thought he had glimpsed would have to have been standing on the other side of the room, between the light and the window.
It seemed that someone had moved the bed. He waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. What furniture? The bed, the chair in which he had read—that should be beside the window where he had left it—a dresser with a spotted mirror, and (he racked his brain) a nightstand, perhaps. That should be by the head of the bed, if it were there at all.
Whispers filled the room. That was the wind outside; the windows were open wide, the old house flanked by stately maples. Those windows were visible now, pale rectangles in the darkness. As carefully as he could he crossed to one and raised the blind. Moonlight filled the bedroom; there was his bed, here his chair, in front of the window to his left. No puff of air stirred the leaf-burdened limbs.
He took off his robe and hung it on the towering bedpost, pulled top sheet and comforter to the foot of the bed, and lay down. He had heard something—or nothing. Seen something—or nothing. He thought longingly of his apartment in Lincoln, of his sabbatical—almost a year ago now—in Greece. Of sunshine on the Saronic Gulf. . .
Circular and yellow-white, the moon floated upon stagnant water. Beyond the moon lay the city of the dead, street after narrow street of silent tombs, a daedal labyrinth of death and stone. Far away, a jackal yipped. For whole ages of the world, nothing moved; painted likenesses with limpid eyes appeared to mock the empty, tumbled skulls beyond their crumbling doors.
And at once he was there, lying helpless in the night-shrouded street. For a moment the jackal’s glowing eyes loomed over him; its jaws closed, and his collarbone snapped. . .
The jackal and the moonlit city vanished. Bolt upright, shaking and shaken, he did not know where. Sweat streamed into his eyes.
There had been a sound.
To dispel the jackal and the accursed, sunless city, he rose and groped for the light switch. The bedroom was—or at least appeared to be—as he recalled it, save for the damp outline of his lanky body on the sheet. His suitcase stood beside the dresser; his shaving kit lay upon it; Gods Before the Greeks waited his return on the cane seat of the old chair.
“You must come to me.”
He whirled. There was no one but himself in the room, no one (as far as he could see) in the branches of the maple or on the ground below. Yet the words had been distinct, the speaker—so it had seemed—almost at his ear. Feeling an utter fool, he looked under the bed. There was nobody there, and no one in the closet.
The doorknob would not turn in his hand. He was locked in. That, perhaps, had been the noise that woke him: the sharp click of the bolt. He squatted to squint through the old-fashioned keyhole. The dim hallway outside was empty, as far as he could see. He stood; a hard object gouged the sole of his right foot, and he bent to look.
It was the key. He picked it up. Somebody had locked his door, pushed the key under it, and (possibly) spoken through the keyhole.
Or perhaps it was only that some fragment of his dream had remained with him; that had been the jackal’s voice, surely.