Thomas Hittler, a paunchy professor type, waved from across the crowded room. “Hallo, Sam. It's Hittler, back here!” Thomas pronounced it Heet-tleer. “The extra T is for extra terror!” Sam had suggested to Thomas once, but Thomas chose to bear his unfortunate surname with a Midwestern stoicism utterly alien to Sam. They were friends, Sam and Thomas, close ones, but Sam never could get over his initial impression of his colleague: Thomas looked like someone had painted a face on an egg and set it on top of a starched collar. Thomas was up and on his feet now, a frappe in each hand, and pushed his way to the door. “Samuel, good to see you,” he said and he shifted one of the frappes to the crook of his arm to free up a hand for a meaty one-armed hug. “I think we can begin now.”
“Uh … “ Sam started. “What's going on?”
“Showdown,” Bart said.
“Showdown,” Thomas said too, with a serious nod.
“Oh man, Samuel Bey!” said some scrawny kid who had materialized right by Sam's left elbow. “Hi, it's me,” said the kid, who was actually wearing a tuxedo. “Remember me, from the Lenore Awards banquet, when you won the lifetime achieve- ment award? I wore what I was wearing then in case you came, so you'd remember me.”
“You're my biggest fan,” Sam said.
“ … Jeremy?” That was a safe guess. Everyone under the age of thirty seemed to be named Jeremy these days.
Jeremy beamed. “You do remember me! I'm so glad I was able to make it. I spent years submitting stories, but finally one got published. Do you read Dark Somethings, Mister Bey?” It was a photocopied zine that Sam received in the mail every eighteen months or so. He found that the paper stock was good for rolling joints, so appreciated the free subscription. “I remember back in 1989 you writing in that essay that Dark Somethings was the future of h — ” Jeremy kept talking, but Sam turned his bad ear toward him.
“What is all this?”
“We should get the meeting underway,” Thomas said. “Here's your frappe.” He handed Sam the extra glass.
And then someone began to scream.
“Yo! Yo, yo!” Scrape was on the counter, all denim and mirrorshades. “Wooaaaaaw!” he howled like a brewpub stud doing his best Houses of the Holyimpression. “Glad you all could make it! We need to get this show on the muthafuckin. roooaaaaaad!” Scrape was a little too old and a little too famous (and a little too fat, these days) to be Kiss Army, but he sure was annoying. Scrape liked to write about rockstar wendigos and snorting coke out of the quivering genitals of fourteen-year-old hookers. Sam had remembered wondering if that hadn't been Scrape's car a few ahead of his back in the traffic snarl. Scrape had a nice 2002 Chrysler PT Dream Cruiser with the wood paneling, and a DIE YUPPIE SCUM bumper sticker that had been lovingly cared for and transferred onto every new bumper Scrape had owned since 1984.
“We all know why we're here, and we all know who you've come to hear” — Sam stepped forward, not knowing why he was there at all any more, except that the Showdown was imminent and only he knew how to stop evil from overwhelming Rover's Corner and maybe even the whole world. He tried to remember some quick anecdotes about the early days to tell his crew, who seemed to all be horror writers of one stripe or another. “Nigel St. Carnal!” Scrape finished.
Silence. Well, except for the buzzing of the junebugs on the screendoor. They were attracted to the light, hugging the mesh to keep from the darkness outside. Even the insects could sense it. The Showdown.
Nigel rose from his chair in the dark corner of Copley's, and stepped onto it and then from there onto the top of a squat cigarette machine of the sort you just don't see in New York City anymore. A pang of nostalgia washed over Sam; he could taste the ash and fire of a good smoke on his tongue, and in his throat. But he couldn't smoke anymore, not since the accident, and the surgeries. The butchers in green and white, cracking open his sternum like a nut … Sam gulped down the sensation and his memories, leaving it bitter in his stomach.
“It is heartening that so many of us have come. That so many of us have felt the call from so far away,” Nigel said, “to come back here to Rover's Corner. To my hometown.”
“Your hometown,” Sam said. All heads turned. “Nigel, you're British.”
“I'm Welsh,” Nigel corrected, gently.
“Be that as it may, this isn't your hometown. I lived here for thirty-two years, my whole life up to the time I had to move down to New York. I didn't even meet you until I was forty, and that was at Fangula!”
“There are many ways to call a town home. The St. Carnals have been a part of this town's history since the land was purchased from the Abenaki. The church in which you were baptized, Sam, was founded by my great-great-great-great grandfather.”
“And I went to summer camp here!” said Jeremy.
“Madge's family has a summer place in West Rover's Corner. On the Vermont side. Remember, Sam, I invited you fishing there once?” Thomas said. Sam didn't remember. The 1990s were really a big blur anyway.
Sam looked around, and he met Bart's gaze. Bart shrugged. “I think I bagged a waitress here once.” Then he flashed a smile. “I think she thought I was you.”
“God,” said Sam. He turned on his heel and pointed at Scrape. “How about you, Mister L.A.?”
“I went to Wiggleton Prep!” Scrape said, suddenly defensive, though it wasn't clear whether he was defensive about the possibility that he might be disbelieved, or that he might be believed. “I mean, I was thrown out. But I went there. I love this town.”
“I assure you, Samuel,” Nigel said, all business. “We all have a close connection to Rover's Corner.
We are all proper Mainers.”
“Vermonters —” Thomas said.
“I thought this town was in New Hampshire,” said Ophelia, mad that the attention had shifted. “And I think we all know why are here, and what the evil we face is! It's —”
“Vampires!” a helpful member of the Kiss Army said.
“Oh no,” said Nigel. “It is the spirits of the Abenaki, dispossessed and driven mad. They will flay us and wear our skins over their own deathless bones in a macabre pantomime of life —”
“I'm sure,” Thomas Hittler said, his voice modulated to be both loud and comforting at once, “that it is just the ghost of an old whore drowned by some Wiggleton Prep students —”
“Hey now, don't go there,” Scrape said. “It's werewolves.”
“No way!” It was another member of the Kiss Army, shaking with an animal rage. “Werewolves are the good guys. In fact, only by embracing our lupine natures can we fight off the ancient evil.” He snatched a tablespoon out of his frappe, licked it clean, and then peered in at the curved surface of the flatware. Eyes narrowed and nostrils flared, he shook his long hair once — kind of like a Breck Girl, Sam noticed — and stared. “Be the werewolf,” he muttered. “Be the werewolf.” Nothing happened, so everyone went back to ignoring him.
“You're all wrong,” said Sam. “It's not any supernatural agency at all. At least, not ultimately. It's the government, I'm sure of it.” Sam commanded attention. “I think they put something in all of our frappes. That's why we're all on edge. All so nuts. I didn't drink mine. Did everyone else drink theirs?” It looked like everyone had. A few people even had pinkish, milky mustaches. Sam suddenly felt very alone.
“No,” Ophelia said in a tone of voice that rolled its eyes better than any actual pair of eyes could have. “You are all wrong. Especially you!” she said, pointing an imperious finger at the first member of the Kiss Army. “We do not face mere vampires. The great evil lurking in these woods are dham. Dham, as you may not know, are the hideous spawn of a vampire and hu —” and the very beginnings of that convoluted explanation was the last thing Ophelia Darque would ever say, as at that very moment a rock came flying through the front window of Copley's, shattering it as it flew across the room and cracked the lithe young authoress right in the head. She fell into a swoon, limp and broken like a china doll. A doll with enormous breasts.
And then someone began to scream. Everyone did, really.
“All right, all right!” Shelly Johnson shouted from the doorway. “God, you people are worse than my kids.” She was a large woman with facial features a size and a half too big for her head. Glasses that would have looked owlish on anyone else barely registered on her face. She hefted a paper shopping bag by the twine handles. “This is the deal. I got a bag full of rocks right here. I got a station wagon full of my nine goddamned brats a half-mile away because you bastards took up all the parking spaces. I got a cheating drunk of a husband loving up some tender young freshman right now, if that clock on the wall is right, and we've got only a few minutes to the Showdown. So are you kids going to get your acts together or what?” That “what” — will I have to stone every one of you little turds to death like I did Morticia Addams there— hung silently in the air like the promise of candy on Halloween.
“What is the evil we face, Ms. Johnson?” Sam asked.
“It is within,” she said.
“That's right,” Bart said. “Evil is always within us. Evil isn't some external thing you can just do away with via magic spells or goofy rituals. We all have our own dark sides. The Showdown isn't about monsters or ghosts, it's about us. Man's inhumanity to man.” He tapped his chest. “The Showdown is in here.”
“Pfft,” Shelly said. She dropped her bag and raised her own hand to her face. “Actually, it's in here.” She grabbed her lower lip and began to tear the flesh from her jaw. “Take this, you paperback-writin' hacks!” And from the void that was once her face spewed forth a swarm obsidian-black junebugs, filling Copley's like an evil cloud.
And Sam again began to scream. But he couldn't hear himself over the beating of wings.
Later that night, a long-jawed man opened the door of Copley's, hat in hand and mumbled apologies on his lips. “—train service from Providence is ever so mercurial at this time of night. Additionally, my poor maiden aunt needed a fourth for her whist game ...” He looked up and saw the slaughter. Bones picked clean of muscle, but not of offal or intestine. Not-quite-empty eye sockets stared back at Howard with swirling blobs of viscous fluid where well-formed irises once so closely observed the world.
“Oh,” he said, and bowed his head slightly. Then he closed the door to Copley's and began to walk back home through those Cyclopean mountains that stood ageless and trackless under the bowl of the starry night. Gnarled, legend-haunted woods swayed and sagged under the whisper of distant gusting shores as Howard picked his way back to the gaslights and gabled roofs of home. As he walked, to keep himself company, he whistled like a squid.
Nick Mamatas once sought to explain a great SF master thusly: “[Name Redacted] is an asshole who writes like a dream.” Saner editorial heads kept it out of print, but now these same heads suggest: Nick Mamatas is a dream who writes like an asshole.
THE STONE-HEARTED QUEEN
(In which destiny will not be denied, or fulfilled)
by Kelly Barnhill
Men came in search of sons. They ripped off doors, pried boys from the hands of clutching, screeching mothers, and scattered the hay in the barns. In retrospect, we should have known they sought sons and not daughters, which is to say that my father should have known. But he did not. Men came, and my father thought they came for me.
My father heard the men approach while the rest of us lay dreaming, deep in our beds. He had been waiting, again, and unable to sleep. Unable to sleep for days. At the first intimation of hoof- beats, the first whiff of teeth and shield and unsheathed blade, my father dragged me from my bed and hauled me bodily into the garden at the south side of the house. He was old — impossibly old by then, but fear had made him strong. Magic too, most likely.
“I'm sorry,” he said, “I'm so, so sorry.” And with a wave of his withered hands and an agonized, lonely cry, he transformed me into a stone right in the middle of the tomato patch. He knelt beside me, laid his hands upon the cool, heavy curve of my body as it was now and whispered, “I love you. My darling, darling child. It's temporary. I can't let them find you. God knows what they'd do.”
I only heard as a stone hears and felt as a stone feels. Even now, the memories are stiff, cold and inscrutable. I do remember the trembling of his hands. In his younger days, my father had quick, sure hands, deft with quill, herb and staff. He was a scholar's scholar and a magician's magician. Princes and mages sought his council (though they feared it too); colleges invited his musings; the downtrodden sought his aid. His library once rivaled the finest universities. Despite banish- ment (twice), imprisonment (eight attempts, though no prison could hold him), and once an advancing army, nothing could diminish his power, grace and influence. Nothing except age. In these last moments of his life, he was a misty recollection of his earlier self — and fading fast. My transformation sapped him entirely. There would be no more magic that night. And since he did not live through the night, there was no more magic at all.
As a stone, I felt the hoof beats approaching, impossibly loud. I heard them echo in the dirt, in the rock, in the pillars of the earth. As a stone, I listened to the scraping footsteps of my aged father as he made his way from the garden to the front of the house. He set his staff upon the ground and leaned upon it. I felt its power radiate from the point of contact to the core of the world and back again. I listened as it picked up echoes from the conversations of the stars. I remembered as a stone remembers: etched and permanent. The words would never leave me.
The men arrived — all iron and leather and hoof. My father slammed his staff against the ground, an action that in earlier days brought men to their knees. In the garden, I felt the staff like a slap of lightning. I felt myself shudder, vibrate and hum, and wondered if I might crack. The men did not notice and dismounted instead. From the garden I watched — patient and unblinking.
“She is gone,” my father said. “She is far away and will be of no use to you. There is nothing for you here.”
The heaviest man approached. I felt his footsteps. He came to the front stoop while the men behind him gathered and mobbed, trampling the flowers that my mother had lovingly planted and cultivated. The big man pierced the ground with his sword and leaned upon the hilt. The big man laughed, a loud, violent laugh, and shook the ground where he stood.
“She?” he demanded. “What use have I for she?Your wife, your daughter, your mother, they are only useful after the battle is won — and don't look at me that way, old man. The battle will surely be won, and we will indeed return to — ” he laughed , “make use.” He stamped and gestured to the men at his right. It was then that I saw the group of horses that still held men on their backs. Young men, no older than twenty-five, and many as young as ten. They were bound to their saddles, their mouths tied with bloody bandages. As a stone, I felt the places where their blood had soaked into the earth, where their tongues had been cut and left for the crows. After all, a good soldier doesn't talk back.
Two men picked up my father and brought him to the big man, forcing him down to his knees. Another group of clomping boots entered the house and dragged my brothers into the yard. Their hands and legs were bound and their mouths were gagged. The boys with bloody faces looked on sadly.
Stay silent, I whispered in my stone voice. Say nothing, I breathed my stone breath. And whether they heard me or felt me or just had the good sense to keep their mouths shut, I do not know. But they said nothing, and did not resist their binding.
My mother followed — or not so much followed as was dragged, screaming and punching, hooked under the arm of a man with a mask covering half of his face.
“So unladylike,” tutted the big man. “I do hope your sons haven't picked up your poor behavior. Though if they do, we will handle it. As they say, spare the knife, spoil the soldier.” They tied my brothers to the horses while the big man looked at my huddled father on the ground. “You had a chance, old man. You were right there, and yet you did nothing. I will no longer wait for your loyalty. T
he king will die, and with him his family and court. I will do this because you lacked the courage.”
“No,” I yelled in my silent stone voice. “Courage had nothing to do with it. He's old. And he hates you. That's it.” They could not hear me, of course, though the other stones gave me their own affirmations. I felt their agreement, their encouragement, and their love.
“You have lived a coward's life. What is magic to a sword? What is a library to an army? And you will die now like a rat at my feet.” And with that he reached down, grabbed my father by his sparse hair and twisted hard. Had I been flesh, had I been standing next to him, I have no doubt that my heart would have broken in two and I would have died right there. But my heart was not flesh. My heart was stone, my flesh was stone. I heard the snap of his fragile neck, and my heart stayed whole. My father slumped to the ground. I felt the land sigh, the trees sigh, the air and stars and core of the world all sigh. As a stone, I mourned a stony grief and wept stony tears that clinked softly on the ground. Each tear was a pale pebble, the color of pearls that shone softly in the starlit night. My mother lifted her head and turned sharply towards me. She saw stone surrounded by stone tears. “Hush,” she mouthed and gave me a stern look. I swallowed my tears. No more came.
The men released my mother who ran to my father, gathering his body in her arms. He was as light as grass and my mother was much younger, still fresh of face and strong. She lifted him like an infant to her breast.
Weird Tales, Volume 350 Page 7