Aftertaste

by Kevin J. Anderson

“Thanks,” says Lamont, taking it from him.

  I wait for him to buy another.

  He doesn’t.

  “Boy, am I thirsty!” I say finally. “You must be thirsty too, Morton.”

  Morton shrugs, and I swear I can hear his bones creak. “Not really. The urge has passed. Besides, I don’t have any more money.”

  I try not to sound desperate. “The least I can do is give you another can, on the house, for being so generous.”

  “No need,” says Morton, as polite as ever. “I’ve been meaning to go on a diet anyway.”

  I almost do a double take at the thought of a skeleton on a diet. “What the hell,” I say in desperation. “I’ll buy you a diet pop.”

  “It’s bad for the teeth,” answers Morton, giving me a full skeletal grin.

  I stand there for a minute, not trusting myself to speak. Otis looks up at me from his obituary columns, clearly amused, and I swear Harold’s snakes are hissing in laughter.

  I turn to the medusa, exasperated. “What the hell are you doing here anyway?”

  “I’ve come for a shave and a shampoo.”

  “Please, not a shampoo!” begs one of the snakes. “It gets in our eyes! We’ll be good from now on, I promise!”

  “It’s wet!” cries another. “My uncle Nate drowned during a shampoo!”

  “Oh, aren’t they just adorable!” exclaims Mavis, no longer wary of the terrified creatures.

  The snakes all turn to Mavis. “Save us!” they hiss in unison.

  “We promise not to bite,” says Cecil. “Probably,” he adds very softly.

  I’m about to point out that Cecil can’t bite anyone anyway when Mavis’s face softens into a smile. “How about this,” she says. “I’m busy with another client at the moment”—she gestures to Basil—“but if you boys behave, I’ll wash you afterward.” She raises her hand to stall any protests. “I promise not to immerse any of you in water. I’ll just rub you with a wet soapy cloth to get you clean.”

  The snakes start writhing in excitement.

  “You can do anything you want to us, sweetie!” one of them exclaims, pulling himself erect.

  “Anything at all,” agrees another.

  “Okay, it’s a deal,” says Mavis. She turns back to Basil and starts working on his cuticles. Suddenly he yelps in pain.

  “Don’t be a crybaby,” she admonishes him, “I’ve barely touched you.”

  He growls.

  “Basil!” I warn him.

  “But it hurts!” he whimpers.

  “You’re not a cub anymore,” I say. “Man up!”

  “Or wolf up,” adds Morton helpfully.

  Basil sinks back down in the chair, and Mavis starts to work on him again. Not a minute has gone by before he’s howling in pain. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Basil!” she exclaims. “I’m not used to working on werewolves.”

  Otis drops his newspaper, now alert, his nostrils twitching. “Blood!” he intones.

  I look over and see that Mavis has cut Basil near his dewclaw.

  “The cream burns!” howls the werewolf.

  “What’s in it?” asks Lamont, walking over and looking at Basil’s arm.

  “It’s a secret recipe that’s been used by my family for decades. I know it uses chimera blood, and firebird feathers, and just a dollop of chopped liver. My uncle Saul, who is a Wizard of the Third Order, created it.” She sniffs it. “I always thought it had cream cheese as well.”

  “Is it supposed to burn?” I ask, surprised to find myself genuinely worried for Basil.

  “Only if I nick him,” she responds. “It softens hard dry skin, and I suppose that includes nails, though in all my years as a manicurist I’ve never nicked a dewclaw before.” She pauses, then adds thoughtfully, “In fact, I’ve never seen a dewclaw before. Well, except on my puppy.”

  “You have a puppy?” asks Lamont, suddenly interested.

  “She’s the cutest little thing you ever saw,” says Mavis.

  “Bring her to my next match at the arena,” says Lamont. “I could pretend I’m going to eat her, and when I’m just two seconds away from biting her head off, Heroic Horace can whack me over the head with that rubber bat of his and throw me out of the ring.”

  “Where all your little old ladies will jab you with hat pins,” says Morton. “Are you sure you want that?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” admits Lamont, and suddenly he’s depressed again.

  “Ouch, goddamn it!” snarls Basil.

  “Don’t be such a crybaby,” I say. “You’re giving werewolves a bad name.”

  “She’s cutting me to bits, and you’re giving me stupid little homilies!” moans Basil.

  Mavis examines his paw, frowning. “I didn’t cut a quick,” she announces.

  “You must have,” insists Basil.

  She shakes her head. “There’s no blood.”

  “Damn!” grumbles Otis. “It’s not fair to get a fellow’s hopes up like that.”

  “You haven’t been a fellow in fifty years,” I tell him.

  “No,” concludes Mavis after checking his paw again. “I never touched a quick.”

  “Then you cut into my skin,” says Basil accusingly.

  “I most certainly did not,” replies Mavis. “There’s not a mark on it.”

  “It’s not my skin anyway,” sulks Basil. “It’s my claw.”

  “You don’t have any feeling in your claw,” insists Mavis. “I put a tiny nick in the top of it, but you only have feeling in your quick, and I never touched it.”

  “Well, it hurts like hell,” complains Basil.

  “All right, all right,” mutters Mavis. “Let me rub a little cream on it, just to make sure you don’t get infected while you’re running in the park.”

  She rubs the cream on, and only gravity keeps Basil from jumping right through the ceiling. His howl is so loud that I think he’s going to shatter my front window, but fortunately it survives intact, though the mirror behind the chair develops two large cracks in it, and one of my fillings falls out.

  “She’s murdering me!” screams Basil.

  She frowns. “It must be the chopped liver.”

  “Aw, come on, pal,” says Lamont. “I was watching her, and all she did was dab a little cream on a claw.”

  “Yeah,” says Basil bitterly. “And all Lizzie Borden did was trim her father’s mustache!”

  “If you were acting, I’d say you have the makings of a pro rassler,” says Lamont. He frowns. “But you sound like you mean it.”

  “I do. I was fine until she rubbed that cream on me.”

  “I think I’ve got it,” says Mavis. “Uncle Saul always complained that he really wanted the feathers of a harpy, but they are almost impossible to find without a qualified tracker, so he had to settle for some equally rare firebird feathers. Obviously the combined ingredients indeed soften the skin—its intended purpose—but the substituted ingredient also increases sensitivity exponentially.” She shook her head. “No wonder the cream burns.”

  Lamont’s gaze goes from Basil’s claw to the cream and back to the claw. Finally he turns to Mavis and extends his hand. “Would you rub some of that on my hand, please?”

  She shrugs and dabs the back of his hand with it.

  “Can’t feel a thing,” says Lamont, who is clearly disappointed.

  “I can’t feel it on my other three claws,” says Basil. “Just where she nicked me.”

  Lamont holds his hand out. “Bite it.”

  “No way!” says Basil. “That stuff hurts enough on the outside of my body.”

  “Otis?” says Lamont, extending his hand in the vampire’s direction.

  “I wish I could accommodate you,” answers Otis. “But you don’t have any blood. I don’t think my metabolism could handle that.”

  “Ah, what the hell,” says Harold, getting to his feet. He walks over, takes Lamont’s hand, and lays it on his head. “Dig in, boys.”

  Each of the snakes takes a bite—well, all
except Cecil, who really needs the services of a dentist with a background in herpetology, or maybe a herpetologist with a background in dentistry—and suddenly Lamont shrieks even louder than Basil did.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I feel pain!” he exclaims with a huge grin. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Not surprisingly, not a single person in the shop—not even any of the snakes—agrees with him.

  “Don’t you see?” continues Lamont. “I’ll rub this all over my body before a match, and then I won’t have to pretend anymore!”

  “You want to be in pain?” asks Mavis.

  “It’s for my fans,” he answers. “Especially the little old ladies. They’ve kept me in business since I came back from . . . well . . . you know. This is the least I can do for them.” A pause. “Maybe I’d better give it a field test.”

  He takes off his coat and has Mavis rub her cream all over his back, his eyes lighting up in both pleasure and pain as the cream bites into the wounds the little hat pin ladies inflicted after his match. “You can get more of this stuff, right?” he asks through gritted teeth.

  “Uncle Saul left us five gallons of it,” she tells him. “And if we run out, I’m sure I can convince him to leave the mausoleum for one night and make more. He’s always complaining about how cramped he feels in his tomb anyway.”

  Lamont walks to the door. “Wish me luck.”

  We all do, and then he’s out in the street.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” says Otis, looking up from the paper. “Horatio Throop died.”

  “Who was Horatio Throop?” asks Morton.

  “The cop who tracked me down after I bit every girl at the Our Lady of Unseemly Passions Flower Festival over in Brooklyn. Put six slugs into me at point-blank range. Of course they didn’t do any damage at all, except to the watch I had in a vest pocket. They didn’t believe his story at headquarters and fired him for being drunk or maybe delusional. We became quite good friends after that. Whenever he was depressed he’d give me a phone call, come on over, empty his revolver into me, and then he’d feel all better.”

  Just then Ursula the Undine enters the shop. She is only three feet tall, bald as an egg, and totally without fingernails, so I know she’s not here on business.

  “I don’t mean to bother you,” she says breathlessly, “but there’s quite a commotion going on out there. I almost got trampled to death!”

  “Oh?” I say.

  “Yes,” she replies. “A bunch of wild-eyed old ladies are chasing some poor guy down the street, jabbing him with hat pins. He’s screaming in pain, but as he passed me he was smiling the biggest damned smile you ever saw.”

  “Mavis,” I say as Ursula works up the courage to go back outside, “it looks like you just may have a client for life.”

  “Which in this case,” adds Otis, “means quite a bit more than usual.”

  Acknowledgments

  WILL LUDWIGSEN

  Such a work as this, plumbing the depths of everlasting human existence, could never be written alone, and the author is grateful to the following people and institutions without whom his expedition to Mosschase would not have been possible.

  First, without the generous financial support of George M. Theerian, owner and president of the Theerian Wig Factory, this project could not have been executed at all. Though I never met his first wife, Flora, while she lived, she was clearly an extraordinary woman well worthy of her husband’s obsession with the postmortem persistence of spirit. I am sorry not to have made her acquaintance during our séances, but I’m told that women spirits deprived of their worldly bodies sometimes find my locus of masculinity too intimidating to confront.

  The wit, class, and emotional sensitivity of the present Mrs. Theerian, the radiant Pauline, could well have been my bedrock during the whole ordeal of Mosschase House. From her knowing glances to her sublime taste in hats, I couldn’t ask for a greater companion. Her shoulder-rubs were almost as exquisite as her insights.

  My own wife, Opal, of course, proved ever helpful as well, attending to worldly matters back in Sussex while I attended to the otherworldly ones.

  David Darley and the team from Westinghouse were literally instrumental to our exploration: without their durable electrostatic detectors, temperature gauges, spirit condensers, radium lanterns, Victrola voice-capture machines, and ectoplasm containment jars, we’d have been marooned forever on the island of ignorance. May they soon conquer the fickle bitch of alternating current!

  Beatrice and Chester Kleiner, present occupants of Mosschase, permitted free access to their home for all six weeks of our investigation. Both graciously accepted the daily company of twenty spirit investigators, not to mention their equipment, their foodstuffs, their sweat-soaked waistcoats and cravats, and their often coarse language. Some of the men proved quite excitable, and I beg the good Mrs. Kleiner’s forgiveness for my torrent of obscenity in the face of the First Manifestation (see chapter 1). As for the wreckage of the south basement wall, I am sure the inevitable profits of this book can easily pay for that damage as well as the charred library mezzanine.

  My gratitude runs especially strong for Emil Kleiner, that scamp cousin of Chester’s, whose homebrewed absinthe accelerated both our quiet nights and our active ones.

  My sincerest apologies, too, to young Master Heinrich Kleiner. To eyes aching from the lack of sleep, a ten-year-old boy in pajamas can easily be mistaken for an apparition, and we pray that the burns from the Faraday Net have long since subsided. Chin up, little soldier!

  Mosschase wouldn’t be a delightfully sinister heap of misshapen stones without the clumsy architectural stylings of Sir Quentin Montrose or the slipshod workmanship of Charles Gaston. Together, they built the perfect haunted house atop that lonely chalk cliff, knotted with ancient oaks and strangled by vines: a veritable spectral honeypot. Well done, gentlemen!

  And, though I am loath to do it, I suppose I must also thank Baron Gerhardt von Klaugh for the underlying psychic trauma that makes Mosschase such an embassy for the damned. While I can’t condone his practice of sewing shut children’s mouths or hanging their corpses as puppets, it certainly suited his former home for my purposes.

  I offer much gratitude, also, to the generations of terrified servants, wide-eyed children, and gibbering drunks whose local gossip served like linguistic lenses, compounding mere rumor into legend and finally, wondrously, into reality. So, too, must I thank my peers among the spiritual sciences whose dim fumbling against the shadows on Plato’s wall saved me decades of false starts and blind alleys. Who’d have thought the answer, gentlemen, was simply to turn around?

  Then there are the mediums. Where to start? Clearly with the ones who were less than successful.

  Charley Two Feathers, if that even is his real name, provided a pleasant ambience of primitive spirituality. We’re sorry that his spirit guides proved to be wholly ineffectual during the investigation, though one could hardly expect animals to operate a talking board anyway. Best of luck with the traveling carnival, “Charley”!

  Though poor Madame Vladovich’s spiritual eyes proved to be as cataract clouded as her ordinary ones, I’m quite obliged for her energetic table lifting. It isn’t easy for an eighty-seven-year-old woman to heft an oaken table with rulers in her sleeves, but she certainly did. Brava!

  Little Wendy Wexham, God rest her soul, gave us the last few weeks of her consumptive life just to communicate with souls as estranged from life as her own. I hope she’s found her well-earned peace.

  And, lo, the poor successful Erwin Haste: how sorry we were to have to send a bullet through your brain. Would that your open mind had not been so roomy for evil, my friend. Would, too, that the leather straps had held. May God forgive us for burying you facing down.

  Harry the Gardener deserves my gratitude for his enthusiastic work with the pickaxe. If I’m ever trapped beneath a wall of infant skeletons again, their tiny bone hands clawing at my face, you will be the first man I�
��ll telegraph.

  To the neighbors, I will say I’m sorry. We did determine the awful truth behind the ghostly lights and the keening screeches at midnight, but ending them was beyond the charter of our expedition. We are planning a second excursion to your wonderful countryside, one dedicated to expelling this darkness once and for all. Donations for our cause will be heartily accepted by the publisher and passed on to us. Stay calm and carry on, good worthies: we’re on our way.

  And finally, most importantly, I thank you, the discerning reader, the curious and adventuresome explorer, for your excellent taste. It is your enthusiasm for the outré that makes it all worthwhile.

  Mannequin

  HEATHER GRAHAM

  A scream pierced the air, loud and clear. The two young people sitting in the parlor of the Cantrell house froze for a moment. The sound touched them with such a knifing quality; it awoke in them a sense of acute primeval fear.

  “What the hell?” Janet demanded, jumping up. There was deep concern and anxiety in her dark eyes and her long hair swayed as she moved; Janet was Vogue beautiful.

  “Someone in the basement is playing games, surely,” Keith, her boyfriend, said. But he too quickly came to his feet, ready to rush by Janet’s side down to the basement to see what demons of the night might be playing games.

  Andrew Adair was already up and moving. The scream had to have come from Alexi—Alexi was his wife, and they all knew her scream. She tended to be afraid of her own shadow. And yet, they were in the Cantrell house.

  But Alexi had wanted to come here. She always said that she was a coward, but she still loved being afraid. Andrew, however, worried; maybe this was proving to be too much for her. Andrew knew that he, Keith, and Janet were the ones who truly loved horror movies, museums of the macabre, grisly tales and truths, and all things terrible and spooky.

  Andrew didn’t believe in ghosts.

  Alexi did.

  The Cantrell house was known worldwide for its horrible history, and, naturally, ghosts.

  “Come on!” he called over his shoulder, already moving.

  They actually had to leave the house through the kitchen via the side door and walk around back to take the steps down to the basement.