American supernatural tales

by S. T. Joshi

  Monocles and thick-lensed spectacles and glass-hard blue eyes peer downward. Their faces are distorted and hideous—as if he, or they, someone, is viewing this perspective through a magnifying glass. The men in black uniforms are goose-stepping and Heil-Hitlering in geometric patterns behind the grinning misshapen faces of the doctors.

  The stairway is of endless black marble, polished to a mirror-sheen, giving back no reflection. The SS officers, alike as a thousand black-uniformed puppets, are goose-stepping in orderly, powerful ranks down the polished stairway. Toward them, up the stairway, a thousand blonde and blue-eyed Valkyries, sequinpantied and brass-brassiered, flaxen locks bleached and bobbed and marcelled, are marching in rhythm—a Rockette chorus line of Lorelei.

  Wir werden weiter marschieren, wenn alles in Sherben fällt, denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt!

  Needles plunge downward.

  Inward.

  Distancing.

  Der Führer leans and peers inward. He wipes the needles with his tongue and snorts piggishly. Our final revenge, Hitler promises, in a language he seems to understand. The dancers merge upon the stairway, form a thousand black-and-white swastikas as they twist their flesh together into DNA coils.

  Sieg Heil!

  Someday.

  A thousand bombs burn a thousand coupled moths into a thousand flames.

  A thousand, less one.

  Distance.

  While he hated and feared all of his fantasies, he usually hated and feared this one worst of all. When he peered through the windows of the building, he saw rows of smokestacks belching uncounted souls into the recoiling sky.

  But often there was no fence. Only a main entrance.

  A Grand Entrance. Glass and aluminum and tile. Uncorroded, but obscured by thin dust. A receptionist’s desk. A lobby of precisely arranged furniture: art moderne or coldly functional—nonetheless serving no function in the sterile emptiness.

  No one to greet him, to verify an appointment, to ask for plastic cards and indecipherable streams of numbers. He always thought of this as some sort of hospital, possibly abandoned in the panic of some unleashed plague virus.

  He always avoided the lifts. (Shouldn’t he think of them as elevators?) Instead he followed her through the deserted (were they ever occupied?) hallways and up the hollow stairwell that gave back no echo to their steps.

  There is another fantasy that he cannot will away.

  He is conscious of his body in this fantasy, but no more able to control his body than to control his fantasy.

  He is small—a child, he believes, looking at the boyish arms and legs that are restrained to the rails of the hospital bed, and examining the muted tenderness in the faces of the white-clad supplicants who insert the needles and apply the electrodes to his flesh.

  Electric current makes a nova of his brain. Thoughts and memories scatter like a deck of cards thrown against the sudden wind. Drugs hold his raped flesh half-alert against the torture. Smokestacks spew forth a thousand dreams. All must be arranged in a New Order.

  A thousand cards dance in changing patterns across his vision. Each card has a face, false as a waxen mask. His body strains against the leather cuffs; his scream is taken by a soggy wad of tape on a wooden paddle.

  The cards are telling him something, something very essential. He does not have time to read their message.

  I’m not a fortune-teller! he screams at the shifting patterns of cards. The wadded tape steals his protests.

  The rape is over. They are wheeling him away.

  The cards filter down from their enhanced freedom, falling like snowflakes in a dying dream.

  And then he counts them all.

  All are there. And in their former order.

  Order must be maintained.

  The Old Order is stronger.

  But he knows—almost for certain—that he has never been a patient in any hospital. Ever.

  His health is perfect. All too perfect.

  She always led him through the maze within—upward, onward, forward. The Eternal Female/Feminine Spirit-Force. Goethe’s personal expression of the ultimate truth of human existence—describing a power that transcended and revoked an informed commitment to damnation—translated awkwardly into pretentious nonsense in English. He remembered that he had never read Goethe, could not understand a word of German.

  His therapists said it was a reaction to his adoption in infancy as a German war orphan by an American family. The assertive and anonymous woman represented his natural mother, whom he had never known. But his birth certificate proved that he had been born to unexceptional middle-class American parents in Cleveland, Ohio.

  And his memories of them were as faded and unreal as time-leached color slides. Memories fade before light, and into night.

  False memories. Reality a sudden celluloid illusion.

  Lightning rips the night.

  Doctor! It’s alive!

  Another fantasy evokes (or is invoked by, say his therapists) visions of Macbeth, of scary campfire stories, of old films scratched and eroded from too many showings. His (disremembered) parents (probably) only allowed him to partake of the first, but Shakespeare knew well the dark side of dreams.

  Sometimes he is on a desolate stretch of moor, damp and furred with tangles of heather. (He supposes it is heather, remembering Macbeth.) Or perhaps he is on a high mountain, with barren rocks thrusting above dark forest. (He insists that he has never read Faust, but admits to having seen Fantasia.) Occasionally he stands naked within a circle of standing stones, huge beneath the empty sky. (He confesses to having read an article about Stonehenge.) And in this same Gothic context, he has another such fantasy, and he never speaks of its imperfectly remembered fragments to anyone—not to lovers, therapists, priests, or his other futile confidants.

  It is, again (to generalize), a fantasy in which he is again the observer. Passive, certainly. Helpless, to be sure. But the restraints hold a promise of power to be feared, of potential to be unleashed.

  Hooded figures surround him, center upon his awareness. Their cloaks are sometimes dark and featureless, sometimes fantastically embroidered and colored. He never sees their faces.

  He never sees himself, although he senses he stands naked and vulnerable before them.

  He is there. In their midst. They see him.

  It is all that matters.

  They reach/search/take/give/violate/empower.

  There is no word in English.

  His therapists tell him this is a homosexual rape fantasy.

  There is no word in any language.

  There is only the power.

  The stairway climbed inexorably as she led him upward into the building. Returning—and they always returned, he knew now—the descent would be far more intolerable, for he would have his thoughts to carry with him.

  A stairwell door: very commonplace usually (a Hilton or a Hyatt?), but sometimes of iron-bound oak, or maybe no more than a curtain. No admonition. No advice. On your own. He would have welcomed Fire Exit Only or Please Knock.

  She always opened the door—some atavistic urge of masculine courtesy always surfaced, but he was never fast enough or certain enough—and she held it for him, waiting and demanding.

  Beyond, there was always the same corridor, circling and enclosing the building. If there were any significance to the level upon which they had emerged, it was unknown to him. She might know, but he never asked her. It terrified him that she might know.

  There is innocence, if not guiltlessness, in randomness.

  He decided to look upon the new reality beyond the darkened windows of the corridor. She was impatient, but she could not deny him this delay, this respite.

  Outside the building he saw stretches of untilled farmland, curiously demarcated by wild hedgerows and stuttering walls of toppled stone. He moved to the next window and saw only a green expanse of pasture, its grassy limitlessness ridged by memories of ancient fields and villages.

&
nbsp; He paused here, until she caught at his arm, pulled him away. The next window—only a glimpse—overlooked a city that he was given no time to recognize, had he been able to do so through the knowledge of the fire that consumed it.

  There were doors along the other side of the corridor. He pretended that some might open upon empty apartments, that others led to vacant offices. Sometimes there were curtained recesses that suggested confessionals, perhaps secluding some agent of a higher power—although he had certainly never been a Catholic, and such religion that he recalled only underscored the futility of redemption.

  She drew aside a curtain, beckoned him to enter.

  He moved past her, took his seat.

  Not a confessional. He had known that. He always knew where she would lead him.

  The building was only a façade, changing as his memory decayed and fragmented, recognizing only one reality in a dream-state that had consumed its dreamer.

  A stadium. A coliseum. An arena.

  Whatever its external form, it inescapably remained unchanged in its function.

  This time the building’s interior was a circular arena, dirt-floored and ringed by many tiers of wooden bleachers. The wooden benches were warped and weathered silver-gray. Any paint had long since peeled away, leaving splinters and rot. The building was only a shell, hollow as a whitened skull, encircled by derelict rows of twisted benches and sagging wooden scaffolding.

  The seats were all empty. The seats had been empty, surely, for many years.

  He sensed a lingering echo of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” played on a steam calliope. Before his time. Casey at the bat. This was Muddville. Years after. Still no joy.

  He desperately wished for another reality, but he knew it would always end the same. The presentations might be random, might have some unknowable significance. What mattered was that he knew where he really was and why he was here.

  Whether he wanted to be here was of no consequence.

  She suggested, as always. The woman at the bank who wouldn’t approve the car loan. Send for her.

  She was only doing her job.

  But you hated her in that moment. And you remember that hatred.

  Involuntarily, he thought of her.

  The numberless windows of the building’s exterior pulsed with light.

  A window opened.

  Power, not light, sent through. And returned.

  And the woman was in the arena. Huddled in the dirt, too confused to sense fear.

  The unseen crowd murmured in anticipation.

  He stared down at the woman, concentrating, channeling the power within his brain.

  She screamed, as invisible flames consumed her being. Her scream was still an echo when her ashes drifted to the ground.

  He looked for movement among the bleachers. Whatever watched from there remained hidden.

  Another, she urged him.

  He tried to think of those who had created him, this time to send for them. But the arena remained empty. Those he hated above all others were long beyond the vengeance of even his power.

  Forget them. There are others.

  But I don’t hate them.

  If not now, then soon you will. There is an entire world to hate.

  And, he understood, too many nights to come.

  Some are Born to sweet delight,

  Some are Born to Endless Night.

  —William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

  NORMAN PARTRIDGE

  Norman Partridge was born in 1958. As a youth growing up in California, Partridge absorbed horror and fantasy through several media—oral tales from his father, books by Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, and films and television. All these elements are found in Partridge’s work. He began publishing short stories in the small press in the 1980s, and his first story collection, Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales (1992), won the Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers Association. This was followed by the novel Slip-pin’ into Darkness (1994), a powerful and moving nonsupernatural account of the effect of a woman’s suicide upon the members of a gang who had raped her in high school. The collection Bad Intentions (1996) contains additional tales that fuse such pop-culture elements as B-movies, rock-and-roll, and hot rods with the supernatural. In that same year, Partridge coedited (with Martin H. Greenberg) It Came from the Drive-In!, an anthology of horror tales written in homage of the drive-in movie. After writing two crime novels, Saguaro Riptide (1997) and The Ten-Ounce Siesta (1998), Partridge published the novel Wildest Dreams (1998), a dark and gruesome novel about a bounty hunter and his sorcerer father. He has also written a novel in James O’Barr’s graphic novel series The Crow, Wicked Prayer (2000); it was filmed in 2005. Partridge is at work on an expansion of his story “Frankenstein ’59” (in It Came from the Drive-In!) into a novel.

  Partridge, who lives in California and works in a library, has gathered his best tales in The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists (2001); it includes such specimens as the vampire story “Do Not Hasten to Bid Me Adieu”; “In Beauty, Like the Night,” a zombie tale; and “The Bars on Satan’s Jailhouse,” which melds the theme of lycanthropy with the Western.

  “The Hollow Man” (first published in Grue Magazine, Fall 1991) is a subtle and ambiguous tale that appears to be told from the point of view of a wendigo, a mythical air elemental believed to haunt the forests of Canada.

  THE HOLLOW MAN

  Four. Yes, that’s how many there were. Come to my home. Come to my home in the hills. Come in the middle of feast, when the skin had been peeled back and I was ready to sup. Interrupting, disrupting. Stealing the comfortable bloat of a full belly, the black scent of clean bones burning dry on glowing embers. Four.

  Yes. That’s how many there were. I watched them through the stretched-skin window, saw them standing cold in the snow with their guns at their sides.

  The hollow man saw them too. He heard the ice dogs bark and raised his sunken face, peering at the men through the blue-veined window. He gasped, expectant, and I had to draw my claws from their fleshy sheaths and jab deep into his blackened muscles to keep him from saying words that weren’t mine. Outside, they shouted, Hullo! Hullo in the cabin! and the hollow man sprang for the door. I jumped on his back and tugged the metal rings pinned into his neck. He jerked and whirled away from the latch, but I was left with the sickening sound of his hopeful moans.

  Once again, control was mine, but not like before. The hollow man was full of strength that he hadn’t possessed in weeks, and the feast was ruined.

  They had ruined it.

  “Hullo! We’re tired and need food!”

  The hollow man strained forward, his fingers groping for the door latch. My scaled legs flexed hard around his middle. His sweaty stomach sizzled and he cried at the heat of me. A rib snapped. Another. He sank backward and, with a dry flutter of wings, I pulled him away from the window, back into the dark.

  “Could we share your fire? It’s so damn cold!”

  “We’d give you money, but we ain’t got any. There ain’t a nickel in a thousand miles of here . . .”

  Small screams tore the hollow man’s beaten lips. There was blood. I cursed the waste and twisted a handful of metal rings. He sank to his knees and quieted.

  “We’ll leave our guns. We don’t mean no harm!”

  I jerked one ring, then another. I cooed against the hollow man’s skinless shoulder and made him pick up his rifle. When he had it loaded, cocked, and aimed through a slot in the door, I whispered in his ear and made him laugh.

  And then I screamed out at them, “You dirty bastards! You stay away! You ain’t comin’ in here!”

  Gunshots exploded. We only got one of them, not clean but bad enough. The others pulled him into the forest, where the dense trees muffled his screams and kept us from getting another clear shot.

  The rifle clattered to the floor, smoking faintly, smelling good. We walked to the window. I jingled his neck rings and the hollow man squinted through the tangle of veins, to the spot where a re
d streak was freezing in the snow.

  I made the hollow man smile.

  So four. Still four, when night came and moonlight dripped like melting wax over the snow-capped ridges to the west. Four to make me forget the one nearly drained. Four to make me impatient while soft time crept toward the leaden hour, grain by grain, breath by breath . . .

  The hour descended. I twisted rings and plucked black muscles, and the hollow man fed the fire and barred the door. I released him and he huddled in a corner, exhausted.

  I rose through the chimney and thrust myself away from the cabin. My wings fought the biting wind as I climbed high, searching the black forest below. I soared the length of a high mountain glacier and dove away, banking back toward the heart of the valley. Shadows that stretched forever, and then, deep in a jagged ravine that stabbed at a river, a sputtered glimmer of orange. A campfire.

  So bold. So typical of their kind. I extended my wings and drifted down like a bat, coming to rest in the branches of a giant redwood. Its live green stench nearly made me retch. Huddling in my wings for warmth, I clawed through the bark with a wish to make the ancient monster scream. The tree quivered against the icy wind. Grinning, satisfied, I looked down.

  Two strong, but different. One weak. One as good as dead.

  Three.

  Grizzly sat in silence, his black face as motionless as a tombstone. Instantly, I liked him best. Mammoth, wrapped in a bristling grizzly coat he looked even bigger, almost as big as a grizzly. He sat by the fire, staring at his reflection in a gleaming ax blade. He made me anxious. He could last for months.

  Across from Grizzly, Redbeard turned a pot and boiled coffee. He straightened his fox-head cap and stroked his beard, clearing it of ice. I didn’t like him. His milky squint was too much like my own. But any fool could see that he hated Grizzly, and that made me smile.