by Farris, John
“Don’t move. If you turn around I’ll kill you.”
The jolt of fear at the nape of Taryn’s neck was powerful enough to pop her mouth open. She hadn’t heard a sound. But he’d sneaked up so close behind her she could smell him—and his odor was instantly, powerfully familiar.
She knew him. Soon she would be dead.
Tor books by John Farris
All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By
The Axman Cometh
The Captors
Catacombs
The Fury
King Windom
Minotaur
Nightfall
Scare Tactics
Sharp Practice
Son of the Endless Night
Wildwood
An earlier version of this book was published in hardcover under the same title by Tor in July 1988. This mass-market edition contains two stories— "I Scream. You Scream. We All Scream for Ice Cream. ” and “Scare Tactics"—not included in the hardcover edition.
This book is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in it are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
SCARE TACTICS
Copyright © 1988, 1989 by John Farris
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A TOR Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24th Street
New York, N.Y. 10010
Cover art by Carol Russo
ISBN: 0-812-50300-7 Can. ISBN: 0-812-50299-X
First mass market edition: November 1989 Printed in the United States of America
0987654321
Table of Contents
The Odor of Violets
horrorshow
I Scream. You Scream. We All Scream for Ice Cream.
Scare Tactics
The Guardians: A Novel
The Odor
of Violets
I was completing my last lap of the day on the rutted cinder track when a man in a trench coat and a muffler appeared out of the fog and called my name.
“Mr. Mayo, sir?”
Not as if he knew me by sight. I was tempted to pass him by with a curt shake of the head, since at the time I was nearly three months behind on my car payments, and ripe for repossession. But immediately after calling, tentatively, to me, the man in the trench coat was taken with a fit of coughing, like a volcano trying to erupt. He leaned against the chain link fence surrounding the track and the Sprayberry College football field (“Home of the Purple Maulers”). Instinctively, as I jogged nearer, I felt that he was not going to threaten me with harsh reminders of past-due bills. He seemed to have no business being there at all, in the dank night air. Nonetheless, I stopped well short of where he stood, trying to arrest his cough, holding with one hand to the fence for support and clutching, under his other arm, a bulky manila envelope.
Jogging in place, I spoke to him. “Yes?”
He got control of himself and straightened, breathing hard. Light from the sodium vapor lamp above the end-zone gate, now almost invisible in the fast-moving fog, touched his face; it was a glowing, unhealthy shade of red, as if from St. Anthony’s fire. Although we were early into February, the air growing chillier by the minute, he was perspiring. He had a brown ruff of beard along the jawline, like a worn-out strip of welcome mat, and not much hair on his head.
“You are Jack Mayo—the author?”
His accent was softly southern; I was reminded of pleasant bourbon-saturated evenings in Key West in the company of Tennessee and dear, doomed Carson McCullers.
“Yes,” I admitted impatiently, now paying more attention to the telltale envelope he’d brought with him. He was of late middle age; I assumed he was not a student here. At least I had never noticed him on campus, or heard that distressing cough before. Sprayberry was a rather small and thoroughly déclassé institution, near the sea’s edge and forever on the brink of insolvency. “Who are you?” I inquired of him.
He spoke slowly, and in a low tone, as if constantly needing to strangle the urge to cough. “David Hallowell, sir. You have never heard of me. But I am a writer, too.”
“I see,” I said unencouragingiy, and decided to forgo the last hundred yards of my final lap. I began doing exercises so as not to cool off too suddenly and risk taking a chill. “If you’re interested in signing up for one of my seminars in creative writing, then I suggest that you contact the admissions office.”
“No, I—I don’t have time for that,” Hallowell replied, and he smiled deprecatingly before he began to cough again, into a soiled wad of handkerchief. When he regained his voice he said, “But it doesn’t matter. I have nearly finished it. My book, I mean. Another two weeks—three at the vereh most. I wanted you to see it now. Then my fondest hope is that you will be willing to advise me. I know nothing about the publishing business. I do not know what I should do next. Of course, it will be published. It’s good—vereh good. Superb, in fact. Yes, it should be a vereh great success.”
“Really?” I grunted, touching my toes, feeling fire in the tendons of my thighs, the old bursitis that plagued my right shoulder. I wan amused and, I suppose, a trifle irritated by his presumption. “What is it you’ve written? A novel?”
“Yes, sir. That I have.”
“You want me to read it, and find you a publisher.”
I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice: too many years of practice at the expense of mediocre scribblers unable to retaliate in kind had perfected my killshots. He drew back a little, shifting the position of the large envelope until it covered him like a buckler. But I had no desire to shatter his pathetic dignity.
“I’m much too busy,” I said, “with teaching. And then my own work—”
“Oh, I know that!” he said, trembling now. “It’s only that I have admired your writing so much. I must have read each of the stories in Tug of War a dozen times. The craftsman-ship, the complexity, the humor—your talent inspired me from the beginning of my own poor ambition, and I—well—” He thrust the envelope at me, holding it at arm’s length. His eyes pleaded for me to take it. “I owe so much to you.”
“Mr. Hallowell—”
“Please! You’ll like it, I know you will. Here is my life, sir—all that has kept me alive these past two years.”
The coughing again. I felt a twinge of alarm and then, vaguely, guilt for not accepting his manuscript, making him suffer all the more in the fog and the cold.
“Yes, I suppose I could find the time. All right.”
He stumbled forward eagerly, pressing the envelope into my hands. Quite heavy, there would be well over three hundred pages, I thought. At least I could glance at it before dismissing his labor with a few noncommittal words. Up close I saw how bad his eyes looked, like runny egg congealing on a cheap plate, how thin and ragged he was. I could not imagine him straying very far from the Salvation Army shelter, much less finding the high purpose and energy it took to write a novel.
“You’re very ill,” I said. “Are you seeing a doctor?”
He shook his head. “It’s my lungs. I was a sickly child, and at fourteen I was made to go to work in my uncle’s mill, on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River. It was an old, primitive, turn-of-the-century place, and the air was always thick with cotton dust. I contracted brown-lung disease while still a young man. And, well, nothing can help me now.” His face screwed up in an agony of pride and he whispered fiercely, “I will finish my appointed task, however. I already have the last few chapters in mind. Just a few more nights—”
“You really ought to be in a hospital,” I said.
He smiled, astounded, perhaps deeply touched that I might care whether he
lived or died. Tears flowed from his red-flecked eyes. He seized my free hand and shook it. I felt as if I were grasping the bony hand of Death itself.
“You can’t know how happy you’ve made me, sir! A year ago I couldn’t imagine even meeting you, and now—you’re going to read my novel!”
“Yes, certainly I’ll read it, Mr. Hallowell. But I can’t promise anything—”
“You’ll do what you can!” he cried, ecstatic, his weeping eyes wandering from my face; almost instantly he appeared to be in a feverish fugue state. He babbled. “You’re a man of high talent, a good and generous man !”—as if these qualities must be synonymous. “I only regret I shall not be here to read your novel. I know it’s going to be a masterpiece, after all the years you’ve spent writing it—”
“Well, I’m afraid I still have far to go,” I said, an automatic response. “Now, you really must put yourself to bed, take care of that cough.”
Even as I spoke, his efflorescence was fading in the voracious Pacific fog; and I was left standing there holding a torn and seedy envelope I had no real desire to open.
“Good-bye—good-bye, Mr. Mayo! My address is on the title page. If you could see your way clear—I’m so vereh anxious to know what you think—”
“I’ll read it immediately !” I promised rashly, now talking only to a ghost as he vanished beyond the gate. I shuddered, then began to jog again, in the opposite direction and away from the sea, across the rolling campus to ray studio in the faculty apartments.
After a shower and a light supper I applied myself to the chore of reading my students’ work, fortifying myself at intervals with double scotches. I had put the envelope containing David Hallowell’s manuscript far back on my already cluttered worktable. For the next two hours my mood worsened steadily as I looked for some gleam of talent in the pile of chaff before me. Influences in style ranged from Saul Bellow to Erma Bombeck and, yes, even hoary old Hemingway. I gave up when a headache like a spike between my eyes diminished my ability to concentrate. I drank the last of the scotch in the bottle (remembering, too late, there would be no more credit at the liquor store), and went to bed.
Scarcely three hours later I was suddenly wide awake on the Hide A Bed, roused from an unmemorable dream; I had heard, or thought I heard, a tortured cough. And there was an unfamiliar odor in my cramped studio, the sweetness of wild violets.
I got up and turned on a lamp, but I had no company except for the memory of David Hallowell’s face in the fog. I felt amazingly refreshed on a short ration of sleep. It was half past three in the morning; I didn’t want to go back to bed. I made coffee. The odor of violets faded gradually as I stood at my windows looking at the campus lights through slow spirals of fog. Then I turned to a bookshelf and took down a copy of Tug of War. I looked at the dust-jacket photo of myself—leaner and with a thicker head of hair in those days when I had been, in pugilistic terms, a “comer.” I knew the brief biography by heart, my present state of futility summed up in the last line: Mr. Mayo is currently at work on a novel.
The collection of eight stories in my hand, my only published work, was thirteen years old. Each year’s crop of “comers” had pushed me farther and farther into the dim background of the literary scene. The novel blithely referred to on the endpaper was not forthcoming. In thirteen years I had managed less than a hundred pages. Not one word for the past two years. I was still not well recovered from the depression caused by my fiftieth birthday.
I set aside Tug of War and glanced at my worktable, now seeing only the soiled envelope with David Hallowell’s manuscript inside. I felt annoyed with him; he was terminally ill, yet he had nearly finished a novel while I could not write at all. Assuredly it would turn out to be a dreadful piece of muck ... but his dedication, his belief that he had a story worth telling, merited respect.
I opened the envelope, and a thick bundle of yellow pages torn from legal pads fell to the floor. It was a holographic manuscript, and he wrote, like Eugene O’Neill, in a cramped, miserly hand; there must have been half a thousand words on every page. But he composed so painstakingly that every word was legible without a magnifying glass. I scanned the first page casually after finding the title provocative, turned to the second, sat down slowly on the Hide A Bed with that untidy bundle in my lap.
By daybreak I had read all of Angels and Aborigines. I had been powerless to stop reading. It was marvelous: a comic, picaresque Lear. Hallowell’s protagonist, an old poet, and three randy daughters careered like tornadoes through his pages. He satirized (and often tore to shreds) academia, government, religion, the full spectrum of intellectual pretentiousness and cultural folderol of our times. I turned over the last, incomplete page knowing that David Hallowell was a literary titan. My first thought, with nothing more to read, was an earnest entreaty to the gods that Hallowell be allowed to live long enough to finish this masterwork.
My second, distantly corrupting thought was, This is the novel I was meant to write.
I had been almost childishly pleased to note that there were echoes of the old, the good Jack Mayo, in those pages. It was true, as Hallowell insisted, that I had served him in some small way.
After my morning classes I drove down from the hills to the old section of San Augustin. David Hallowell was living in a barrio by the sea where the dreary fog lingered at noonday. The streets were narrow, the houses ramshackle, with a few hang-dog date palms and rusting pepper trees in the sandy yards. There was truculent graffiti in Spanish on every side wall of laundería and bodega. It took me quite some time to locate him.
The squat Mexican woman who responded to my inquiry on Portales Street had a baby on one hip and toddlers clinging to her skirt.
“Dah-veed, sí, is living here.” She looked hopefully at me. “You are friend?”
“We met only yesterday,” I said.
“Oh. Dah-veed very sick, is always—tosiendo.” She translated the word for me by coughing into her fist.
“Yes, I know. Could you take me to him?”
She led me through her squalid house and out the back door to a casita set against the alley fence. There were chickens in the bare yard, discarded beer cans, and rusted parts of automobiles. A stench of garbage saturated the fog. I could hear the surf just two blocks away. I also heard him coughing as we reached the casita door. The Mexican woman shifted her fretting half-clad infant from one chubby arm to the other.
“All night he is like that,” she said of the coughing. “I go make tea for him now.” She smacked one of her toddlers, who was bending over poking a finger into a fresh pile of chickenshit, and returned to the house.
I knocked at the casita door. Muffled coughing, but no other response. I shivered in the damp grayness. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in.
There was, unexpectedly, a sweetness in the air: violets, a welcome contrast to the sour spoor of the chicken-blighted yard. The one-room casita was quite dark, shades pulled down over the remaining panes of glass in the door and the single small window. I could make him out lying in a narrow mission-style bed, huddled under a blanket, coughing pathetically, rocking the springs with the violence of his affliction.
“Mr. Hallowell?” I said. “David?”
He gave a start, one bare foot kicking out from beneath the blanket, and sat up, peering at the doorway.
“Yes—yes. Who is it?”
“Jack Mayo.”
“Oh, Mr. Mayo! I apologize, sir, I—please, if you would give me a few moments—”
“Certainly. I’ll wait outside.”
“No! No! Stay! I’m just waking up. I work nights, you see.” He was having difficulty getting his breath. “If you wouldn’t mind—on the table there—a bottle of tequila.”
I raised the window shade, letting in some pallid light. I poured a shot of tequila for him and, at his urging, a shot for myself, as he had a supply of paper cups to drink from. I didn’t entirely trust his explanation of the illness from which he suffered, and I have always been more than
mildly phobic about germs. Fortunately there was no atmosphere of the sickroom, because of the remarkably pleasant odor of spring violets. I saw none growing in the room, however; and no potentially flowering seed would have survived for long out-of-doors. Perhaps it was perfume, a recent female visitor—
When I mentioned the odor to him he looked puzzled. His face was flushed and glistened from perspiration, his eyes were unfocused as he sipped his tequila.
“Oh, yes, I did smell violets in the beginning, I suppose. But that was so long ago I’ve become used to it. I hardly notice anymore.”
His explanation was far from clear, but I had no good reason to question him further. And my attention had been drawn to the pile of yellow paper on his writing table, beside a cracked pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses and a jar crammed with ballpoint pens, the cheap variety given away by every sort of business establishment. It was difficult for me not to pick up the new pages and begin reading on the spot. Instead I smiled at David Hallowell.
The tequila seemed to have temporarily suppressed his cough, although it lived on in his skinny chest, as a low dangerous rumbling. His complexion had cleared somewhat. My smile was unexpected; it caused him to flinch, and then he returned an abashed smile of his own.
“Was I right? It is good, isn’t it?”
“I think you’re a genius,” I said.
He scratched his head and trembled; he began to weep and shake the bed in a paroxysm of joy and thanksgiving. A little overcome myself, I fed him more tequila, and wondered how his heart could stand up under the strain. Some of the tequila dribbled into the ruff of his coarse beard. “But surely,” I said, “others have told you that.”
“No. Not another living soul but you has read a word of my book. I moved to San Augustin because—I knew that you were here.”
Rather than watch him suffer through more agonies of gratitude, I turned again to his worktable, noticing a copy of Tug of War atop a pile of badly worn paperback dictionaries. I picked up the book, which obviously he’d rescued from a stall in a secondhand store. Just inside the cover was a recent clipping from the local newspaper, my photo accompanying an announcement of the summer writers’ workshop I had established on campus.