The Year's Best Horror Stories 16

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Indeed, in her convalescent mellowness, much augmented by Valium, she had started to fantasize going up to his office, pulling the blinds, and ravishing him at his desk. She imagined him lonely and horny. Perhaps he had nursed his wife through a long illness and she had at last expired gently ... He would be so grateful!

  This fancy took on such a quality of yearning that it alarmed Patti. Although she was a good and well-adapted hooker, she was, outside her trade’s rituals of exchange, very shy in her dealing with people. She was not forward in these emotional matters, and she felt her longing to be forward as an impulse in some way alien to her, put upon her. Nonetheless, the sweet promptings retained a fascination, and she was kept swinging between these poles of feeling, to the point where she felt she had to talk about them. Late one afternoon she dragged Sheri, her best friend, out of the lobby and into a bar a couple blocks away. Sheri would keep confidence, but on first hearing the matter, she was as facetious as Patti had foreseen.

  “Jesus, Patti,” she said. “If the rest of him’s as fat as his face it’d be like humping a hill!”

  “So you pile only superstars? I mean, so what if he’s fat? Try and think how nice it would be for him!”

  “I bet he’d blush till his whole head looked like an eggplant. Then, if there was just a slit in the top, like Melanie was saying—” Sheri had to break off and hold herself as she laughed. She had already done some drinking earlier in the afternoon. Patti called for another double and exerted herself to catch up, and meanwhile she harped on her theme to Sheri and tried to get her serious attention:

  “I mean I’ve been working out of the Parnassus—what? Maybe three years now? No, four! Four years. I’m part of these people’s community—the druggist, Arnold, Fat Face—and yet we never do anything to show it. There’s no getting-together. We’re just faces. I mean like Fat Face—I couldn’t even call him that!”

  “So let’s go look in the directory of his building!”

  Patti was about to answer when, behind the bar, she saw a big roach scamper across a rubber mat and disappear under the baseboard. She remembered the plump body in the towel, and remembered—as a thing actually seen—the slug-fragmented skull.

  Sheri quickly noted the chill on her friend. She ordered more drinks and set to work on the idea of a jolly expedition, that very hour, over to Fat Face’s office. And when Patti’s stomach had thawed out again, she took up the project with grateful humor, and eagerly joined her friend’s hilarity, trading bawdy suppositions of the outcome.

  They lingered over yet a further round of drinks and at length barged, laughing, out into the late-afternoon streets. The gold-drenched sidewalks swarmed, the pavements were jammed with rumbling motors. Jaunty and loud, the girls sauntered back to their intersection, and crossed over to the old building. Its heavy oak-and-glass doors were pneumatically stiff, and cost them a stagger to force open. But when they swung shut, it was swiftly, with a deep click, and they sealed out the streetsound with amazing, abrupt completeness. The glass was dirty and it put a sulfurous glaze on the already surreal copper of the declining sun’s light outside. Suddenly it might be Mars or Jupiter out beyond those doors, and they themselves stood within a great dim stillness that might have matched the feeling of a real Mesopotamian ruin, out on some starlit desert. The images were alien to Patti’s thought—startling intrusions in a mental voice not precisely her own. Sheri gave a comic shiver but otherwise made no acknowledgment of similar feelings. She merrily cursed the old elevators with a hand-written out-of-order sign affixed to their switchplate by yellowed scotch tape, and then gigglingly led the way up the green-carpeted stairs, up which a rubber corridor mat ran that gave Patti murky imaginings of scuffed, supple, reptilian skin. She struggled up the stairs after her skylarking friend, gaping with amazement at the spirit of gaiety which had so utterly deserted her own thoughts at the instant of those doors’ closing.

  At the first two landings they peeked down the halls at similar vistas: green-carpeted corridors of frosted-glass doors with rich brass knobs. Bulbs burned miserly few, and in those corridors Patti sensed, with piercing vividness, the feeling of kept silence. It was not a void silence, but a full one, made by presences not stirring.

  Patti’s dread was so fierce and gratuitous, she wondered if it was a freak of pills and booze. She desperately wanted to stop her friend and retreat with her, but she couldn’t find the breath or the words to broach her crazy panic. Sheri leapt triumphantly onto the fourth-floor landing and bowed Patti into the corridor.

  Every door they passed bore the clinic’s rubric and referred the passer to the room at the end of the hall, and every step Patti took toward that door sharpened the kick of panic in her stomach. They’d gotten scarcely halfway down the hallway when she reached her limit, and knew that no imaginable compulsion could make her go nearer to that room, Sheri tugged at her, and rallied her, but finally abandoned her and tiptoed hilariously up to the door, trying to do a parody of Patti’s sudden fear.

  She didn’t knock, to Patti’s relief. She took out her notepad, and mirthfully scrawled a moderately long message. She folded the note, tucked it under the door, and ran back to Patti.

  When they reached the last flight of stairs, Patti dared speech. She scolded Sheri about the note.

  “Did you think I was trying to steal him?” Sheri taunted, “giving him my address?” She alluded to a time, at a crowded party, when Patti had given Sheri a note to pass to a potential john, and Sheri had tampered with it and brought the trick to her own apartment. Patti was shocked at the possibility of such a trick, before discarding the idea as exceeding even Sheri’s quirkishness.

  “Did you hear any music up there?” Patti asked as they stepped out on the street. Coming into the noise outside was a blessed relief—breaking out into air and the color, as if surfacing from the long, crushing stillness of a deep drowning. But even in this sweet rush she could call up clearly a weird, piping tune—scarcely a tune really, more an eerie melodic ramble—which had come into her mind as they hurried down the slick-rubbered flights of stairs. What bothered her as much as the strange feeling of the music was the way in which she had received it. It seemed to her that she had not heard it, but rather remembered it—suddenly and vividly—though she hadn’t the trace of an idea now where she might have heard it before. Sheri’s answer confirmed her thought:

  “Music? Baby, there wasn’t a sound up there! Wasn’t it kind of spooky?” Her mood stayed giddy and Patti gladly fell in with it. They went to another bar they liked and drank for an hour or so—slowly, keeping a gloss on things, feeling humorous and excited like schoolgirls on a trip together. At length they decided to go to the Parnassus, find somebody with a car and scare up a cruising party.

  As they crossed to the hotel Sheri surprised Patti by throwing a look at the old office building and giving a shrug that may have been half shudder. “Jesus. It was like being under the ocean or something in there, wasn’t it, Patti?”

  This echo of her own dread made Patti look again at her friend. Then Arnold, the vendor, stepped out from the newsstand and blocked their way.

  The uncharacteristic aggressiveness gave Patti a nasty twinge. Arnold was unlovely. There was a babyish fatness and a redness about every part of him. His scanty red hair alternately suggested infancy or feeble age, and his one eyeless socket, with its weepy red folds of baggy lid, made his whole face look as if screwed up to cry. Over all his red, ambling softness there was a bright blackish glaze of inveterate filth. And, moronic though his manner was most of the time, Patti now felt a cunning about him, something sly and corrupt. The cretinous, wet-mouthed face he now thrust close to the girls seemed, somehow, to be that of a grease-painted conman, not an imbecile. As if it were a sour fog that surrounded the newsman, fear entered Patti’s nostrils, and dampened the skin of her arms. Arnold raised his hand. Pinched between his smudgy thumb and knuckle were an envelope and a fifty-dollar bill.

  “A man said to read this, Patti!” Arn
old’s childish intonation now struck Patti as an affectation, like his dirtiness, part of a chosen disguise.

  “He said the money was to pay you to read it. It’s a trick! He gave me twenty dollars!” Arnold giggled. The sense of cold-blooded deception in the man made Patti’s voice shake when she questioned him about the man who’d given him the commission. He remembered nothing, an arm and a voice in a dark car that pulled up and sped off.

  “Well, how is she supposed to read it?” Sheri prodded. “Should she be by a window? Should she wear anything special?”

  But Arnold had no more to tell them, and Patti willingly gave up on him to escape the revulsion he so unexpectedly roused in her.

  They went into the lobby with the letter, but such was its strangeness—so engrossingly lurid were the fleeting images that came clear for them—that they ended taking it back to the bar, getting a booth, and working over it with the aid of whiskey and lively surroundings. The document was in the form of an unsigned letter which covered two pages in a lucid, cursive script of bizarre elegance, and which ran thus:

  Dear Girls:

  How does a Shoggoth lord go wooing? You do not even guess enough to ask! Then let it be asked and answered for you. As it is written: “The Shoggoth lord stumbleth unto his belusted, lo, he cometh heavily unto her, upon alien feet. From the sunless sea, from under the mountains of ice, cometh the mighty Shoggoth lord unto her.”

  Dear, dear girls! Where is this place the Shoggothoi come from? In your tender, sensual ignorance you might well lack the power to be astonished by the prodigious gulfs of Space and Time this question probes. But let it once more be asked and answered for you. Thus has the answer been written:

  “Shun the gulf beneath the peaks,

  The caverned ocean black as night,

  Where star-spawned gods made their retreat

  From the slowly freezing world of light.

  For even star-spawn may grow weak,

  While what has been its slave gains strength;

  Even star-spawn’s will may break,

  While slaves feed on their lords at length.”

  Sweet harlots! Darling, heedless trollops! You cannot imagine the Shoggoth lord’s mastery of shapes! His race has bred smaller since modern men last met with it. Oh, but the Shoggoth lords are limber now! Supremest polymorphs—though what they are beneath all else, is Horror itself.

  But how is it they press their loving suit? What do they murmur to her they hotly crave? You must know that the Shoggoth craves her fat with panic—full of the psychic juices of despair. Therefore he taunts her with their ineluctable union; therefore he pipes and flutes to her his bold, seductive lyric, while he vows with a burning glare in his myriad eyes that she’ll be his. Thus he sings:

  “Your veil shall be the wash of blood

  That dims and drowns your dying eyes.

  You’ll have for bridesmaids Pain and Dread,

  For vows, you’ll jabber blasphemies.

  My scalding flesh will be your gown,

  And Agony your bridal song.

  You shall both be my bread

  And, senses reeling, watch me fed.

  O maids, prepare her swiftly!

  Speedily her loins unlace!

  Her tender paps annoint,

  And bare unto my seething face!”

  Thus, dear girls, he ballads and rondelays his belusted, thus he waltzes her spirit through dark, empty halls of expectation, of always-harkening Horror, until the dance has reached that last, closed room of consummation!

  As many times as the girls flung these pages onto the table, they picked them up again after short hesitation. Both Sheri and Patty were very marginal readers, but the flashes of coherent imagery in the letter kept them coming back to the murky parts, trying to pick the lock of their meaning. They held menace even in their very calligraphy, whose baroque, barbed elegance seemed sardonic and alien. The mere sonority of some of the obscure passages evoked vivid images, a sense of murky submersion in benthic pressures of fearful expectation, while unseen giants abided in the dark nearby.

  It put Patti in a goosefleshy melancholy, but of real fear it raised little, even though it meant that some out-to-lunch hurt-freak had quite possibly singled her and Sheri out. The letter held as much creepy entertainment for her as it did threat. The ones really into letter writing were much less likely to be real doers. Besides that, it was a very easy fifty dollars.

  She was the more surprised, then, at Sheri’s sudden, jagged confession of paranoia. She had been biting back panic for some time, it appeared, and Patti was sure that even as she spoke she was holding back more than she told. She was afraid to go home alone.

  “All this bullshit,” she pointed at the letter, “it’s spooked me, Patti, I can’t explain it. I got the bleep scared out of me, girl. Come on, we can sleep in the same bed, just like slumber parties in school, Patti. I just don’t want to face walking into my living room tonight and turning on the light.”

  “Sure you can sleep over! But no kicking, right?”

  “Oh, that was only because I had that dream!” Sheri shrilled. She was so happy and relieved it was pitiful, and Patti found herself developing an answering chill that made her glad of the company.

  They got some sloe gin and some vodka and some bags of ice and bottles of Seven-Up. They got several bags of chips and puffs and cookies and candy bars, and repaired with their purchases to Patti’s place.

  She had a small cottage in a four-cottage court, with very old people living in the other three units. The girls shoved the bed into the corner so they could prop pillows against all the walls to lean back on. They turned on the radio, and the tv, and got out the phone book, and started making joke calls to people with funny names while eating, drinking, smoking, watching, listening and bantering each other.

  Their consciousness outlasted their provisions, but not by long. Soon, back to back, they slept, bathed and laved by the gently burbling soundwash, and the ash-gray light of the pulsing images.

  They woke to a day that was sunny, windy and smogless. They rose at high, glorious noon, and walked to a coffee shop for breakfast. The breeze was combing buttery light into the waxen fronds of the palms, while the Hollywood Hills seemed most opulently brocaded—under the sky’s flawless blue—with the silver-green of sagebrush and sumach.

  As they ravened breakfast, they plotted borrowing a car and taking a drive. Then Sheri’s man walked in. She waved him over brightly, but Patti was sure she was as disappointed as herself. Rudy took a chair long enough to inform Sheri how lucky she was he’d run into her, since he’d been trying to find her. He had something important for her that afternoon. Contemptuously he snatched up the bill and paid for both girls. Sheri left in tow, and gave Patti a rueful wave from the door.

  Patti’s appetite left her. She dawdled over coffee, and stepped at last, unwillingly, out into the day’s polychrome splendor. Its very clarity took on a sinister quality of remorselessness. Behold, the whole world and all its children moved under the glaring sun’s brutal, endless revelation. Nothing could hide. Not in this world ... though of course there were other worlds, where beings lie hidden immemorially ...

  She shivered as if something had crawled across her. The thoughts had passed through her, but were not hers. She sat on a bus-stop bench and tightly crossed her arms as if to get a literal hold on herself. The strange thoughts, by their feeling, she knew instinctively to be echoes raised somehow by what they had read last night. Away with them, then! The creep had had more than his money’s worth of reading from her already, and now she would forget those unclean pages. As for her depression, it was a freakish sadness caused by the spoiling of her holiday with Sheri, and it was silly to give in to it.

  Thus she rallied herself, and got to her feet. She walked a few blocks without aim, somewhat stiff and resolute. At length the sunlight and her natural health of body had healed her mood, and she fell into a pleasant veering ramble down miles of Hollywood residential streets, relis
hing the cheap cuteness of the houses, and the lushness of their long-planted trees and gardens.

  Almost she left the entire city. A happy, rushing sense of her freedom grew upon her and she suddenly pointed out to herself that she had nearly four hundred dollars in her purse. She came within an ace of swaggering into a Greyhound station with two quickly packed suitcases, and buying a ticket either to San Diego or Santa Barbara, whichever had the earliest departure time. With brave suddenness to simplify her life and remove it, at a stroke, from the evil that had seemed to haunt it recently ...

  It was her laziness that, in the end, made her veer away from the decision—her dislike of its necessary but inherently tedious details: the bus ride, looking for an apartment, looking for a job. As an alternative to such dull preliminaries, the endless interest and familiarity of Hollywood took on renewed allure.

  She would stay then. The knowledge didn’t dull her sense of freedom. Her feet felt confident, at home upon these shady, root-buckled sidewalks. She strode happily, looking on her life with new detachment and ease. Such paranoias she’d been having! They seemed now as fogs that her newly freshened spirit could scatter at a breath.

  She had turned onto a still, green block that was venerably overhung by great old peppertrees, and she’d walked well into it before she realized that the freeway had cut it off at the far end. An arrow indicated a narrow egress to the right, however, so she kept walking. Several houses ahead, a very large man in overalls appeared, dragging a huge German shepherd across the lawn.

  Patti saw a new, brown van parked by the curb, and recognized it and the man at once. The vehicle was one of two belonging to Fat Face’s stray refuge, and the man was one of his two full-time collectors.