Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  “Just a poor lunatic who murdered his wife and children many years ago. As madmen often do, he made curious remarks. They are now given more weight than they deserve. But he surrendered to Christ before he was hanged, and his body was interred in the family vault. Which vault has remained, I assure you, undisturbed for the past fifty years.”

  “You’ve checked?”

  “Of course.” The priest smiled. “Mr. Conan Doyle’s detective advises us to eliminate the impossible from our inquiries, but he doesn’t tell us to ignore it completely.”

  Lying in his bed later, after opening both windows of his room on the night, tossing the garlic blossoms into the street, turning the mirror to the wall and hiding the innkeeper’s crucifix in the chamber-pot, Franz savored the priest’s praise of his poetry. Only after a while did it strike him that saying his verses were “not entirely unlike Baudelaire” was no praise at all.

  He decided before drifting off that Father Teodor’s exile to this backwater was no mystery. Advancement in the clergy had never been the reward for mordant wit.

  * * * *

  Given over to mangy dogs and knots of suspicious old men by daylight, the town itself seemed undead. Houses and factories gutted in the late war, or perhaps in some earlier war, had never been repaired. The paper-mill whose defluxions had bleached the dead boy lay in ruins, but Franz was willing to grant that its poison might still linger in the dead, still stream.

  The graveyard was more populous than the town, but no better kept. Climbing steeply through a tangle of broken slabs and brambles, Franz at last reached the precinct of nobler tombs. That of the Trusis clan was square and squat and ugly, and securely locked. Footprints were evident in the dried mud on the portico, but they had been left by those who had defaced the walls with a disturbing mixture of religious and lubricious symbols and wreathed the door with garlic. Unbroken by any motion of the door, the wreaths had withered long ago.

  Franz felt very old on his way down the hill, and even older when he made a second climb through the ruins after dark.

  Slipping on a rain-slicked headstone, he cut his hand, and this lifted his spirits. The incidents in this town had been too numerous, their explanations too glib. As never before in his long and frustrating career, he sensed the near-presence of the uncanny. Valdemar might not be the vampire; but the real one might be drawn by a trail of fresh blood leading to his tomb.

  And what then? “Wait!” he would cry, given half a chance. “Unlike your other victims, I welcome you! We are the same, you and I, born into the service of darkness and the worship of night. Drink the blood I have saved for you and show me the way.”

  The rain fell harder. He shrank tighter into his cloak and huddled for shelter against the door of the suspect tomb; which opened.

  A thin cry escaped his lips as he struggled for balance. His first, shameful impulse was to dash headlong down the hill and regain the safety of the inn, but he found the strength to resist. It took strength, too, to hold and operate his electric torch in hands that didn’t merely tremble, but shook violently.

  The dancing light revealed a bare chamber where coffins lay in niches about the walls. The oldest were of bronze, fancifully ornamented and undisturbed; the newest was a plain pine box whose lid had been removed and placed standing against the wall, as if awaiting the return of the occupant.

  As he had known it would be, it was empty. He sagged against it, pressing his forehead hard against the edge, unable to determine whether the ragged sounds that tore from his throat were sobs or giggles. Either way, his eyes stung with tears. As he came to himself, he noted that the coffin held a stronger odor than one might expect from an occupant who had resisted the importunities of the worm.

  He stood and consulted his watch, which had stopped. The rain pattered on the roof, a chill crept into his wet feet from the stone floor. His best estimate suggested a long wait.

  With a shrug to placate the Powers of Darkness, he hoisted himself into the niche and lay down in the vacant coffin, which was a tolerably good fit. He planned to get out as soon as he had relieved the strain on his feet and rested his eyes.

  It was so deliciously comfortable, though, to lean halfway out the window and try to discern patterns in the multitudinous glimmer of the fireflies as they rose to the glorious moon....

  * * * *

  The rain must have stopped, Franz thought when his eyes opened to a burst of sunlight, and he just had time to reflect that this was a shoddy last thought for a poet. And last thought it must surely be, to judge by the unbearable, tearing pain that had exploded in his heart.

  “Fa...?”

  “Rest, my son,” said Father Teodor, pounding the stake a final time.

  With a strength that seemed nearly preternatural to those huddled behind him, the priest severed the vampire’s head with one stroke of a butcher-knife. Before anyone could get a good look at the ineffable Valdemar, he reversed the head as tradition dictated and pressed the still twitching and drooling face against the pine planks.

  “So much blood!” Granny Karen quavered. “And after so many years! I was just a little girl when Val tried to corner me in the woodshed and lift my dress, but—”

  “Go!” the priest commanded. “Our long ordeal is over at last. Leave me now. I must pray.”

  “Shouldn’t we burn it?” asked Gregor, the butcher, who was troubled about the future use of the good knife he had lent the priest. “I once read that—”

  “Get out!” Father Teodor shrieked, his eyes seeming to start from his head for a moment, then added in a milder tone, “My children. This is yet a place of great evil and spiritual peril, and only a consecrated servant of Our Lord is truly safe. Please go. Now. At once! And close the door.”

  “Considering what Val used to do to cats, I can’t say he didn’t deserve it, but what a way—”

  “Believe me, Granny, no one ever pursued his fate with so much willful persistence as this man,” he said, giving her a shove that would have seemed extremely rude if he hadn’t been in such obvious physical distress. Everyone remarked that Father Teodor looked pale and shaken, that he averted his eyes from the sunlight as if in pain.

  Young Peter’s ears were soundly boxed when he asked why, before the door clanged shut, he had glimpsed the priest greedily licking his fingers.

  THE DUNWICH LODGER

  Dedicated to Benjamin Adams

  * * * *

  I thought I wouldn’t be sick after what we did with Old Man Gray, but the way Johnny was slamming the Dodge pickup over the ruts made me want to throw up so bad that I just pushed the door open.

  “You goddamn moron!” He tromped on the brake and I banged my shoulder into the dashboard.

  “I gotta—” He knew what I had to do, and he helped me with a shove out the door. Turning his wife into a whore, killing his father, and all the rest of it, that was okay, just so long as he didn’t get his precious pickup dirty.

  Me, I never felt so dirty in my life, heaving on all fours, choking for air that was nothing but swamp-fog laced with gasoline fumes. When he turned off the engine—he was as bad as his father, so cheap he didn’t want to waste a nickel on gas—crickets and frogs hammered the night with a crazy chant.

  I heard him get out. He always got the most noise he could out of his beloved steel-toed motorcycle boots. He even wore them with his three-piece suit at work. He stood over me, smoking a cigarette. “You about finished?”

  I grabbed a handful of weeds and scrubbed my mouth. No, not weeds, it was mint growing by the roadside, and it was so sweet and clean and normal that I suddenly wanted to cry. I knew that would be all Johnny needed, so I held in the tears.

  “Let’s just don’t do it, Johnny.” I hadn’t even known I was going to say that, it just squeezed out in a very small voice.

  “Yeah, don’t do it. After all the other shit? Jesus!”

  He didn’t sound as mad as I figured that would make him. Maybe he was having second thoughts. I had to lean on the tr
uck when I stood up, my legs shook so much.

  “Money isn’t everything,” I said.

  “But it’ll do. Stop talking dumb and get in the fucking truck.”

  He drove more carefully. I don’t think he was being considerate of me, or even of his precious axles, but that he was beginning to feel genuinely uneasy now that we were so close to his Daddy’s house. Red eyes flashed in the high beams, so many more of them than usual that I wondered if they were the foxes and raccoons they pretended to be.

  “All I have to do is say one word,” he said, as if to convince himself. “After everything else, what’s that? It’s nothing. And the rest of it, that wasn’t so bad.”

  “Yeah, it was real fun.”

  “Don’t get sarcastic with me! It’s over, that’s all that matters, it’s behind us. The past—it’s like the doll you had when you were six, it’s like the scrape you got on your knee when you were ten, it ain’t there no more, it don’t exist, so why fuss about it?”

  My husband had got philosophical since falling under Old Man Gray’s spell, and I didn’t like it. The past wasn’t gone. I still had the good Christmas mornings, and I still had the warmth of Grandma’s hugs. If I didn’t have treasures like those to hang onto, Johnny’s meanness and that horrible old man would have driven me crazy long before this. But now, now, I had new memories to pollute the good ones. (“What harm can it do to take off your top, Dorie? He only wants to look. He’s just a harmless old guy who ain’t seen a pretty girl naked since Jesus was jacking off. I’m here, honey, I’m your husband.”)

  * * * *

  “We’re home,” Johnny said with a little laugh, but we weren’t. We were at his Daddy’s big white house, Abner Corbin’s, not at our own cozy little trailer. “Well, come on.”

  As I pulled one foot after the other up the steps, his Daddy came to the screen door to greet Johnny: “What the hell do you want at this hour? You lookin’ for a handout, fuck you.” A real loving family.

  When I came into the porch light, he said, “What the hell’s wrong with you, Dorie? You look like shit. If this little bastard’s been beatin’ on you, just tell me, I can still handle him.”

  Maybe that would have made me feel good if it came from a father-in-law who didn’t grab my ass every chance he got, who didn’t try to turn every fatherly hug into a dirty dancing routine. He and his son were always trying to get one up on each other, and I was just one of the many pieces in their stupid game.

  “Just some damn woman-thing, never mind her,” Johnny said. “You gonna ask us in, or what?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Okay.” Johnny shrugged and turned back toward me. “Come on, Dorie. He don’t want to hear about the Starry Wisdom Seminar. He can find out when he adds up the receipts.”

  “What? The hell you say, boy! What about it?”

  “Well, thank you, yes, Father, I would very much like to come inside and sit down and have a beer. How fucking kind of you to ask.”

  “Don’t sass me, you little shit,” Abner said, but he backed inside like an old tomcat whose bluff is called.

  Vonna was curled up on the couch with a romance novel. She looked up at us for a moment as if wondering who had left the screen door open. The Red Sox were playing on Abner’s 35-inch TV, and I bet she liked that as little as she liked it when Johnny said, “Hi, Mom.”

  “Don’t give your stepmother no shit, boy. So what’s all this about the seminar?”

  “What’s all this about a beer?”

  “Jesus wept. Get him a beer, Vonna. Me, too.”

  “I’ll—” I just wanted to spare myself one of their godawful scenes, but Abner’s arm restrained me, with his hand landing expertly just where it shouldn’t, before I could offer to serve the refreshments.

  “No, honey, it’s time the goddamn Duchess of York got off her fat ass for a change.”

  That was still funny, maybe because I disliked Vonna so much. She was a big, busty redhead who looked a lot like Fergie, but who had more in common with a rat in the cellar. She was thirty years younger than Abner, and like I told Johnny, he should just wait for his father to overdose on Vonna. But Johnny couldn’t wait.

  Abner was impatient, too, dancing around and snapping his suspenders, but unwilling to give up any more points in their game by asking Johnny again about hotel business. Getting tourists to a forlorn hellhole like Dunwich in the middle of the summer was nearly impossible, and those that did come were more likely to stay at the Ramada on the Aylesbury Pike than at Corbin’s Cockroach Palace, as everybody in town called the Dunwich Inn. Booking all forty-eight rooms for a whole week had been a real feather in Johnny’s cap.

  Johnny was supposed to be the manager, but he made little more than he had when he was changing linen and cleaning toilets, which were now my duties. Abner wouldn’t even let us have a free room, not that I would have wanted one. The big difference in Johnny’s job was that his Daddy could not only yell at him because the toilets were dirty and the beds unmade, but because the rooms were empty.

  I would have been thrilled for my husband if the contact man for the Starry Wisdom Seminar had been anyone but Saul Gray, the weird old man who had been living in the rear top floor suite since, God knows, since the Great Depression. He had arranged for the seminar last winter, and since then Johnny had fallen steadily deeper under his evil influence. But I hadn’t guessed how deep and evil until tonight. (“Let him put his hand there, honey, just pretend it’s mine. See? My hand is here, and his hand is there, and you just close your eyes and it’ll be all the same.”)

  I heard Vonna slamming around in the kitchen, but I think I was the only one who heard her say, “ ... and I hope you both choke on it.”

  They didn’t hear because Johnny couldn’t wait any longer. He got all of Abner’s attention when he said, “Well, I won’t leave you in suspense any longer, old man.”

  “You slimy little punk! You lousy jailbird! I’ll show you an old man!”

  “Okay, if you don’t want to hear what Mr. Gray said—”

  “All right, boy, spit it out, I’m listening.”

  “He said—” And nothing, nothing on that awful night, was creepier than when Johnny pulled himself up to his full height, which wasn’t much, and seemed suddenly to take on Old Man Gray’s ominous dignity, even to adopt his tall, gaunt frame—“He said, Die!”

  It started out to be comical. Abner did a bulgy-eyed take that would have done credit to a silent film clown. Then he started to get mad, to sputter. To keep sputtering ... and it stopped being funny when his face turned a ghastly shade of purple. He whooped for breath. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he hit the floor so hard he rattled the windowpanes.

  For the first time that night I did something on my own account, even though I never planned to do it. I didn’t even guess it would happen until I heard myself screaming, but I can’t tell you how good it felt. “Vonna!” I screamed. “Get out of the house! Now! Johnny’s killed his father, and now he’s coming for you. Run!”

  Johnny looked bewildered. He stared at me as if I was the crazy one. But my voice must have carried more than enough conviction, because I heard the back door slam.

  “You silly bitch,” Johnny said, shaking his head. “You pathetic moron.”

  “Please don’t do it, Johnny. Please! Your Daddy’s dead. That’s all you wanted, and you’ve got it. You don’t need to do the rest, don’t you see? He died from natural causes, it was just a coincidence—”

  “The bastard ain’t dead,” Johnny sighed. He dropped to one knee and felt for a pulse at his father’s neck. Grimacing sourly, he rose and repeated, “He ain’t dead. I have to do it all, all of it, just like Saul said.”

  (Just like Saul said. “Deep, Doris, it is deep, is it not, deeper than you ever felt before?” And the bony hands, the cold bony hands on my hips that made me know, even though I couldn’t see his face, that it was Old Man Gray who was doing what no one but Johnny had ever done to me. And worst of all, far
worst of all, pleasing me by it.)

  Struck silent by foul memories I could never scrub away, I watched Johnny walk to the door. I heard the pickup thunder to life. He could afford to let Vonna get a head start. I hadn’t heard a car, probably because Abner kept a tight fist on all keys. Unable to run through the swamp, she would be forced to run on the road, where Johnny would overtake her.

  I knelt beside Abner and struggled to roll him over. He had soiled himself, but an even worse odor came from his slack mouth with each wet snore. I forced myself to give him mouth-to-mouth. God knows I had put my lips to worse uses that night.

  He began to sputter again, seemed to wake. He struggled feebly against me.

  “I’ll call the EMS in town.”

  “Sarah?” I never thought I could feel pity for Abner Corbin, but this cry to his dead wife, Johnny’s mother, tugged at my heart. The only time the two men didn’t fight was when they reverently placed flowers on her grave at Sentinel Hill.

  “No, Daddy Corbin, it’s Dorie. Johnny’s wife?”

  “Yes, goddamn it, I know who the hell you are! You think I’m senile? What happened?”

  “It’s all right. You had a little fainting spell, that’s all. I’ll call the ambulance just to be on the safe side.”

  “Bullshit, fainting spell!” His face was the color of oatmeal, his nasty little smile raised only one side of his mouth. “It was like a bolt of electricity when Gray—when Johnny, I mean, when Johnny said that word....”

  I couldn’t just crouch there shivering at that horrible name. I ran to the phone. But this was the last house out on Beaver Dam Road, where the lights or the phone died whenever a bird perched on a wire. I heard only static, but I jiggled the receiver furiously.

  From the floor, Abner stared at me with curious intensity. It took me a moment to understand, and I could hardly believe it of a man in his condition, but he was enjoying the view he got with a strong lamp shining through my flimsy summer dress. My underthings ... cold, bony hands had ripped them off.