“They’ll take you away and lock you up,” John cried again, the ghost of a sob in his voice; but once more the only answer was the slight moaning of the wind. John looked across at David, maybe twenty-five feet away, and said: “I think … I think he’s gone.” Then he gave a wild shout. “He’s gone. He’s gone!”
“I didn’t hear him go,” said David, dubiously.
John was very much more his old self now. “Oh, he’s gone, all right. He saw those men coming and cleared off. David, I’m going up!”
“You’d better wait,” David cried out as his friend slid down to hang at arm’s length from his rung. John ignored the advice; he swung forward hand over hand until he was under the far gap in the planking. With a grunt of exertion, he forced the tired muscles of his arms to pull his tired body up. He got his rib cage over the rung, flung a hand up and took hold of the naked plank to one side of the gap, then—
In that same instant David sensed rather than heard the furtive movement overhead. “John!” he yelled. “He’s still there—Wiley Smiley’s still there!”
But John had already seen Wiley Smiley; the idiot had made his presence all too plain, and already his victim was screaming. The boy fell back fully into David’s view, the hand he had thrown up to grip the edge of the plank returning automatically to the rung, his arms taking the full weight of his falling body, somehow sustaining him. There was a long gash in his cheek from which blood freely flowed.
“Move forward!” David yelled, terror pulling his lips back in a snarling mask. “Forward, where he can’t get at you …”
John heard him and must have seen in some dim, frightened recess of his mind the common sense of David’s advice. Panting hoarsely—partly in dreadful fear, partly from hideous emotional exhaustion—he swung one hand forward and caught at the next rung. And at that precise moment, in the split-second while John hung suspended between the two rungs with his face turned partly upward, Wiley Smiley struck again.
David was witness to it all. He heard the maniac’s rising, gibbering shriek of triumph as the sharp point of the stick lanced unerringly down, and John’s answering cry of purest agony as his left eye flopped bloodily out onto his cheek, lying there on a white thread of nerve and gristle. He saw John clap both hands to his monstrously altered face, and watched in starkest horror as his friend seemed to stand for a moment, defying gravity, on the thin air. Then John was gone, dwindling away down a drafty funnel of air, while rising came the piping, diminishing scream that would haunt David until his dying day, a scream that was cut short after what seemed an impossibly long time.
John had fallen. At first David couldn’t accept it, but then it began to sink in. His friend had fallen. He moaned and shut his eyes tightly, lying half across and clinging to his rung so fiercely that he could no longer really feel his bloodless fingers at all. John had fallen …
Then—perhaps it was only a minute or so later, perhaps an hour, David didn’t know—there broke in on his perceptions the sound of clumping, hurrying feet on the boards above, and a renewed, even more frenzied attack of gibbering and shrieking from Wiley Smiley. David forced his eyes open as the footsteps came to a halt directly overhead. He heard a gruff voice:
“Jim, you keep that bloody—Thing—away, will you? He’s already killed one boy today. Frank, give us a hand here.”
A face, inverted, appeared through the hole in the planks not three feet away from David’s own face. The mouth opened and the same voice, but no longer gruff, said: “It’s okay now, son. Everything’s okay. Can you move?”
In answer, David could only shake his head negatively. Overtaxed muscles, violated nerves had finally given in. He was frozen on his perch; he would stay where he was now until he was either taken off physically or until he fainted.
Dimly the boy heard the voice again, and others raised in an urgent hubbub, but he was too far gone to make out any words that were said. He was barely aware that the face had been withdrawn. A few seconds later there came a banging and tearing from immediately above him; a small shower of tiny pieces of wood, dust, and homogenous debris fell upon his head and shoulders. Then daylight flooded down to illuminate more brightly the shaded area beneath the walkway. Another board was torn away, and another.
The inverted face again appeared, this time at the freshly-made opening, and an exploratory hand reached down. Using its kindly voice, the face said: “Okay, son, we’ll have you out of there in a jiffy. I—uh!—can’t quite seem to reach you, but it’s only a matter of a few inches. Do you think you can—”
The voice was cut off by a further outburst of incoherent shrieking and jabbering from Wiley Smiley. The face and hand withdrew momentarily and David heard the voice yet again. This time it was angry. “Look, see if you can keep that damned idiot back, will you? And keep him quiet, for God’s sake!”
The hand came back, large and strong, reaching down. David still clung with all his remaining strength to the rung, and though he knew what was expected of him—what he must do to win himself the prize of continued life—all sense of feeling had quite gone from his limbs and even shifting his position was a very doubtful business.
“Boy,” said the voice, as the hand crept inches closer and the inverted face stared into his, “if you could just reach up your hand, I—”
“I’ll—I’ll try to do it,” David whispered.
“Good, good,” his would-be rescuer calmly, quietly answered. “That’s it, lad, just a few inches. Keep your balance, now.”
David’s hand crept up from the rung and his head, neck, and shoulder slowly turned to allow it free passage. Up it tremblingly went, reaching to meet the hand stretching down from above. The boy and the man, each peered into the other’s straining face, and an instant later their fingertips touched—
There came a mad shriek, a frantic pounding of feet and cries of horror and wild consternation from above. The inverted face went white in a moment and disappeared, apparently dragged backward. The hand disappeared, too. And that was the very moment that David had chosen to free himself of the rung and give himself into the protection of his rescuer …
He flailed his arms in a vain attempt to regain his balance. Numb, cramped, cold with that singular icy chill experienced only at death’s positive approach, his limbs would not obey. He rolled forward over the bar and his legs were no longer strong enough to hold him. He didn’t even feel the toes of his shoes as they struck the rung—the last of him to have contact with the viaduct—before his fall began. And if the boy thought anything at all during that fall, well, those thoughts will never be known. Later he could not remember.
Oh, there was to be a later, but David could hardly have believed it while he was falling. And yet he was not unconscious. There were vague impressions: of the sky, the looming arch of the viaduct flying past, trees below, the sea on the horizon, then the sky again, all slowly turning. There was a composite whistling, of air displaced and air ejected from lungs contracted in a high-pitched scream. And then, it seemed a long time later, there was the impact …
But David did not strike the ground … he struck the pool. The deep swimming hole. The blessed, merciful river!
He had curled into a ball—the fetal position, almost—and this doubtless saved him. His tightly-curled body entered the water with very little injury, however much of a splash it caused. Deep as the water was, nevertheless David struck the bottom with force, the pain and shock awakening whatever facilities remained functional in the motor areas of his brain. Aided by his resultant struggling, however weak, the ballooning air in his clothes bore him surely to the surface. The river carried him a few yards downstream to where the banks formed a bottleneck for the pool.
Through all the pain David felt his knees scrape pebbles, felt his hands on the mud of the bank, and where willpower presumably was lacking, instinct took over. Somehow he crawled from the pool, and somehow he hung on grimly to consciousness. Away from the water, still he kept on crawling, as from the horror of his
experience. Unseeing, he moved toward the towering unconquered colossus of the viaduct. He was quite blind as of yet, there was only a red, impenetrable haze before his bloodied eyes; he heard nothing but a sick roaring in his head. Finally his shoulder struck the bole of a tree that stood in the shelter of the looming brick giant, and there he stopped crawling, propped against the tree.
Slowly, very slowly the roaring went out of his ears, the red haze before his eyes was replaced by lightning flashes and kaleidoscopic shapes and colors. Normal sound suddenly returned with a great pain in his ears. A rush of wind rustled the leaves of the trees, snatching away and then giving back a distant shouting which seemed to have its source overhead. Encased in his shell of pain, David did not immediately relate the shouting to his miraculous escape. Sight returned a few moments later and he began to cry wrackingly with relief; he had thought himself permanently blind. And perhaps even now he had not been completely wrong, for his eyes had plainly been knocked out of order. Something was—must be—desperately wrong with them.
David tried to shake his head to clear it, but this action only brought fresh, blinding pain. When the nausea subsided he blinked his eyes, clearing them of blood and peering bewilderedly about at his surroundings. It was as he had suspected: the colors were all wrong. No, he blinked again, some of them seemed perfectly normal.
For instance: the bark of the tree against which he leaned was brown enough, and its dangling leaves were a fresh green. The sky above was blue, reflected in the river, and the bricks of the viaduct were a dull orange. Why then was the grass beneath him a lush red streaked with yellow and gray? Why was this unnatural grass wet and sticky, and—
—And why were these tatters of dimly familiar clothing flung about in exploded, scarlet disorder?
When his reeling brain at last delivered the answer, David opened his mouth to scream, fainting before he could do so. He fell face down into the sticky embrace of his late friend.
SPINDLESHANKS
(NEW ORLEANS, 1956)
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of the novels Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She also wrote the movie novelization of Beowulf and, more recently, she has published the Siobhan Quinn series of urban fantasies (Blood Oranges, Red Delicious, and Cherry Bomb) under the pseudonym “Kathleen Tierney.”
Her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in a number of volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores, To Charles Fort with Love, Alabaster, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, The Ape’s Wife and Other Tales, Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume Two), and Dear Sweet Filthy World.
Kiernan is a multiple recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award, as well as a winner of the Nebula Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Mythopoeic Award.
As the author explains: “‘Spindleshanks’ is the only story I’ve ever written that I thought was so good that it would absolutely, definitely, find a place in an annual ‘Year’s Best’ anthology. Previously, I’d almost felt that confident about ‘Rats Live on No Evil Star.’ Naturally, neither of these stories were chosen for such compilations. As is so often the case, my own reaction to my work was not in line with the opinions of readers and editors, and so ‘Spindleshanks’ has languished in a somewhat obscure collection.
“In ‘Spindleshanks,’ I somehow managed to achieve an economy of language I’d not enjoyed before (or since, for that matter). Stylistically, I think it stands apart from the greater body of what I’ve written. That wasn’t intentional, though, just something that happened. When I started work on the piece, I had in mind a story about a ghoul cult living in a necropolis beneath Lafayette Cemetery, with dashes of lycanthropy thrown in, and ‘Spindleshanks’ is what came out instead. Rather, not instead, but it is a story where I kept the horrific and supernatural elements so low-key that, most of the time, they work more as subtext than overt theme.
“Looking back at the story, I realize that it’s actually about the difficulties I was having finishing my second novel, Threshold (née Trilobite), with Reese Callicott’s The Ecstatic River standing in for my own unfinished manuscript. I see in it many of the qualities that I so admire in the work of Shirley Jackson, who, as Stephen King so aptly pointed out years ago, ‘never needed to raise her voice.’”
THE END OF July, indolent, dog-day swelter inside the big white house on Prytania Street; Greek Revival columns painted as cool and white as a vanilla ice cream cone, and from the second-floor veranda Reese can see right over the wall into Lafayette Cemetery, if she wants to—Lafayette No. 1, and the black iron letters above the black iron gate to remind anyone who forgets. She doesn’t dislike the house, not the way that she began to dislike her apartment in Boston before she finally left, but it’s much too big, even with Emma, and she hasn’t bothered to take the sheets off most of the furniture downstairs. This one bedroom almost more than she needs, anyway, her typewriter and the electric fan from Woolworths on the table by the wide French doors to the veranda, so she can sit there all day, sip her gin and tonic and stare out at the whitewashed brick walls and the crypts, whenever the words aren’t coming.
And these days the words are hardly ever coming, hardly ever there when she goes looking for them, and her editor wanted the novel finished two months ago. Running from that woman and her shiny black patent pumps, her fashionable hats, as surely as she ran from Boston, the people there she was tired of listening to, and so Reese Callicott leased this big white house for the summer and didn’t tell anyone where she was going or why. But she might have looked for a house in Vermont or Connecticut, instead, if she’d stopped to take the heat seriously, but the whole summer paid for in advance, all the way through September, and there’s no turning back now. Nothing now but cracked ice and Gibley’s and her view of the cemetery; her mornings and afternoons sitting at the typewriter and the mocking white paper, sweat and the candy smell of magnolias all day long, then jasmine at night.
Emma’s noisy little parties at night, too, all night sometimes, the motley handful of people she drags in like lost puppies and scatters throughout the big house on Prytania Street; this man a philosophy or religion student at Tulane and that woman a poet from somewhere lamentable in Mississippi, that fellow a friend of a friend of Faulkner or Capote. Their accents and pretenses and the last of them hanging around until almost dawn unless Reese finds the energy to run them off sooner. But energy in shorter supply than the words these days, and mostly she just leaves them alone, lets them play their jazz and Fats Domino records too loud and have the run of the place because it makes Emma happy. No point in denying that she feels guilty for dragging poor Emma all the way to New Orleans, making her suffer the heat and mosquitoes because Chapter Eight of The Ecstatic River might as well be a cinder-block wall.
Reese lights a cigarette and blows the smoke toward the veranda, toward the cemetery, and a hot breeze catches it and quickly drags her smoke ghost to pieces.
“There’s a party in the Quarter tonight,” Emma says. She’s lying on the bed, four o’clock Friday afternoon and she’s still wearing her butter-yellow house coat with one of her odd books and a glass of bourbon and lemonade.
“Isn’t there always a party in the Quarter?” Reese asks and now she’s watching two old women in the cemetery, one with a bouquet of white flowers. She thinks they’re chrysanthemums, but the women are too far away for her to be sure.
“Well, yes. Of course. But this one’s going to be something different. I think a real voodoo woman will be there.” A pause and she adds, “You should come.”
“You know I have too much work.”
Reese doesn’t have to turn around in her chair to know th
e pout on Emma’s face, the familiar, exaggerated disappointment, and she suspects that it doesn’t actually matter to Emma whether or not she comes to the party. But this ritual is something that has to be observed, the way old women have to bring flowers to the graves of relatives who died a hundred years ago, the way she has to spend her days staring at blank pages.
“It might help, with your writing, I mean, if you got out once in a while. Really, sometimes I think you’ve forgotten how to talk to people.”
“I talk to people, Emma. I talked to that Mr …” and she has to stop, searching for his name and there it is, “That Mr. Leonard, just the other night. You know, the fat one with the antique shop.”
“He’s almost sixty years old,” Emma says; Reese takes another drag off her cigarette, exhales, and “Well, it’s not like you want me out looking for a husband,” she says.
“Have it your way,” Emma says, the way she always says “Have it your way,” and she goes back to her book and Reese goes back to staring at the obstinate typewriter and watching the dutiful old women on the other side of the high cemetery wall.
Reese awakens from a nightmare a couple of hours before dawn, sweating and breathless, chilled by a breeze through the open veranda doors. Emma’s fast asleep beside her, lying naked on top of the sheets, though Reese didn’t hear her come in. If she cried out or made any other noises in her sleep at least it doesn’t seem to have disturbed Emma. Reese stares at the veranda a moment, the night beyond, and then she sits up, both feet on the floor, and she reaches for the lamp cord, but that might wake Emma and it was only a nightmare after all, a bad dream, and in a minute or two it will all seem at least as absurd as her last novel.
Instead she lights a cigarette and sits smoking in the dark, listening to the restless sounds the big house makes when everyone is still and quiet and it’s left to its own devices, its random creaks and thumps, solitary house thoughts and memories filtered through plaster and lathe and burnished oak. The mumbling house and the exotic, piping song of a night bird somewhere outside, mundane birdsong made exotic because she hasn’t spent her whole life hearing it, some bird that doesn’t fly as far north as Boston. Reese listens to the bird and the settling house, Emma’s soft snores, while she smokes the cigarette almost down to the filter, and then she gets up, walks across the wide room to the veranda doors, only meaning to close them. Only meaning to shut out a little of the night and then maybe she can get back to sleep.
The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Page 3