Mister October

by Christopher Golden

  Bobby leered at me through the screen. At first he seemed perched on the nearest branch, but then I realized that he was clinging to the window frame by his lichen-encrusted fingers, his toes balanced on the outside sill. His mouth was moving, and even though the window was open I couldn’t hear him. I didn’t want to.

  Still, I got up and cautiously approached him. His whisper could barely be made out over the susurrus of the leaves brushing together. I wondered if the dead always sounded like this, like some dry thing lightly passing through the grass.

  “Can’t wait for school, can you, you little shit? I’d rather die than go back to school—oh, wait, I am dead. You killed me, didn’t you? Little fucking bastard crushed my fingers. Should have been you at the bottom of the rocks, Kevin, you fucker.” He just went on and on like that, and as soft as it was I could hear him right through my hands as I pressed them to my ears. My eyes started to burn and my hands quivered when I took them from my head and leaned against the window frame just where Bobby’s hands clung to the outside.

  “Shut up shut up shut up shut up,” I kept muttering as I lifted my leg and kicked through the screen into Bobby’s face. He fell out and down onto a wheelbarrow laden with rakes and shovels, and I could see the blade of a hoe sink into the side of his neck. The wheelbarrow went over with the impact, spilling tools and my twice-dead brother onto the lawn. Then I screamed.

  * * *

  That was the last time I told my parents anything about Bobby and me. When I described his appearance at my window and why the screen had a hole in it and why the garden tools were scattered and broken, I ended up in therapy with my mother. Post-traumatic stress syndrome they were calling it by then, and it got me out of another two weeks of school. Of course they called it that because they couldn’t find the body I claimed was there, and how would they when he was already dead and buried.

  But I knew he had been there, knew he would be back, and knew I’d keep my mouth shut about it from now on. And I’d still keep killing the son of a bitch.

  * * *

  When I was sixteen, Bobby showed up behind my dad’s Buick just about the time I had convinced Ursula Something-Or-Other to get into the backseat with me. We were parked in a scenic spot overlooking the Connecticut River, and I told her to get comfortable while I got a blanket out of the trunk.

  Bobby’s neck sported a ragged gash about the length of a hoe blade, and while no blood flowed from it, it puckered and gaped when he spoke. His fingernails had paint from the side of the house mixed with dirt and dry lichen bits beneath them still, and it was hard for me to look away from them to get the keys out of my pocket. He kept whispering details of what he’d like to do to Ursula as I popped the trunk and dug under the blanket to find the tire iron. I worked up a sweat smashing his skull with the lug wrench end and dragging his body down to the water. I hoped the current would drag him all the way to Long Island Sound. I threw the iron as far as I could into the river, then knelt at the bank and washed my hands. Then I strolled back up to the car and got into the backseat.

  Ursula was another first, but I remember Bobby better. After high school, I’d never see Ursula again. But Bobby? Bobby would always be with me.

  * * *

  By my high school graduation, I had started carrying a knife. After I gave my valedictorian speech I found Bobby loitering behind the gym, his head misshapen and his skin pale and puffy from his river excursion. He looked tired but still a sullen sixteen, and I realized I was the bigger brother now. He seemed surprised to see me approach him so boldly, but he started his nasty little whispers the minute he laid eyes on me.

  I stabbed him in the stomach and chest until my wrist grew sore, and then I hauled his slight and bloodless corpse over the lip of a dumpster. I wiped the knife and threw my robe and cap in on top of him. I kept the tassel—a drop of red at the end of its gold threads—as a reminder.

  Back inside I hugged my parents hard when I found them in the crowd. They threw me the best graduation party I could have imagined. My dad bought me a new car to drive to college—and back home—so my mom wouldn’t have to worry so much about her remaining son.

  * * *

  I didn’t see Bobby for three years after that, and I almost started to have a normal life. While my mother never really got over the death of her first-born, she finally stopped looking at me with shadows of regret and accusation in her eyes. My father remained the stiff and stoical cliché. He probably considered himself a rock onto which my mother could cling to keep from being swept away in her years of grief and recriminations, but in truth he presented the same lusterless stare whether he was watching the evening news or me hit a homerun or my mother suddenly break into sobs at the dinner table. There were times I wanted to hit him to gain any sort of reaction at all, and times when I doubted he’d fog a mirror held under his nose.

  Despite my parents’ failings, I almost started to have a normal life. Based on the stories I heard from my friends, my home life was apparently no more dysfunctional than anyone else’s, and at least my parents were still together. And how could I, of all people, hold their faults against them? I went a little wild after graduation, though, just like a lot of college-bound teenagers, and my parents indulged me in that. Maybe they saw a little of Bobby in me when I came home too late or a little buzzed or with a scratch in the fender. And after my freshman year at U. Mass., I wasn’t looking over my shoulder all the time, waiting for Bobby to slouch out of the shadows and spoil any moment that might mean something to me. I met a girl or two over the last couple of years, and some of those encounters even skirted the shoals of relationships. Bobby didn’t so much as blow me a raspberry when I rented my first off-campus apartment, though I slept with all the lights on for two weeks running in anticipation of his return. He didn’t flash a smug leer when I smoked my first joint. He didn’t sneer at my joining a frat or winning a scholarship to study abroad my junior year or becoming captain of the shooting team. I started to forget the sound of his whispered insinuations and the cruel curl of his anemic lips. I started to think my life could be normal.

  But normal is relative when you’ve killed your brother a few times, when you hold a secret like that deep down close to your heart the way you cup a match against the bitter winter wind. You become possessive of the way it fires you inside, and you shield it, too, because it would burn you and everyone around you to the ground if you ever shared it. Protecting something like that distances you from the world, though; and no matter how much love or hate someone might throw at me, I could never, ever show them that flame. The outside world is a little dimmer when you’re lit from within, and your reactions to it become proportionately muted. Nothing’s ever sweet enough or hot enough or bright enough or loud enough. I guess that’s sort of a method halfway between poetry and Psych 101 of saying repeatedly killing my brother has colored me all the shades of fucked up and not likely to get a hell of a lot better.

  This is why things went the way they did between Tara and me a couple of weeks ago. I’m used to blaming myself for all sorts of things; I’m the living example of when “It’s not you, it’s me” is the God’s honest truth.

  I have to give her credit—she lasted a hell of a lot longer than most of them. She might even have made some decent dents in me. God knows there were nights, lying next to her, that I wanted to reveal all, to let that little flame catch us both up in the conflagration of revealed truth. Maybe I’d discover we weren’t made of paper and tinder-sticks. But in the end I couldn’t take that chance, and I closed my hand tighter around the match. She was important to me, but she couldn’t ever know.

  As the door closed behind her, I heard Bobby whispering.

  I was wiping a tear from my cheek when I heard that dry and hateful sound. I pushed my knuckles into my mouth to keep from screaming while my blurry gaze frantically scanned the room for his desiccated corpse.

  But Bobby seemed to have learned something over the last three years. He let me hear him, but he wo
uldn’t let me see him. Just that voice, telling what he would have done with Tara, what he could have done to her, again and again. He never had to pause for breath; it was as if a steady wind of foul air streamed through his unquenchable throat, stopped and started only by the clicking of his leathery tongue against his teeth.

  I ran that night. Got drunk at a friend’s and slept on his couch. And by the next afternoon Bobby’s voice had found me. I checked everywhere in the apartment, literally beat the bushes outside my friend’s window, but I couldn’t find him.

  For the last week I’ve moved from place to place, escaping the whispers sometimes for a day, sometimes only for a few hours at a time. It’s been exhausting, but in the process Bobby has gotten careless. I’ll catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, see him stepping through a doorway just as I turned, note him fading behind a tree as I approach a wooded lot. He’s gotten quicker and smarter in the last three years, while I became complacent. He wears coats and hats over his faded jeans and ragged punk T-shirt, and he’s adept at blending into crowds and lurking at the back of lecture halls. He can pass for just another student on campus, unless you know what to look for. You have to know the tell-tale signs, the too-pale flesh and the bloodless lips, the flat and too-dark eyes, the filthy fingernails. He hides the gash in his neck under scarves or upturned collars. He’s good at hiding in crowds, good at whispering. But I have something he doesn’t.

  I have a gun.

  It’s only a .22 gauge bolt-action rifle, but I’ve gotten very good with it. I wouldn’t be captain of the shooting team if I weren’t.

  Of course, I can’t carry it around with me everywhere, and besides, a rifle isn’t much good at close quarters. I need a spot with an unobstructed view of the campus, so I can see him coming, scan a wide swath of ground when I hear the whispers start again. This afternoon, from the top of the library. He likes it when I go to the library. So many places he thinks he can hide and whisper to me. I have to be careful, have to watch closely. He could be dressed like anyone. The kid with the Sox cap and the windbreaker, the shaggy one with the wool hat and the vest, the preppy in the blazer and sunglasses. I’ll be looking for the sign. Listening for the whispers.

  Taking aim.

  Conjurer

  Book I: The Grieve

  By Tom Piccirilli

  I’d been called before the vampire lords to atone for my crimes. They sent a murder of crows across the city to find me. I sat in an open-air café and watched the black birds arcing high against brownstones, museum edifices, and factory smokestacks pluming into the night. The crows called to me with their squawks and screeches, like men being flayed. They darted among the cabs and carriages on the avenue, eyes blazing, but I was too well-concealed by my spells and hexes. I drank chocolat chaud, went back to reading my novel, and thought, To hell with the Grieve.

  After that, the royals took a more direct approach. They left veiled messages scrawled with daggers in the corpses of drug-addicted prostitutes. The feds thought a new serial killer was at work and locked down the worst of the flesh-peddling areas of lower downtown. I could imagine the high the Grieve got off the blood, lounging in their silken chambers as queasy and intoxicated as slumming English nobility lying in opium dens a century ago.

  When that failed to impress, they attempted to lure me into their courts by sending word on the street that they’d captured my brother, Simon, and were savagely torturing him.

  They thought it would bring me rushing into a trap, where I’d kneel before the throne and beg for his life. It proved that even agents of the Grieve could get their information wrong. If they really knew anything about us they’d have realized that my brother and I hated each other.

  For three days I heard about the heinous abuse they inflicted on him. Some of it made me smile in grim satisfaction; some of it forced me to grit my teeth. I sat in my apartment paging through family photo albums. The eyes of my parents told me enough was enough. They implored me from their graves to save their firstborn son. I paced for hours, performed a few rituals of protection, and finally grabbed my jacket and crossed the city on foot.

  The fortress-like abbey of the Grieve sat nestled on a low bluff to the north of the city, where the river fed le lac de la foi, the lake of faith. It had supposed divine healing powers, and the ill, elderly, and dying gathered in the nearby parks and plazas, waiting for their chance to bathe in the therapeutic waters. The priests held services in St. Michael’s, and the monks helped the afflicted and the crippled through the abbey to the bathing pools. The brothers would mark the terminal cases with invisible brands, and the Grieve would pluck them from the crowds and bleed them nearly dry before letting them stumble back through the city to die of apparent natural deaths. A place of miracles was the perfect cover for butchery.

  It was midnight. The faithful slept in their makeshift lean-tos among the park trees. There wasn’t much reason for stealth. The Grieve were expecting me. I was here by invitation. As I approached the great gates a monk moved into my path and said, “I’m sorry, my son, you must wait for morning prayers –”

  “I say my prayers in the dark,” I told him. I threw my arm around his throat, got him in a headlock, and pulled him into the shadows until his neck snapped with a dull crack. I drew on his robes and cowl and followed my brother’s witch’s scent through the cloisters. Occasionally a passing priest blessed me. I returned the gesture. I eased silently into the heart of the Grieve courts, eventually finding the royals in their throne room, enjoying their spectacle of agony.

  Now I could see the stories weren’t half as bad as the truth. They’d strapped Simon to a wooden rack and had been at him with whips, red-hot pincers, thumb-screws, bootikens to crush his feet, and the turcas to pull out fingernails. His head was bound by and intricate pattern of knotted ropes so they could thraw him, jerking his neck violently side to side. Members of the court, so proud of their sophistication and refinement, quivered in their silk robes wanting to taste his witch’s blood.

  They were going old school on him because that’s how the Grieve thought. They were each several hundred years old and trapped in their memories of the plague years and the Renaissance. They oozed European poise and savoir-faire. In their lives they had been Italian artists and from ancient families of French nobility. They dressed like it was still the seventeenth century. A few even wore powdered wigs and rouge.

  The belief that vampires cast no reflection was a farce. The chamber was filled with full-length mirrors. I stepped to the nearest one and tapped quietly on the glass. I put my ear to it, focusing past my brother’s screams, listening to the great dark depths. There was no response. I moved on to the next mirror and knocked on it. I concentrated. I waited. I stepped to the next mirror.

  They had a leather gag tightened in my brother’s mouth. They needn’t have bothered. He was and is seven shades of stupid. He wouldn’t have uttered a sound no matter what they inflicted on him. He’d been tortured before. By coven masters, dirty cops, syndicate hitters, and assassins possessed by the infernal order. Always because they sought leverage against me.

  I stepped lightly around the outer rim of the gathered observers, keeping hidden. The Grieve enjoyed their pageantry and forced the monks to bear witness. Chiseled trenches in the stone floor made it difficult to navigate the room silently. The Grieve would usually skin or impale their victims and let the running blood fill the trenches, which led to open-mouthed gargoyle heads and fountains. Servants would fill goblets and chalices for their masters. Only a newly-turned slave would get on its knees and lap at the floor.

  Lord D’Outremal’s nostrils flared. He was dressed in tight white breeches, a heavily ruffled shirt, and a coat and tails of velvet. The fresh blood of my brother speckled his garments. The vampire lord lifted his chin and let his lips drape into a lazy smile.

  “The conjurer is among us.”

  A collective murmur went up. Black-clad sentries dressed like novitiate priests tried to sniff me out, but
it hadn’t been the scent of a witch that had alerted their master. The king was more discerning than that. He sensed my will and intent. He could feel the heat of my contempt and defiance.

  He turned and hissed, “Thomas? Magician? Will you do tricks for us tonight?”

  Sophia stood at the left hand of her father. Her dark eyes gleamed, and her chin was cocked slightly in my direction. She perceived me as well. I felt that same wild surge of excitement I always got when I saw her. Everything about her did it to me. The way her blonde waves fell across the edges of her face. The pink of her lips and even the hint of her fangs. The haunting sorrow of her stance, the thrust of her chest, the sensual manner her cloak draped about her bare legs.

  She was one of the youngest of her breed in the room, born of the vampire blood, no more than an adolescent at fifty in their world. She appeared to be no older than eighteen. When we rode in horse-drawn carriages across the park, people stared because we looked so right together. We’d picnic in the moonlight. My love for her was one of the crimes I’d been called to the courts for.

  The royals barked orders. A duchess I wasn’t familiar with snorted a pinch of snuff and sipped a teacup of my brother’s blood. The drone-like guards growled and began clawing their way through the brothers. Shrieking monks retreated in terror, begging for mercy as their wounds spurted and filled the stone channels.

  I drummed at the next mirror with the pads of my thumbs. I heard something move sluggishly in the abyss. I undid my robe and let it fall. I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I nabbed one of my maxed-out credit cards and used the edge to slice open the tip of my index finger. It was barely a paper cut. But I bled.

  I scrawled my name on the glass and wrote out a series of sigils with my bleeding finger and invoked the pale rider. I caught D’Outremal’s eyes in the reflection of the glass. He was amused by me. He’d always been amused by me, which is why I was still alive.