The nurse leaned out. She had changed her scrub shirt, Meredith noticed; this one was in a Hawaiian pattern, with bright fruit standing out against dark green palm trees.
“Mrs. Hallam?” the nurse said, and the chubby woman stood up with her baby. She looked into the blankets the whole time she was crossing the floor, and she and the nurse giggled to one another. Meredith could hear them start talking as the door swung closed. The only words she thought she heard were “the claw.” Or maybe it was “de-claw.”
Meredith’s eyes drifted from the door, and she started when she saw the thin lady’s stare hard upon her, magnified by her huge square glasses.
“I didn’t give them my name,” the lady said, “but it won’t matter, you’ll see. You didn’t think they’d let you leave, did you? Did you?”
Meredith had no answer. She grimaced in discomfort, and tried to think of some way to end the conversation—though it wasn’t much of a dialog—without being obviously rude.
“You haven’t been watching,” the lady continued. “Not watching the right things. You haven’t seen the signs.” She tossed her magazine aside on the empty seat beside her. “The hands on the clock are the only ones they leave behind, you know. And they like the stains.”
The stains. Meredith looked at the dark splotch. A fly was crawling across it, sampling it. Meredith felt her stomach roll. She smiled politely to the lady, then stood up and crossed again to the reception counter. The girl behind it smiled at her as before. Meredith could see her makeup was too thick; the foundation was starting to show cracks at the corners of her mouth and eyes.
“I’m sorry, but that spot on the chair,” Meredith said. “Someone’s been in here twice now—the custodian, I suppose—but he hasn’t cleaned it up, or even done anything to cover it. I really don’t think it’s sanitary, leaving it like that.”
The girl smiled and nodded as she had before. “I’ll send someone out to take care of it right away.” Her lips didn’t move when she spoke, but her tongue wriggled behind her twisted teeth.
Meredith didn’t feel anything had been resolved, but she was even more uncomfortable standing here than sitting. Still, there was nothing forcing her to sit close to the fouled seat. She walked past the thin lady who was now sitting with her hands primly on her knees and instead seated herself on the bank of chairs that the chubby woman had vacated. Not in the same seat, though. There was something left behind on that seat, and it took Meredith a moment’s attention to identify it: it had been a baby’s pacifier, but the soft nipple was torn away, the edge of the rubber shredded as if it had gone through a meat grinder.
The door opened again, and the custodian entered for a third time. He held the door for a larger man dressed in khaki and denim. The larger man held the utility case this time. He stopped just inside the door and scanned the room with bulbous, unblinking eyes. He had a short, squat nose, and cheeks pitted with acne scars. Meredith looked away when his eyes fell upon her.
The custodian from earlier gestured wordlessly to the stained seat. The larger man—his boss, maybe? His supervisor?—went to the seat and knelt on the carpet, setting the case beside him. The smaller custodian knelt a pace behind him. The supervisor didn’t open his case. He leaned his elbows on the edge of the seat. Then he extended his right hand to the back of the seat, trailed three fingers down the bloody wetness, and brought them to his face.
Meredith grimaced and turned her head away. The thin lady was watching her, ignoring the two custodians. Meredith was afraid to look back, afraid that the two men were also watching her too, but the lady’s glare was too hard to endure. But when she turned her head back, the custodians weren’t watching her. Instead they had gotten to their feet, and now both of them left, the smaller again holding the door for the latter. On the larger man’s face were three parallel stripes in watery red, extending from his hairline down onto his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. The stain was still there on the chair, but now there was something else too: a tooth. It looked human. The fly buzzed through the air and landed on the tooth to examine it with its forelegs.
The door to the back office opened, and the nurse stepped halfway out. She had changed her shirt again; this one was still tropical themed, green palm trees against a black background, but mixed among the trees were white skulls with open mouths and snaking red tongues.
“Ma’am?” she said, looking toward the thin lady, who was still staring hard at Meredith.
“I didn’t tell them my name,” she said, her voice now despairing. “But that doesn’t help any. You see?”
“Ma’am.” The nurse motioned with her clipboard. Reluctantly, the thin lady stood up. She was shorter than Meredith had thought, almost childlike in her proportions, and the nurse towered over her as she ushered her into the back and closed the door. From where she was now sitting, Meredith caught a glimpse of the office behind the door. It was black—not unlit, but painted black.
Now she was alone in the waiting room, alone with the hum of the lights and the clock. There was no breathing, not even her own.
She turned in her seat and craned to see the clock, which was now above and behind her. It read 10:31 A.M.
She stood up and went to the reception counter.
“I think your clock is falling behind,” she said. “It’s moving awfully slowly.”
The girl smiled at her, and Meredith saw that the cracks weren’t in her makeup after all; they were in her face. Her entire pinup’s face was slowly detaching, cracks and creases spreading across it like brittle wax.
“I’ll send someone out to take care of it right away,” she said. Her wax face didn’t move at all. Meredith could see her tongue thrashing behind the twisted teeth, translucent and segmented like a maggot.
“Do you know what time it is?” Meredith asked.
“I’ll send someone out to take care of it right away,” the girl answered. She raised a hand slowly and pointed back to where Meredith had been sitting.
Meredith returned to her seat and huddled there.
No one who had gone into the office had come out.
To keep herself from standing and pacing, she finally reached to the low table and pulled over the first magazine she touched. Its name, Sporting Review, was the only thing she could read on the cover; the rest of the type was in some language she didn’t understand or even recognize. The characters were rounded, stylized pictograms that reminded her of pictures of embryos. The figure on the cover was a smiling man, bronzed skinned and black haired, standing in a stone arena, dressed in nothing but a loin clothing and a feathered head band. His number, 21, was painted on his bare chest with white paint. He proudly held aloft the head of a defeated competitor.
Meredith pushed the magazine back without opening it and looked at the clock again. It still read 10:31 A.M. The fly on the stained seat had taken to the air and now flew in crazy circles around the room, its drone mixing with the sound of the lights and the clock.
The office door opened, and the nurse stood there. Her shirt now was pure black, with a single white skull in the center of her chest, its lascivious red tongue looping out and down and around.
“Meredith,” she said.
Meredith glanced back at the clock. 10:31 A.M., now and forever.
“Meredith,” the nurse repeated.
Her stomach tied itself in knots. She looked at her fingernails, not wanting to meet the nurse’s eyes.
“Meredith,” the nurse said firmly. “The doctor will see you now.”
Credits and Acknowledgments
“Party Favors” first appeared in the Fall 1990 issue of Amazing Stories, under the byline “Alex Nathan Shumate.”
“Other Duties” first appeared in Mormons & Monsters, edited by Wm Morris and Theric Johnson.
“Trading With the Ruks” first appeared in Finding Home: Community in Apocalyptic Worlds, edited by Caroline Dombrowski.
All other stories are published here for the first time.
The majority
of the stories in this volume—“Somewhere in Nebraska or Maybe Colorado,” “Bookmobile Day,” “An Eldritch Correspondence,” “Forbidden Aisles,” “Love Among the Kryil,” “The Night Children,” “On the Demise of Rory Calloran,” “Story in a Bar,” “The Straightest Road in Maine,” “In the Plantation House,” “Trading With the Ruks,” and “Wait”—had their genesis in a single month. My friend Dan Wells (author of the I Am Not a Serial Killer books and the Partials series) had proposed doing a “NaShoStoMo” challenge, writing a new short story every day for a month. That fired my enthusiasm, so in April 2011, I wrote the first drafts of thirty short stories. Some were little more than vignettes, and others were shoddy piffle whose only purpose was to fulfill the letter of the challenge, but right between the fourteenth and twenty-first days I hit a sweet spot, and the result was most of those NaShoStoMo stories included here. I highly recommend the exercise. (Ironically, Dan was unable to participate because of a book tour, and hasn’t yet, to my knowledge, taken the challenge that he first proposed.)
If you enjoyed this book, check out some of the other publications from Cold Fusion Media:
Shared Nightmares
Edited by Steven Diamond and Nathan Shumate
Twelve authors— including New York Times bestseller Larry Correia, #1 Amazon bestseller Michaelbrent Collings, Prometheus Award winner Sarah Hoyt, Campbell Award nominee Max Gladstone, and Hugo nominee Howard Tayler—take you to the dark side of the dream world, where phantasms and fears become frighteningly real.
***
Space Eldritch
Science fiction goes occult in Space Eldritch, a volume of seven original novelettes and novellas of Lovecraftian pulp space opera. Featuring work by Brad R. Torgersen (Hugo/Nebula/Campbell nominee), Howard Tayler (multiple Hugo nominee), and Michael R. Collings (author of over 100 books), plus a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia, Space Eldritch inhabits the intersection between the eternal adventure of the final frontier and the inhuman darkness between the stars.
***
Space Eldritch II: The Haunted Stars
The cold of interstellar space is again closer than you think as eleven authors—including New York Times bestseller Larry Correia, Nebula winner Eric James Stone, Amazon #1 bestseller Michaelbrent Collings, and multiple Hugo nominee Howard Tayler—explore what happens when space opera meets Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
***
Arcane Sampler
Edited by Nathan Shumate
A bite-sized collection featuring twelve unsettling original stories, Arcane Sampler demonstrates the kind of macabre storytelling that characterizes the Arcane series of anthologies — for only 99 cents! Included:
The performers in a traveling carnival suddenly find themselves in mortal danger from their latest exhibit...
A Bible salesman discovers a reclusive family who worships something older… and closer...
A good Samaritan stopping to give roadside assistance encounters something far more dangerous than a flat tire...
***
Arcane
Edited by Nathan Shumate
The first full-length anthology of this series features thirty stories by some of the freshest blood in the horror, dark fantasy and weird fiction fields! Included:
An office worker returns from bereavement leave to find his workplace changing before his eyes…
A priest excites his village to the greatest show of devotion to their god ever seen…
A mortician sees all of his immaculate handiwork destroyed when his clients start rising…
***
Arcane II
Edited by Nathan Shumate
This second volume of the Arcane anthology series presents twenty-one more stories of dark imagination. Included:
A landlord finds something left behind by a former tenant, something with a will of its own...
A bride explores her new husband’s manor house, seeking the mystery that overshadows his life...
A survivor of the apocalypse sees an insidious change infecting the few remaining humans...
***
The Golden Age of Crap
by Nathan Shumate
Just because you can’t respect a movie doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. The Golden Age of Crap serves up a sampling of junk-food flicks that gained their audiences on videocassette rental shelves during the ’80s and ’90s, a time when one couldn’t visit the video rental store without being tempted by Italian post-apocalyptic adventures, ninja revenge yarns, and zombie-filled “camcorder epics.” The movies covered here run from sleeper hits (Phantasm II) to cult favorites (The Dead Next Door), from unknown stinkers (Plutonium Baby) to undiscovered gems (America’s Deadliest Home Video), all examined with a critical but fun-loving eye.
Cold Fusion Media
http://www.coldfusionmedia.us
Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories Page 14
