The Year's Best Horror Stories 4

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  The sergeants cheeks were hollow, his fingers grotesquely thin where they rested on top of the door or clutched the handles of his zipped AWOL bag. Where no moles squatted, his skin was as white as a convict's; but the moles were almost everywhere, hands and face, dozens and scores of them, crowding together in welted obscenity.

  The sergeant laughed starkly. "Pretty, aren't I? The docs tell me I got too much sun over there and it gave me runaway warts. Hell, four years is enough time for it to."

  "Umm," Richmond grunted in embarrassment, edging back into the hall to have something to do. "Well, the car's in back . . . if you're ready, we can see the Lunkowskis."

  "Yeah, Christ," the sergeant said, "that's what I came for, to see the Lunkowskis." He shifted his bag as he followed the captain and it clinked again. Always before, the other man on the notification team had been a stateside officer like Richmond himself. He had heard that a few low-casualty outfits made a habit of letting whoever knew the dead man best accompany the body home, but this was his first actual experience with the practice. He hoped it would be his last.

  Threading the green Ford through the heavy traffic of the city center, Richmond said, "I take it Private Lunkowski was one of your men?"

  "Yeah, Stevie-boy was in my platoon for about three weeks," Morzek agreed with a chuckle. "Lost six men in that time and he was the last. Six out of twenty-nine, not very damn good, was it?"

  "You were under heavy attack?"

  "Hell, no, mostly the dinks were letting us alone for a change. We were out in the middle of War Zone C, you know, most Christ-bitten stretch of country you ever saw. No dinks, no trees—they'd all been defoliated. Not a damn thing but dust and each other's company."

  "Well, what did happen?" Richmond prompted impatiently. Traffic had thinned somewhat among the blocks of old buildings and he began to look for house numbers.

  "Oh, mostly they just died." Morzek said. He yawned alcoholically. "Stevie, now, he got blown to hell by a grenade."

  Richmond had learned when he was first assigned to notification duty not to dwell to the way his . . . missions had died. The possibilities varied from unpleasant to ghastly. He studiously avoided saying anything more to the sergeant beside him until he found the number he wanted. "One-sixteen. This must be the Lunkowskis'."

  Morzek got put on the curb side, looking more skeletal than before in the dappled sunlight. He still held his AWOL bag.

  "You can leave that in the car," Richmond suggested. "I'll look up."

  "Naw, I'll take it in," the sergeant said as he waited for Richmond to walk around the car. "You know, this is every damn thing I brought from Nam? They didn't bother to open it at Travis, just asked me what I had in it. 'A quart of gin,' I told 'em, 'but I won't have it long,' and they waved me through to make my connections. One advantage to this kind of trip."

  A bell chimed far within the house when Richmond pressed the button. It was cooler than he had expected on the pine-shaded porch. Miserable as these high, dark old houses were to heat, the design made a world of sense in the summer.

  A light came on inside. The stained-glass window left of the door darkened and a latch snicked open. "Please to come in," invited a soft-voiced figure hidden by the dark oak panel. Morzek grinned inappropriately and led the way into the hall, brightly lighted by an electric chandelier.

  "Mr. Lunkowski?" Richmond began to the wispy little man who had admitted them. "We are—"

  "But yes, you are here to tell us when Stefan shall come back, are you not?" Lunkowski broke in. "Come into the sitting room, please Anna and my daughter Rose are there."

  "Ah, Mr. Lunkowski," Richmond tried to explain as he followed, all too conscious of the sardonic grin on Morzek's face. "You have been informed by telegram that Private Lunkowski was—"

  "Was killed, yes," said the younger of the two red-haired women as she got up from the sofa. "But his body will come back to us soon, will he not? The man on the telephone said . . ."

  She was gorgeous, Richmond thought, cool and assured, half smiling as her hair cascaded over her left shoulder like a thick copper conduit. Disconcerted as he was by the whole situation, it was a moment before he realized that Sergeant Morzek was saying, "Oh, the coffin's probably at the airport now, but there's nothing in it but a hundred and fifty pounds of gravel. Did the telegram tell you what happened to Stevie?"

  "Sergeant!" Richmond shouted. "You drunken—"

  "Oh, calm down, Captain," Morzek interrupted bleakly. "The Lunkowskis, they understand. They want to hear the whole story, don't they?"

  "Yes." There was a touch too much sibilance in the word as it crawled from the older woman, Stefan Lunkowski's mother. Her hair was too grizzled now to have more than a touch of red in it, enough to rust the tight ringlets clinging to her skull like a helmet of mail. Without quiet appreciating its importance, Richmond noticed that Mr. Lunkowski was standing in front of the room's only door.

  With perfect nonchalance, Sergeant Morzek sat down on an overstuffed chair, laying his bag across his knees. "Well," he said, "there was quite a report on that one. We told them how Stevie was trying to boobytrap a white phosphorous grenade—fix it to go off as soon as some dink pulled the pin instead of four seconds later. And he goofed."

  Mrs. Lunkowski's breath whistled out very softly. She said nothing. Morzek waited for further reaction before he smiled horribly and added. "He burned. A couple pounds of willie pete going blooie, well . . . it keeps burning all the way through you. Like I said, the coffin's full of gravel."

  "My god, Morzek," the captain whispered. It was not the sergeant's savage grin that froze him but the icy-eyed silence of the three Lunkowskis.

  "The grenade, that was real," Morzek concluded. "The rest of the report was a lie."

  Rose Lunkowski reseated herself gracefully on a chair in front of the heavily draped windows. "Why don't you start at the beginning Sergeant?" she said with a thin smile that did not show her teeth. "There is much we would like to know before you are gone."

  "Sure," Morzek agreed, tracing a mottled forefinger across the pigmented callosities on his face. "Not much to tell. The night after Stevie got assigned to my platoon, the dinks hit us. No big thing. Had one fellow dusted off with brass in his ankle from his machine gun blowing up, that was all. But a burst of AK fire knocked Stevie off his tank right at the start."

  "What's all this about?" Richmond complained. "If he was killed by rifle fire, why say a grenade—"

  "Silence!" The command crackled like heel plates on concrete.

  Sergeant Morzek nodded. "Why, thank you, Mr. Lunkowski. You see, the captain there doesn't know the bullets didn't hurt Stevie. He told us his flak jacket had stopped them. It couldn't have and it didn't. I saw it that night, before he burned it—five holes to stick your fingers through, right over the breast pocket. But Stevie was fine, not a mark on him. Well, Christ, maybe he'd had a bandolier or ammo under the jacket. I had other things to think about."

  Morzek paused to glance around his audience. "All this Well, Christ, maybe he'd had a bandolier of ammo under the Federal Building."

  "You won't be long," the girl hissed in reply.

  Morzek grinned. "They broke up the squadron, then," he rasped on, "gave each platoon a sector of War Zone C to cover to stir up the drinks. There's more life on the moon than there was on the stretch we patrolled. Third night out, one of the gunners died. They flew him back to Saigon for an autopsy but damned if I know what they found. Galloping malaria, we figured.

  "Three nights later another guy died. Dawson on three-six . . . Christ, the names don't matter. Sometime after midnight his track commander woke up, heard him moaning. We got him back to Quan Loi to a hospital, but he never came out of it. The lieutenant thought he got wasp stung on the neck—here, you know?" Morzek touched two fingers to his jugular. "Like he was allergic. Well, it happens."

  "But what about Stefan?" Mrs. Lunkowski asked. "The others do not matter."

  "Yes, finish it quickly, Sergeant," th
e younger woman said, and this time Richmond did catch the flash of her teeth.

  "We had a third death," Morzek said agreeably, stroking the zipper of his AWOL bag back and forth. "We were all jumpy by then. I doubled the guard, two men awake on every track. Three nights later and nobody in the platoon remembered anything from twenty-four hundred hours till Riggs's partner blinked at ten of one and found him dead.

  "In the morning, one of the boys came to me. He'd seen Stevie slip over to Riggs, he said; but he was zonked out on grass and didn't think it really had happened until he woke up in the morning and saw Riggs under a poncho. By then, he was scared enough to tell the whole story. Well, we were all jumpy."

  "You killed Stefan." It was not a question but a flat statement.

  "Oh, hell, Lunkowski," Morzek said absently, "what does it matter who rolled the grenade into his bunk? The story got around and . . . something had to be done."

  "Knowing what you know, you came here?" Mrs. Lunkowski murmured liquidly. "You must be mad."

  "Naw, I'm not crazy, I'm just sick." The sergeant brushed his left hand over his forehead. "Malignant melanoma, the docs told me. Twenty-six years in the goddamn army and in another week or two I'd be warted to death.

  "Captain," he added, turning his cancerous face toward Richmond, "you better leave through the window."

  "Neither of you will leave!" snarled Rose Lunkowski as she stepped toward the men.

  Morzek lifted a fat gray cylinder from his bag. "Know what this is, honey?" he asked conversationally.

  Richmond screamed and leaped for the window. Rose ignored him, slashing her hand out for the phosphorous grenade. Drapery wrapping the captain's body shielded him from glass and splintered window frame as he pitched out into the yard.

  He was still screaming there when the blast of white fire bulged the walls of the house.

  COTTAGE TENANT by Frank Belknap Long

  Frank Belknap Long draws the horror for "Cottage Tenant" from the depths of the supposedly placid sea; and the result is a menace H. P. Lovecraft himself might have been proud of. Not surprising perhaps, since Long was one of Lovecraft's closest friends. But the story is uninfluenced by any talent except Long's own, which isn't surprising either since Long is the author of over three hundred science-fiction and fantasy tales, including some of the finest modern supernatural horror stories. He's been too infrequently seen with macabre fiction in the past decade but we hope his two books last year (The Early Long and his non-fiction work Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside) and such stories as the following indicate that his interest is reviving.

  "When we were children," Crewson said, trying hard to sound thoughtful and wise, "the Old English Nursery Rhymes and tales of Greek gods unaging seemed just the right kind of reading for eight-year-olds. No one would have dreamed of putting them on a restricted list. But I'm afraid that today—" He broke off abruptly to stare at Susan Jane, who was two years short of eight and at his son, Timothy, whose recent birthday had made him nine. They bore a remarkable family resemblance, and though his son was the best looking, Susan Jane could hardly have been thought of as "plain."

  He avoided looking directly at his wife until Anne Crewson said: "That's nonsense and you know it. Complete, absolute, total nonsense. What would you have them read—sociological tracts?"

  Instead of replying instantly, Crewson allowed his thoughts to stray. It seemed such a pity, in a way. No young married couple—he still refused to let ten years alter his perspective in that respect—could have achieved more harmony and fulfillment, if just one "fly in the ointment" could have been set aside. They had an attractive white cottage overlooking the sea, with flowering plants and bright shells in the sun parlor, and the wide half-acre of lawn that sloped down to the sea was a miracle of smooth emerald enchantment, with pathway of white gravel leading to the wharf and a small cabin cruiser riding it anchor close to the end of it.

  They were both employed as well, Anne as second in command at a tourist-frequented village antique shop and himself as a junior-high-school principal. Buy somehow they could never seem to agree concerning what was best for the children.

  It wouldn't have mattered much if Timothy didn't say things at times which alarmed him. He was doing that now, raising his eyes from the book he'd been reading in a sprawled-out position on the floor to comment on what his mother had just said.

  "I don't believe any of these stories," he said. "The fall of Troy wasn't like it says here. No one saw what came out of the sea—just a stupid, big wooden horse. All right. There were soldiers inside the horse and they set fire to Troy and burned it down. But the Greeks couldn't have done that without help. They were told what to do every minute."

  "Oh, sure," Crewson muttered sarcastically, his concern blotted out for an instant by irritation. "But how do you account for the fact that Vergil and the Greek dramatists didn't view it that way at all? Poets are supposed to be inspired, perceptive far beyond the average. How could they have written about the fall of Troy as they did if they had suspected there was something hidden and hideous about the sea where the Greek ships rode at anchor? This isn't the first time you've let yourself take that tale apart in a silly way—but the time has come to put a stop to it."

  To his surprise, Crewson found himself quoting: " 'Troy has perished, that great city. Only the red flames now lives there.'

  "That's poetry, Tim boy. Great poetry. And when I was your age those stories meant a lot to me. But kids today—well, that kind of reading seems to do more harm than good. Perhaps because life has become too complicated in too many different directions. I don't know. But if a more realistic kind of reading could be substituted I'm sure I wouldn't be so worried about you, and that means a lot to a father."

  "Darling, just let him say what he pleases," Anne protested. "All children have strange ideas at times. They exaggerate just one aspect of experience out of all proportion. It's part of the growing-up process."

  "It's nothing he could have experienced," Crewson retorted. "He. wasn't there."

  "Neither was Vergil."

  "What does that mean? What are you trying to tell me? That if a boy his age lets his imagination run riot he's doing something we should encourage—if only because it's harmless, and can be chalked up to the marvelous imagination of children? There was nothing childish about Vergil. You'd realize how ridiculous all this is if you'd put Timothy's meanderings into an adult frame of reference."

  "You're better at that than I am," Anne said. "What frame do you have in mind?"

  "One of simple plausibility. Timothy is sure that something monstrous and long-buried came up out of the sea and took possession of the Greek intelligence. Not one person in ten thousand, child or adult, would have hit on so freakish a conjecture. No—not one in a million. Its very freakishness makes it grotesque. And it disturbs me.

  "Besides," Crewson added, "to have taken possession of the Greek intelligence in the Homeric Age would have required some doing even for a sea monster. Ulysses survived every encounter with monsters on land and sea, remember?"

  It was a poor attempt at humor and Crewson knew it. But he was beginning to feel that if he didn't dismiss lightly what his wife had been saying he might end by taking one small part of it seriously. He had never come close to accepting Jung's theory of archetypal images, and only a Jungian would have been willing to concede that Timothy might have dredged something up out of his collective unconscious that was both deeply buried and unusual.

  Solely to keep himself from dwelling on that Crewson set his lips in tight lines, swung about and crossed to the door of the sun parlor in three long strides.

  "Where are you going Daddy?" Susan Jane asked.

  "Just for a walk on the beach," Crewson said, opening the door with a wrench. It always seemed to stick on damp days, and there had been a gray overcast since morning. The fog that had drifted in from the sea had thinned a little, however, and there was a brightness where the sun was trying to break through. If t
he beach just stayed the way it was, he told himself, it would be just right for the kind of stroll he enjoyed most. The tang of the brine in his nostrils, a good visibility for two or three yards ahead, and enough scattered seashells underfoot to keep him occupied in a pleasantly active way. Not that he shared Timothy's interest in collecting shells of all shapes and sizes. But he did like to stop occasionally, pick one up and send it skimming out across the surf-line.

  An unusual shell, or a stranded spider crab or jellyfish gave him a boyish kind of thrill, just why he could not have said. Certainly they were abundant enough on every stretch of New England coastline in the wake of a slight storm, and should have been familiar enough to a New Englander born and bred to stir no interest at all.

  "Supper will be on the table in just twenty minutes," Anne said. "Why did you have to pick this time to go for a walk?"

  "I always seem to pick the wrong time for just about everything," Crewson said. "I'm truly and honestly sorry, Anne."

  "Oh, forget it," Anne said. "Perhaps I married you for that reason. I'm a strange woman in many ways. I guess you've discovered that by now."

  Crewson shut the door very quietly behind him. He walked down the white gravel path to the wharf, and then struck eastward across the narrow stretch of beach which fringed his property for close to half a mile in both directions.

  The fog had cleared surprisingly fast and he could see, not just two or three yards ahead, but as far as the bleak, ragged ledge of rock which ran out into the bay where Richard Forbes's sailboat was anchored. It was a trim, handsome craft, and had much in common with Forbes himself, who prided himself on his popularity with women. Crewson had often found himself wondering how much the attractive blonds and redheads—only rarely a brunette—Forbes took on brief excursions around the bay appreciated the absolute perfection of the boat's lines and the dent its cost had made in his playboy's income. Probably not excessively. Forbes had kept them too busy.

  The sailboat was on Crewson's property, but the water was unusually deep on both sides of the rock projection and he had been only too happy to make Forbes a present of that mooring facility.