by Mort Castle
THE STRANGERS
by Mort Castle
Kindle Edition
Overlook Connection Press
2011
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THE STRANGERS © 2005 by Mort Castle
INTRODUCTION © 2005 by Marc Paoletti
Dust Jacket illustration © 2005 by Erik Wilson
This digital edition © 2011 Overlook Connection Press
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Fat Cat Graphic Design
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INTRODUCTION
I first met Mort Castle years ago at a poker game hosted by a mutual friend, back when my knowledge of horror fiction was limited to paperbacks that featured villains who sucked blood, bayed at the moon or wielded butcher knives. That night, he graciously offered me a copy of THE STRANGERS and I accepted it without expectation. I assumed the book would be like countless others I’d read in the genre.
So much for judging a book by its cover. What I found instead was a complex story with a type of villain I’d never seen before.
Enter Michael Louden, a middle-class husband and father with a nice home and good job. He, like so many of us, looks forward to what the future may bring. Except that Michael’s vision of a better future doesn’t include his wife and two young daughters; it depends on their deaths. Michael is a Stranger waiting for the Time of the Strangers when he and others like him will purge society of “normals.” Until then, he must hide his true nature and do what he can to fit in.
I’m not spoiling anything: you’ll discover this in the first few pages. What makes the story so uniquely satisfying (and downright creepy) is that much of it is told from Michael’s point of view. We’re made privy to every depraved, duplicitous thought as he mows the lawn, drives his kids to school, makes love to his wife.
Few authors of horror choose this approach, and for good reason. Force your readers to spend too much time in the head of your least likeable character—particularly in a genre whose villains tend toward the extreme—and you risk losing them. But there’s more at play here than mere shock value.
THE STRANGERS offers one of the most unsettling and true representations of evil that you’re likely to experience in a horror novel. That is, evil not as some easily-identifiable creature skulking in the shadows, but as a ubiquitous intangible that may dwell quietly within the people you least suspect—your neighbor, your best friend, your spouse—and remain undetected until it’s too late.
It’s interesting to note that this book was first released in 1984, a year when people in this country were more than a little preoccupied with xenophobia. Threats to our way of life were often represented as foreign by the media. Yet, in this book, the threat exists in our own homes. Michael is a worm at the very core of our family unit, willing to kill to bring about a version of the American Dream more insidious and destructive than any alternative political system.
As the story unfolds, Mort doesn’t allay our fears by explaining away Michael’s behavior as spiritual possession, or revealing that Michael is actually some alien doppelganger hatched from a pod. Michael is evil simply because he was born that way, a product of God-only-knows what in our genes or environment that allows him—and thousands of others—to effortlessly and remorselessly pull off his masquerade, day after day. Worse, his brand of evil is able to persist because the rest of us refuse to accept its existence.
But it does exist. And with THE STRANGERS, Mort explores this disturbing and unexplainable aspect of human nature in a way that transcends the genre.
Marc Paoletti
Los Angeles, California
2000
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Marc Paoletti was one of the “new wave” of horror writers featured in the groundbreaking YOUNG BLOOD anthology, edited by the late Mike Baker. He’s written and created comics, short stories, and internet dramas. After a career in motion pictures as a pyrotechnician (“You’re paid to blow up things”) on films like Terminator II, and a stint as a senior adverstising copywriter, Paoletti is no longer deferring his dream: he is pursuing a masters degree in fiction writing at Columbia College in Chicago and working on a novel.
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PROLOGUE
IT WAS a quarter to one in the morning. The Buick Regal’s headlights picked out the beach ball-sized puffs of summer fog that hovered over the winding road skirting the forest preserve. After a sweltering day, the temperature had descended to the mid-’70s, but because of the humidity, the automobile’s air-conditioning was running on high, the steady whoosh masking the sound of the engine.
Without turning his head to look at his companion, the middle-aged man behind the wheel said, “Did you find the day splendidly dull?”
“Dull? A new products exhibition?” The younger man’s words were flat, polished smooth by sarcasm. “Please, we got to see the latest, up-to-the-minute advances in janitorial supplies. Floor finishes, deodorant blocks for urinals, corn brooms… That’s what I call exciting.”
The driver laughed metallically, precise snippets of sound. “You have marvelous enthusiasm.”
“Well gee, Boss, golly! I’m a guy who’s got so damned much to be enthused about. I have my slice of the American pie. A wonderful wife, two adorable kids, and a tract home. Then to add to my abundant good fortune, there’s what you’ve done for me, the raise and promotion. National sales manager, that always was my goal, and I guarantee you, I’ll give 110 percent to Superior Chemical. I sincerely mean that sincerely.’’
The driver nodded. The light of the dashboard’s instruments turned his silver hair green and seemed to define a flesh-masked angularity beneath his round, good-natured face. He said, “It’s people like you who make this country what it is.”
“No… It’s people like us.”
Both men laughed quietly, and then the younger slipped down a bit in the seat, stretching his legs. He loosened his tie and leaned back his head. The man’s sandy hair had begun the receding trek upward on his brow and there were suggestions of crowsfeet-to-come at the corners of his eyes, but he looked no older than his thirty-five years. His face was blandly American, hinting at no identifiable ethnic background. He was not quite handsome and nowhere near homely. If you’d met him once, twice, you were more likely to recall his name than his appearance.
With no trace of humor he said, “Does the waiting ever get to you?”
“Of course.” the driver answered. “Often and I have been waiting considerably longer than you.’’
“Sure, I know, but sometimes I get so my nerves are sticking out a half-inch. You wait and you wait and you think there’ll never be an end to it…”
“There will be.”
“…And you want to rip off the mask, let them all see the real smile behind the fake…”
“And become a newspaper headline for three days?” interrupted
the driver. “And then a jail cell? One of their mental asylums? Death?”
The younger man sighed. “Yes, that’s what happens.”
“No.” The correction was quiet but forceful. “That’s what happens to those who are not clever or cunning—and to those who can no longer be patient.”
“So we wait.”
“Indeed, and we ease our tensions and frustrations as best we can.” The driver’s full lips twitched in a smile. “You might spend more time performing the conjugal act with your wonderful wife, perhaps create still another adorable child.”
“ ‘No more Adorables,’ says the Wonderful. She has an itch to develop a new identity. She’s tuning to the liberated woman concept a mere ten years after the rest of the nation.”
“We do have companionship,” the driver said. “And of course we’re always ready to take advantage of whatever amusements fate and circumstance send our way…” His voice trailed off as he lifted his foot from the’ gas. The Buick slowed and the younger man sat up, alert. The driver said, “Seems to be a problem.”
Ahead, just before a sharp curve, a Ford with a raised hood was on the left hand shoulder, a man peering at the engine, turning his head when the Buick’s headlights spotlighted him.
The Buick stopped on the opposite shoulder. The driver did not switch off the motor. He searched under the front seat with his hands, bringing out a heavy, rubber-insulated, night watchman’s flashlight. “If you’ll open the glove compartment…”
The younger man did. He took out the skinning knife, the handle wrapped with black tape, the five-inch blade double-edged and needle-pointed. “Very nice,” he said.
“You hold onto it,” the driver said. “You seem in need of this sort of activity to lessen your present boredom.”
“Yes.” The word hissed, mingling with the invasion of night sounds, the hushings and tickings and tiny whistles from the surrounding woods that came when the older man opened the door. He said, “Let’s see what we can do to help a stranded traveler on the road of life.”
Fred Harley considered himself a lucky guy. Okay, the Ford decided to pull a no-go, but here he was, stuck for no more than three minutes and someone was stopping. A lonely road, this hour, yeah, it was a lucky break. He wouldn’t have to go tromping off, trying to find a telephone or to flag down a passing car. No, you could tell the mosquitoes to forget it; Fred Harley would keep all his blood tonight.
He watched the two men get out of the Buick. Simultaneously, he noted that they were white and well dressed. Fred didn’t think he was what you’d call a prejudiced person, but the US of A wasn’t exactly a paradise of racial harmony. Had the two men been black, Fred would have been uneasy.
And had Fred Harley been a man with a particular psychic gift, he would have been more than uneasy. He would have been dry mouthed, adrenalin-quaking, clammy-necked terrified.
A clairvoyant with the ability to see auras—see in a way that is only marginally related to the perceptive powers of the human eye— and who understood what those auras signified might have bolted and gone frantically running into the forest, praying to get away, to hide, to find safety.
There was a fire-red nimbus about the head of each man, a halo invisible to those who did not possess psychic sight. The aura was a scarlet pulsing, expanding, contracting as though it breathed, like a specimen seen under a microscope in high school biology, its scientific name forgotten but its image remembered forever in nightmares. The auras of the younger man and the older man marked them for what they were and who they were, identified them to those who could see and understand.
They were Strangers.
But the only light that Fred Harley saw came from Mallory heavy-duty batteries. The beam that linked him to the two men lessened in length.
The Strangers drew closer.
Just as Fred Harley was saying, “Thanks, guys,” the flashlight blinded him. Blinking, he saw only the after-image, an oozing, yellow circle.
The barrel of the heavy flashlight smashed into his face. He heard the dry snap and wet rush. The sound came from inside his own skull and he knew he’d lost teeth, that his nose was broken.
Reeling, he tried to say something that came out, “Gwuff!” and then he was struck again, a blow to the side of the head that dropped him to his hands and knees.
He thought, Hey, this doesn’t make sense!
The younger man straddled Fred Harley’s shoulders, squatting like a child mounting for piggyback. He entwined his fingers in Fred’s hair and yanked his head up and back.
Fred Harley thought, They are killing me and there’s no reason, no reason…
At that moment of complete understanding, the younger man cut Fred Harley’s throat.
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ONE
“WHAT SAY to a cold brew?” Brad Zeller shouted over the roar of a lawnmower.
It was late afternoon, Sunday. Michael Louden was on the final strip of lawn near the house. He nodded, signaled thumb-up. “Be with you in a couple of minutes,” he called to his neighbor on the other side of the four-foot high redwood fence.
Finishing up, Michael was chafed by the perspiration-clammy waistband of his khaki shorts; his T shirt was sopping. Flecks of grass were sweat-stuck to his forearms and calves, annoying little itches.
He switched off the engine, wiped his brow with the back of his hand, and pushed the mower toward the garage. With summer nearing an end, the five-year-old lawnmower was still holding up, though it was one nasty bastard to start. He hoped it would make it through the season and he wouldn’t have to buy another until next year. More sensible to get a new one, though, than to try to repair something really on its way out and—uh-huh! he was a sensible guy.
Or maybe he wouldn’t be concerned about the lawn at all next year. Michael Louden permitted himself a small smile at the thought.
In the garden that lay alongside the garage, Beth was on her hands and knees. She’d long ago triumphed in the war against weeds and insects and animal pests, but she remained vigilant, guarding against a guerilla invasion by so much as a bold dandelion. She loved her zinnias and marigolds, her phlox and white campion, her flowers. The garden was special to her. It made her not merely a housewife and mother but a gardener.
At the comer of the flower plot, Michael stood with the heels of his hands pressed to the steel of the mower’s handle. He watched the small woman in the cut-off jeans ‘and yellow terrycloth halter. He could see it happen: One strong yank on the rope and this time the cranky sonofabitch kicks right over. Beth’s arm-waving panic—the sheer unbelief—the knife-sharp cry of “No!” The flowers destroyed, a rushing spray of multicolored confetti…
“That looks real good,” Michael said approvingly.
“Thanks,” Beth said. “Next year, I’ll have irises right up against the garage. You have to be careful, they can take over the place, but they’re so hardy nothing can kill them.”
Michael laughed teasingly. “Oh, you thought I was talking about the flowers. Sure, they look fine, but I meant that cute little butt you’ve got stuck up in the air.”
Over her shoulder, Beth grinned at him. Curled tendrils of brown hair, cut short at the start of summer, had escaped from the blue kerchief tied Aunt Jemima style on her head. There was a Charlie Chaplin dirt smudge mustache beneath her sparingly freckled nose. “You are silly!” she said.
“Yuh-yuh-yup,” he stammered; his Porky-Pig-Happy-Happy- Imbecile impersonation. He stepped away from the mower and held out his arms. “I’m a wild and crazy guy. I can’t come trekking in there without trampling your daffydillies, so get over and kiss me, kiddo!”
“I’m all dirty!”
“I’m dirtier, so get over here before I get mad and don’t let you.”
He thought there was something of both happiness and desperation in her rush to him; she might have been a toddler welcoming Daddy home after a week’s business trip. He swooped her up, kissed her solidly, and pinched a handful of her rump. As he so ofte
n did, he complimented himself on choosing her, this miniature he had decided on for “wife” in the collection of people and things he’d acquired to disguise himself. Beth Louden, nee Wynkoop, 102 pounds distributed pleasingly over a shade less than five feet of height, the ultra-compact version of the standard model that one selects as wife and mother. Beth was perfect for his needs. And she’d given him two perfect children, completing the image of the middle class, nose-to-the-grindstone, more-or-less contented suburban husband he had to appear to be.
Beth’s words came as though a plea for understanding. “I do love you.”
“Jeez, that works out! I love you, too!”
She pushed away from him, tiny hands on his chest. He wondered if she thought those hands could hold him back, if there were any way on earth or in hell she figured she could do that if he decided he would not be held back, not any longer.
“Michael, I…” Beth’s brown eyes, so round they made Michael think of paintings of waifs in the alleged “Art” sections of department stores, were troubled. “I’ve wanted… For awhile, I’ve really needed to talk with you. Sometimes it’s not easy to talk, I guess.”
“What is it?” he said, resting his hands on her bare shoulders. “This is me, remember? You can say anything at all.”
Beth looked down. She licked her lips. “Michael, I’m worried about us.”
“Us?” he said. Then he let amazement drift out of his tone to be replaced by a note of concern. “I’m not following, honey…
Beth shrugged and he put his arms at his sides. He shaped his face—eyebrows, drawn-in upper lip—into a silent message that read: I do want to understand.
