As soon as she saw him Susie demanded, “Have you seen a doctor?”
Even a psychiatrist couldn’t help him. “I’ll be all right,” he said, hiding behind a bright false smile.
“I’ve thought of some possibilities for your book,” she said over lunch. “What about that house in Edinburgh where almost the same murder was committed twice, fifty years apart? The man who did the second always said he hadn’t known about the first . . .”
She obviously hoped to revive him with ideas—but the nightmare which was replaying itself, endless as a loop of film, would let nothing else into his skull. The victim had managed to tear one hand free and was trying to protect herself.
“And isn’t there the lady in Sutton who collects bricks from the scenes of crimes? She was meaning to use them to build a miniature Black Museum. She ought to be worth tracing,” Susie said as the man seized the flailing hand by its wrist. “And then if you want to extend the scope of the book there’s the mother of the Meathook Murder victims, who still gets letters pretending to be from her children.”
The man had captured the wrist now. Slowly and deliberately, with a grin that looked pale as a crack in clay, he—Miles was barely able to swallow; his head, and every sound in the restaurant, was pounding. “They sound like good ideas,” he mumbled, to shut Susie up.
Back at her office, a royalty fee had arrived. She wrote him a check at once, as though that might cure him. As he slipped it into his briefcase, she caught sight of the notebooks in which he’d written on the train. “Are they something I can look at?” she said.
His surge of guilt was so intense that it was panic. “No, it’s nothing, it’s just something, no,” he stammered.
Hours later he was walking. Men loitered behind boys playing pinball; the machines flashed like fireworks, splashing the men’s masks. Addicts were gathering outside the all-night chemist’s on Piccadilly; in the subterranean Gents’, a starved youth washed blood from a syringe. Off Regent Street, Soho glared like an amusement arcade. On Oxford Street figures in expensive dresses, their bald heads gleaming, gestured broken-wristed in windows.
He had no idea why he was walking. Was he hoping the crowds would distract him? Was that why he peered at their faces, more and more desperately? Nobody looked at all reassuring. Women were perfect as corpses, men seemed to glow with concealed aggression; some were dragons, their mouths full of smoke.
He’d walked past the girl before he reacted. Gasping, he struggled through a knot of people on the corner of Dean Street and dashed across, against the lights. In the moments before she realized that he’d dodged ahead of her and was staring, he saw her bright quick eyes, the delicate web of veins beneath them, the freckles that peppered the bridge of her nose, the pulsing of blood in her neck. She was so intensely present to him that it was appalling.
Then she stepped aside, annoyed by him, whatever he was. He reached out, but couldn’t quite seize her arm. He had to stop her somehow. “Don’t,” he cried.
At that, she fled. He’d started after her when two policemen blocked his path. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed him, perhaps they wouldn’t grab him—but it was too late; she was lost in the Oxford Street crowd. He turned and ran, fleeing the police, fleeing back to his hotel.
As soon as he reached his room he began writing. His head felt stuffed with hot ash. He was scribbling so fast that he hardly knew what he was saying. How much time did he have? His hand was cramped and shaking, his writing was surrounded by a spittle of ink.
He was halfway through a sentence when, quite without warning, his mind went blank. His pen was clawing spasmodically at the page, but the urgency had gone; the nightmare had left him. He lay in the anonymous bed in the dark, hoping he was wrong.
In the morning he went down to the lobby as late as he could bear. The face of the girl he’d seen in Oxford Street stared up at him from a newspaper. In the photograph her eyes looked dull and reproachful, though perhaps they seemed so only to him. He fled upstairs without reading the report. He already knew more than the newspaper would have been able to tell.
Eventually he went home to Neston. It didn’t matter where he went; the nightmares would find him. He was an outcast from surrounding reality. He was focused inward on his raw wound of a mind, waiting for the next outbreak of horrors to infest him.
Next day he sat at his desk. The sunlit houses opposite glared back like empty pages. Even to think of writing made his skin prickle. He went walking, but it was no good: beyond the marshes, factories coughed into the sky; grass blades whipped the air like razors; birds swooped, shrieking knives with wings. The sunlight seemed violent and pitiless, vampirizing the landscape.
There seemed no reason why the nightmares should ever stop. Either he would be forced to write them out, to involve himself more and more deeply in them, or they would be acted out in reality. In any case he was at their mercy; there was nothing he could do.
But wasn’t he avoiding the truth? It hadn’t been coincidence that had given him the chance he’d missed in Oxford Street. Perhaps he had been capable of intervention all along, if he had only known. However dismaying the responsibility was, surely it was preferable to helplessness. His glimpse in Oxford Street had made all the victims unbearably human.
He sat waiting. Pale waves snaked across the surface of the grass; in the heat-haze they looked as though water was welling up from the marshes. His scalp felt shrunken, but that was only nervousness and the storm that was clotting overhead. When eventually the clouds moved on, unbroken, they left a sediment of twilight that clung to him as he trudged home.
No, it was more than that. His skin felt grimy, unclean. The nightmares were close. He hurried to let his car out of the garage, then he sat like a private detective in the driver’s seat outside his house. His hands clenched on the steering wheel. His head began to crawl, to swarm.
He mustn’t be trapped into self-disgust. He reminded himself that the nightmares weren’t coming from him, and forced his mind to grasp them, to be guided by them. Shame made him feel coated in hot grease. When at last the car coasted forward, was it acting out his urge to flee? Should he follow that street sign, or that one?
Just as the signs grew meaningless because he’d stared too long, he knew which way to go. His instincts had been waiting to take hold, and they were urgent now. He drove through the lampless streets, where lit curtains cut rectangles from the night, and out into the larger dark.
He found he was heading for Chester. Trees beside the road were giant scarecrows, brandishing tattered foliage. Gray clouds crawled grublike across the sky; he could hardly distinguish them from the crawling in his skull. He was desperate to purge his mind.
Roman walls loomed between the timber buildings of Chester, which were black and white as the moon. A few couples were window-shopping along the enclosed rows above the streets. On the bridge that crossed the main street, a clock perched like a moon-faced bird. Miles remembered a day when he’d walked by the river, boats passing slowly as clouds, a brass band on a small bandstand playing “Blow the Wind Southerly.” How could the nightmare take place here?
It could, for it was urging him deeper into the city. He was driving so fast through the spotless streets that he almost missed the police station. Its blue sign drew him aside. That was where he must go. Somehow he had to persuade them that he knew where a crime was taking place.
He was still yards away from the police station when his foot faltered on the accelerator. The car shuddered and tried to jerk forward, but that was no use. The nearer he came to the police station, the weaker his instinct became. Was it being suppressed by his nervousness? Whatever the reason, he could guide nobody except himself.
As soon as he turned the car the urgency seized him. It was agonizing now. It rushed him out of the center of Chester, into streets of small houses and shops that looked dusty as furniture shoved out of sight in an attic. They were deserted except for a man in an ankle-length overcoat, who limped by like a sack
with a head.
Miles stamped on the brake as the car passed the mouth of an alley. Snatching the keys, he slammed the door and ran into the alley, between two shops whose posters looked ancient and faded like Victorian photographs. The walls of the alley were chunks of spiky darkness above which cramped windows peered, but he didn’t need to see to know where he was going.
He was shocked to find how slowly he had to run, how out of condition he was. His lungs seemed to be filling with lumps of rust, his throat was scraped raw. He was less running than staggering forward. Amid the uproar of his senses, it took him a while to feel that he was too late.
He halted as best he could. His feet slithered on the uneven flagstones, his hands clawed at the walls. As soon as he began to listen he wished he had not. Ahead in the dark, there was a faint incessant shriek that seemed to be trying to emerge from more than one mouth. He knew there was only one victim.
Before long he made out a dark object farther down the alley. In fact it was two objects, one of which lay on the flagstones while the other rose to its feet, a dull gleam in its hand. A moment later the figure with the gleam was fleeing, its footsteps flapping like wings between the close walls.
The shrieking had stopped. The dark object lay still. Miles forced himself forward, to see what he’d failed to prevent. As soon as he’d glimpsed it he staggered away, choking back a scream.
He’d achieved nothing except to delay writing out the rest of the horrors. They were breeding faster in his skull, which felt as though it were cracking. He drove home blindly. The hedgerows and the night had merged into a dark mass that spilled toward the road, smudging its edges. Perhaps he might crash—but he wasn’t allowed that relief, for the nightmares were herding him back to his desk.
The scratching of his pen, and a low half-articulate moaning which he recognized sometimes as his voice, kept him company. Next day the snap of the letter box made him drop his pen; otherwise he might not have been able to force himself away from the desk.
The package contained the first issue of Ghastly. “Hope you like it,” the editor gushed. “It’s already been banned in some areas, which has helped sales no end. You’ll see we announce your stories as coming attractions, and we look forward to publishing them.” On the cover the girl was still writhing, but the contents were far worse. Miles had read only a paragraph when he tore the glossy pages into shreds.
How could anyone enjoy reading that? The pebbledashed houses of Neston gleamed innocently back at him. Who knew what his neighbors read behind their locked doors? Perhaps in time some of them would gloat over his pornographic horrors, reassuring themselves that this was only horror fiction, not pornography at all: just as he’d reassured himself that they were only stories now, nothing to do with reality—certainly nothing to do with him, the pseudonym said so—
The Neston houses gazed back at him, self-confident and bland: they looked as convinced of their innocence as he was trying to feel—and all at once he knew where the nightmares were coming from.
He couldn’t see how that would help him. Before he’d begun to suffer from his writer’s block, there had been occasions when a story had surged up from his unconscious and demanded to be written. Those stories had been products of his own mind, yet he couldn’t shake them off except by writing—but now he was suffering nightmares on behalf of the world.
No wonder they were so terrible, and that they were growing worse. If material repressed into the unconscious was bound to erupt in some less manageable form, how much more powerful that must be when the unconscious was collective! Precisely because people were unable to come to terms with the crimes, repudiated them as utterly inhuman or simply unimaginable, the horrors would reappear in a worse form and possess whoever they pleased. He remembered thinking that the patterns of life in the tower blocks had something to do with the West Derby murder. They had, of course. Everything had.
And now the repressions were focused on him. There was no reason why they should ever leave him; on the contrary, they seemed likely to grow more numerous and more peremptory. Was he releasing them by writing them out, or was the writing another form of repudiation?
One was still left in his brain. It felt like a boil in his skull. Suddenly he knew that he wasn’t equal to writing it out, whatever else might happen. Had his imagination burned out at last? He would be content never to write another word. It occurred to him that the book he’d discussed with Hugo was just another form of rejection: knowing you were reading about real people reassured you they were other than yourself.
He slumped at his desk. He was a burden of flesh that felt encrusted with grit. Nothing moved except the festering nightmare in his head. Unless he got rid of it somehow, it felt as though it would never go away. He’d failed twice to intervene in reality, but need he fail again? If he succeeded, was it possible that might change things for good?
He was at the front door when the phone rang. Was it Susie? If she knew what was filling his head, she would never want to speak to him again. He left the phone ringing in the dark house and fled to his car.
The pain in his skull urged him through the dimming fields and villages to Birkenhead, where it seemed to abandon him. Not that it had faded—his mind felt like an abscessed tooth—but it was no longer able to guide him. Was something anxious to prevent him from reaching his goal?
The bare streets of warehouses and factories and terraces went on for miles, brick-red slabs pierced far too seldom by windows. At the peak hour the town center grew black with swarms of people, the Mersey Tunnel drew in endless sluggish segments of cars. He drove jerkily, staring at faces.
Eventually he left the car in Hamilton Square, overlooked by insurance offices caged by railings, and trudged toward the docks. Except for his footsteps, the streets were deserted. Perhaps the agony would be cured before he arrived wherever he was going. He was beyond caring what that implied.
It was dark now. At the ends of rows of houses whose doors opened onto cracked pavement he saw docked ships, glaring metal mansions. Beneath the iron mesh of swing bridges, a scum of neon light floated on the oily water. Sunken rails snagged his feet. In pubs on street corners he heard tribes of dockers, a sullen wordless roar that sounded like a warning. Out here the moan of a ship on the Irish Sea was the only voice he heard.
When at last he halted, he had no idea where he was. The pavement on which he was walking was eaten away by rubbly ground; he could smell collapsed buildings. A roofless house stood like a rotten tooth, lit by a single streetlamp harsh as lightning. Streets still led from the opposite pavement, and despite the ache—which had aborted nearly all his thoughts—he knew that the street directly opposite was where he must go.
There was silence. Everything was yet to happen. The lull seemed to give him a brief chance to think. Suppose he managed to prevent it? Repressing the ideas of the crimes only made them erupt in a worse form—how much worse might it be to repress the crimes themselves?
Nevertheless he stepped forward. Something had to cure him of his agony. He stayed on the treacherous pavement of the side street, for the roadway was skinless, a mass of bricks and mud. Houses pressed close to him, almost forcing him into the road. Where their doors and windows ought to be were patches of new brick. The far end of the street was impenetrably dark.
When he reached it, he saw why. A wall at least ten feet high was built against the last houses. Peering upward, he made out the glint of broken glass. He was closed in by the wall and the plugged houses, in the midst of desolation.
Without warning—quite irrelevantly, it seemed—he remembered something he’d read about years ago while researching a novel: the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement. They’d driven out the scapegoat, burdened with all the sins of the people, into the wilderness. Another goat had been sacrificed. The images chafed together in his head; he couldn’t grasp their meaning—and then he realized why there was so much room for them in his mind. The aching nightmare was fading.
At once h
e was unable to turn away from the wall, for he was atrociously afraid. He knew why this nightmare could not have been acted out without him. Along the bricked-up street he heard footsteps approaching.
When he risked a glance over his shoulder, he saw that there were two figures. Their faces were blacked out by the darkness, but the glints in their hands were sharp. He was trying to claw his way up the wall, though already his lungs were laboring. Everything was over—the sleepless nights, the poison in his brain, the nightmare of responsibility—but he knew that while he would soon not be able to scream, it would take him much longer to die.
PUMPKIN HEAD by Al Sarrantonio
Born May 25, 1952, Al Sarrantonio is another of a growing conclave of horror writers who live in the Bronx. Lovecraft foresaw such things. For six years Sarrantonio edited science fiction, fantasy, horror and westerns for Doubleday, before leaving his position there this past year to become a full-time writer. His career is off to a quick start, with sales to Heavy Metal, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Analog, Amazing, Twilight Zone Magazine, Whispers, Fantasy Book, Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, as well as to such anthologies as Shadows, Chrysalis, Ghosts, Terrors, and Death. He has just finished work on two horror/fantasy novels, The Worms and The Wood, and is assembling a collection of his short fiction, entitled Toybox. All of which proves that reading too much of this sort of thing can warp a pure young mind.
An orange and black afternoon.
Outside, under baring but still-robust trees, leaves tapped across sidewalks, a thousand fingernails drawn down a thousand dry blackboards.
Inside, a party beginning.
Ghouls loped up and down aisles between desks, shouting “Boo!” at one another. Crepe paper, crinkly and the colors of Halloween, crisscrossed over blackboards covered with mad and frightful doodlings in red and green chalk: snakes, rats, witches on broomsticks. Windowpanes were filled with cut-out black cats and ghosts with no eyes and giant O’s for mouths.
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