The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 1: Nightmare Seasons (Necon Classic Horror)

by Charles L. Grant

  “And you’re supposed to be my doctor,” she said, just loud enough for him to hear.

  “Afternoon, Bartelle,” the doctor said, his nod almost curt. “Must be nice not having to stick around the office all day,”

  “Just paying a call on my broker,” Vince said briskly. “Can’t have my investments following the weight of the world, you know. Besides, I want to be sure I’m in all the right companies when we take on the paperhanger. The way I see it, we’ll be over there in a couple of years, and I’ll be as rich as some doctors I know.”

  “That isn’t funny,” Greshton said. “And the man does have a name, Mr. Bartelle.”

  “Lord,” Vince said, an anguished look to Sam. “Does Spike Jones know that? It’ll kill him, you know.”

  “Bartelle . . . !”

  Sam cleared her throat loudly. She supposed it should have been something of a pleasure to watch the two men sparring, presumably to impress her, but right now she wasn’t in the mood.

  Greshton, fussing with her wrist and the stethoscope around his neck, didn’t hear her. Vince, however, glanced dramatically at the ceiling, then pulled a silver watch from his waistcoat pocket and frowned as though he had forgotten how to tell time. “Damn,” he said. “Hey, got to run, Sam, or poor Reg will have a stroke. Angie might be around tonight, depending on if she can get out of the clutches of that sailor she’s been seeing; I half expect her to answer the phone with an ‘Ahoy’ instead of ‘Hello.’

  “Oh, and Danny said he would drop by your place, just to give it a check. Nice kid, that. Angie says he’s gotten into the shed in back and even raked the lawn. Ten to one he’ll join the Army once summer is over, though. He has dreams of keeping Europe in its place.” When she grinned and winked, he blew her a kiss and was gone.

  Greshton kept his silence. Continuing his fussing, he moved on to her blood pressure, her reflexes, her eyes and ears, and then to a thermometer before she snatched at his wrist and yanked his face close to hers. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on outside, David, I swear to God I’m going to check myself out.”

  “Now, Samantha—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Please, Samantha! I really think I’m doing, the right thing, don’t you?”

  She didn’t, not anymore, though she understood well and sympathized with his reticence. However, unless she was prepared to carry the swooning female role to its nauseating extreme, she knew she was going to have to begin taking hold before she was smothered by good intentions. Not, she told herself quickly, that she was ashamed of what she had done; it was not the average stock and bond broker who came home at night to find a severed foot on the lawn, a foot that belonged to a man she might have been able to love. Angie Killough, who was the office receptionist and lived with her parents a block over from Sam’s, had stayed with her those first two nights and had endured the aftermath of all those nightmares: the parade of beasts, of spectres, of demons and things, all of which tried to account for the death of the man.

  On the second day, Angie had persuaded her to check into the hospital for a night under Greshton’s care. One night. Free. A night of sheet lightning, but empty of dreams. Greshton had talked with her for over two hours, not minimizing the atrocity but cushioning the effect. The evening she returned home, however, the dreams had returned, this time of madmen who lived in the hills and were evilly chuckling experts at mutilations and horrors. She had made it through work, but barely. Later, she had been unable to bring herself to leave the sidewalk in front of the house until Danny, who had dogged her like a worried shadow, took a spade from the tool shed and turned over the earth where the grass had been trampled, shredded, and stained.

  Tom Hancock had called on her that evening. Just thirty, he looked more like twenty, and when he folded his note pad back into his jacket pocket he smiled ruefully at her, brushing a hand almost apologetically through his close-cut blond hair.

  “That’s all you remember?”

  She had nodded, not wanting to speak.

  “Yeah,” he said, his understanding clear. “Well, Miss England, there’s nothing much else I can tell you now. From those drag marks we figure he was pulled into the woods. And that’s about it. We haven’t been able to find anything else. Nothing at his place, nothing around your house. I’d be less than honest if I told you we had a strong lead.”

  “You look tired,” she said suddenly.

  His smile was weary. “No kidding. It’s the season, I guess.” When she had frowned her puzzlement, he leaned back and sighed. “Spring, you know? We get calls all night. Girls staying out to all hours in the park, their folks think they’re missing or worse. High school guys rodding around the streets, they ain’t got anything better to do. Dogs and cats running away like they’re expecting another Flood. And now this thing. Crazy. My dad, he was a cop up to Maine, he said I should get some small-town experience, then cut out for Boston or New York.” The smile became a grin. “If it’s like this down there, Miss England, I think I’ll head back north.”

  She had folded her hands tightly in her lap. “Then . . . then you don’t know if the . . . if the killer is a person or an animal.”

  “No, ma’am. Weather like this—hot as hell one day, cold like winter the next—there’s no telling what it’s doing to some people. Or some animals. I’m sorry, Miss England, but . . .” And he’d shrugged.

  When he’d left her, she had a glass of wine to help her sleep. And when the dreams came again—fiercer, more vivid—she had called Greshton for fear of retreating. It had been a precaution, nothing more. She did not believe she was losing her mind, but neither was she able to make the man understand that the house was . . . that it had somehow become too close, too small, far too small for the nighttrips her mind was taking. So she allowed herself to be watched, monitored, coddled, bewombed, Three days away from the world, and now she was ready to smash through the window for a breath of fresh air instead of the slow-swirling blanket that was pushed by the ceiling’s fan.

  Greshton freed his wrist and started to crank down the bed, paused when he saw the look on her face.

  “Samantha,” he said with professional tolerance, “you have to get some sleep.”

  “For god’s sake, David, I didn’t have an operation, you know.

  And I’m getting a healthy crop of bedsores on my ass—”

  “Samantha!”

  “Oh, hell, David, will you please stop playing the role?” A moment for him to lick at his wounds with a contrition that almost sickened her. “David, I want to see Officer Hancock again.”

  “Why?”

  She closed her eyes slowly. “Because,” she said, drawing out the word as though he were a child backward and trying, “I want to know if they’ve been able to find out anything more, that’s why. Really, is that so difficult for you to understand?”

  Greshton stared at her for a long second, one finger stroking his chin thoughtfully. “It might upset you, Samantha.”

  “I’m a big girl, David.”

  “You’ll forgive me for saying so, but you didn’t act like one a couple of days ago.”

  She pushed at the mattress to sit herself more upright. “You didn’t see what I saw, Doctor.”

  “Well . . .”

  “If I hadn’t turned a hair, you would have thought I was crazy, right?”

  “I don’t know, Samantha. I don’t know if I—”

  “David, please.”

  He looked at her with cautious concern, permitting a trace of a smile to work finally at his bloodless lips. Then, with a sigh that was more noise than release, he sat heavily on the bed and slapped his hands on his legs. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  She grinned. “Good lord, the man’s a gossip.”

  But there was little he told her that she did not already know, little he could add to the speculation in the Station as to the identity of Malcolm’s killer. No weapons had been found, no enemies uncovered, no animals discovered; it was even impossible to t
ell if the foot had been hacked or chewed off because of the apparently violent manner in which it had been severed. Though the police were still searching, it was Hancock’s private theory that if the rest of the man’s body was going to be found at all, it would be somewhere in the woods. Deep, and accidentally. A stumbling over a mutilated form by someone bent on looking for something far more innocent.

  And though there had been a hunt through the forest, it was more than likely that the killer, no matter who or what it had been, was already long gone.

  “Satisfied?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You want me to get you a book?”

  “Please,” she said. “I can’t count the holes in the ceiling anymore.”

  He laughed and was gone. Reg called her during dinner, and she was barely able to conceal her surprise, and her guilt, at his genuine condolences. Vince called. Angie dropped by.

  Not a word from her uncle; but, unlike Malcolm, he was still dying.

  And that night, when the corridors were still, the lights hushed, the window open from the bottom and admitting the darks ide chorus of treefrogs and nightbirds, she lay in a small pool of light and waited for her medication to start working. Unafraid, now; the dreams had been vanquished.

  She tried to think, but there was little to think about. David had made it abundantly clear that her apprehension over the house was a referral from her work; the economy was finally stirring—not spectacularly, but stronger—and her natural impatience to get on with it was giving her a mild case of claustrophobia, and a strong one of intolerance. The house was confining, squeezing, because there was no work there to challenge her, not the kind of work she enjoyed, not the dealing or the probing or the ferreting of financial hints that would reinstate in her clients a faith in the system. Oxrun had not been severely affected by the Depression; those who had their wealth to hand had not been foolish enough to plunge into the market as deeply as those who had had much more to lose—and did. Even the Station’s middle class had had more sense. Oxrun, as always, took care of its own.

  It was explained to her, then, that this knowledge would enable her to cope—not only with Malcolm’s death, but also with her own life.

  Perhaps, she thought; maybe.

  But she had been just as impatient last year, and no fears had assailed her.

  She shrugged, and she slept, and the following morning she could no longer stand it. She dressed over the nurse’s mild objections, argued lightly with Greshton, and kissed him once before she left. There was no one to accompany her, and she was glad; she did not mind a moment on her own, in the air, to confront the house.

  She needed to know if David had been right.

  And when she saw it, she could not help a small laugh and a delighted smile. Danny had raked and mowed the lawn to new-green perfection, washed the windows, trimmed and weeded the flower bed on the house’s north side, and had somehow contrived to make the privet look amazingly like a hedge instead of a bedraggled copse in the middle of some dark moor. The air was lightly chilled, the sun no longer harsh, and the stabs of apprehension she expected did not reach her. The brown shingles were welcoming instead of seeming glum, and she thought she spotted a stirring in the jay’s nest in the elm by the porch.

  The inside had been aired and dusted. The icebox was filled.

  And Angie had left a cold casserole on the kitchen’s grey-and-blue Formica table.

  She nearly wept, and would have done so had she not been suddenly taken with the idea that the most extravagant thing she could do to celebrate her homecoming was take a shower. She raced immediately up the stairs, stripped, and turned on the water, listening contentedly to the thrumming, watching the steam, feeling the flesh around her small breasts and slightly pudgy stomach, her upper arms and thighs, tighten in anticipation.

  It was heaven, and she deserved it.

  She grabbed the showercap and settled it over her hair. Then mouthed doxy when she caught her reflection in the mirror just before it fogged over; and she laughed, loudly and cleanly, exploding into fits of giggling over the next several hours . . . until she was in bed and the moon threw slats of silver over the blanket that covered her.

  The moon.

  She turned away from it, waiting, her breath held lightly, her right hand gripping the end of her pillow while her left tucked itself between her knees, knees that were drawn protectively toward her chest. Away from the window, toward the door.

  The moon.

  The quiet.

  Waiting, and listening.

  But the slow crushing tension was apparently gone.

  Then she rolled onto her back and laced her fingers behind her head, thinking that somehow she should weep again for Malcolm, should at least rekindle the rage that had come with his dying.

  And that too was gone, the weeping and the ranting.

  He had been a friend, not a lover, and not even from the Station. There was sorrow, and a slight drifting, and she thought before sleeping that Vince would understand.

  the muted hush of

  An argument in the outer office, finally driving her to slap an angry hand on her desk and rise, kicking back her chair and stalking to the door. She hesitated, brushed a hand down the front of her ruffled, cream satin blouse, and tried to bring herself calm. It was the season, she told herself, thinking of poor Hancock and his chasing of runaway pets; to be charitable, it was the season.

  The weather over the past two weeks had been no less erratic, but the trees had finally covered themselves in a soft haze of new green, the park was so brightly new it hurt the eyes, and the last taunts of winter had faded into nights that were just warm and languid enough for memories of years past and kisses shared and walks taken and loves begun. The season. When the lofty pronouncements of poets and romantics were distilled into the inarguable fact that everyone was crazy.

  Including herself.

  She opened the door, then, and winced.

  The room was large, nearly sixty feet to the front where the plate-glass window was quartered by gleaming white curtains that now kept the westering sun from turning the place into a furnace in spite of the elms outside that filtered the light. The walls were wainscoted in dark pine, the ceiling white and high, the floor carpeted in floral oriental. By the entrance, and separated by a low mahogany table neatly stacked with newspapers and magazines, were high-backed brown leather club chairs. Farther inward was Angie’s walnut reception desk, a tangle of pink-faced note slips and tall-cradled telephones that were somehow made rational by the tolerance of her smile. A few paces more to a partition of ebony chin-high and translucent, beyond which was a double row of similarly partitioned desks—vacationing John Nesbitt on the left, an empty one on the right; Vince behind Nesbitt, Reg Craig on the other side of the aisle. In the back wall, three doors—

  Sam’s on the right, her uncle’s, and a brass-plated, decorous entrance to a restroom as large as the one she had at home.

  Craig was standing in the center aisle, leaning over Vince’s desk and hissing at him like, she thought, an aroused viper pit.

  “And furthermore,” he was saying, “I do not give a sweet goddamn what you or-” He stopped at a furtive gesture from Bartelle, looked over his shoulder and strained a grin. “Oh. Hello, Samantha.”

  Her own grin was genuine, made more so when she saw Danny pop up from behind the front partition and stick out his tongue at Craig’s blind side. The boy was slender, not quite twenty, given constantly to collarless shirts and patternless sweaters with raglan sleeves. Chewing gum bulged his left cheek, a pencil balanced rakishly behind his right ear. His hair was thick and dark brown, parted down the middle and combed back so it almost fanned out when it reached his ears. His skin was curiously dusky, and his eyes were slightly hooded, yet he seemed to Sam to be more Saxon than Mediterranean. He stuck out his tongue again, then mimed extreme agony when Angie pinched him.

  “Gentlemen,” Sam said, exaggerating a tone of exhausted impatience, “which one o
f you has bollixed a portfolio this time.”

  “Neither,” said Vince, rocking back in his swivel chair and snapping a wooden match against his center drawer. “Reg here seems to think that FDR has been given a mandate to rule by divine right. After suggesting the possible virtues of Norman Thomas, I, on the other hand, have suggested with all the diplomacy I can muster that the man is nothing more than an imperialist and budding two-bit emperor. I mean really, Samantha—three terms? God, even Jefferson was satisfied with two.”

  Craig, whose white linen suit nearly matched the blinding glare of the front curtains, shot his cuffs and glared at an original Currier & Ives on the wall above Bartelle’s head. “I merely said that he will not, under any circumstances, allow us to fall for German entrapment again.”

  “Crap,” Vince said, with a disarming smile.

  Sam put a hand to her hair, pushed at it, gripped lightly the back of her neck. “Really, do we have to go through all that again? Doesn’t anyone here but me have any work to do?”

  “The market’s closed,” Vince said with a glance to his watch.

  “Marvelous. Do you think we should close down then?”

  He looked to his blotter and touched at a paper. Reg toyed with his bow tie, then pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and turned around to his desk. At that moment, Danny came rushing up the aisle and grabbed for the pen.

  “Hey!” Reg said, pulling his hand away.

  “It’s mine,” said the boy, scowling, hands suddenly fisted at his sides.

  “I’m afraid it isn’t,” Reg told him stiffiy. He held it close to Danny’s eyes. “You can see my initials engraved there. In gold, in case you did not know what all the yellow was.”

  “Well . . . it looked like mine.”

  Sam immediately stepped between them, one hand on Reg’s shoulder. “Danny,” she said softly.

  The boy shoved his hands into his pockets and scuffed a worn shoe over the carpet. “Well . . .”

  “Danny,” she repeated, prompting now and smiling.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered.