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

by Charles L. Grant

  He swallowed, apparently as shaken as she.

  “Well?” It was a bark. She glanced quickly up and down the street, but no pedestrians were nearby, no one lounging on the comers.

  “The . . .”He puffed his cheeks and blew. “It’s silly, now.”

  “Danny!”

  He pulled contritely at a forelock. “The . . . the tickets.”

  “The what?”

  He took a step away, a step back. An elderly man carrying a brown bag soggy at its bottom hurried past them, paying them no mind as he muttered to himself.

  Danny coughed into a fist. “You said . . . you said you’d let me know about a man who—”

  “For god’s sake, boy, does it have to be now?”

  “Well . . .” He shrugged. “No, I guess not.”

  “I guess not,” she echoed sarcastically. “If I survive this night, Danny, you’ll be lucky to get them at all. God!” She put a hand to her chest, felt her heart still racing.

  She did not care about the sudden hurt that narrowed his eyes, nor the way he stiffened out his small-boy stance. She left the window’s support and pushed her hair back into place, smoothed her blouse, rearranged the sweater that had slipped partway off her shoulder. Did her best to ignore the whispering of the fat-boled elms that lined the curbing.

  “The alley door,” she said then, “Go back and see if it’s locked.” When he returned, trying to impress her with his speed, she ordered him inside to fetch her pocketbook, standing at the recessed doorway and staring at his shadow as it flowed ahead of him, behind him when he came back. She took the pocketbook and held it primly at her waist. “Thank you,” she said stiffly.

  “Miss England?”

  She had already taken half a dozen steps when he called. God save me, she thought, and turned around.

  “Did ... did you mean what you said?”

  “About what?” she said, impatience a rush that made her want to scream.

  “The tickets.”

  Lord, she thought, protect me from dogs and teenage children.

  Her smile almost worked. “No, Danny, I didn’t mean it. I was, understandably, upset.”

  “Wow, that’s great,” he said. “You . . . you don’t have to be afraid of me, you know.”

  The smile was real this time, and he brightened and hurried to her side as she walked off. She had considered stopping at the Inn for a drink and something to eat, now had to contrive some way of shaking the boy, off or she would have him on her back until she locked her door behind her. But her nerves still had not recovered from the fright he’d given her, were tingling in the silence that accompanied their walking. It was obvious he was looking for a way to say something to her, looking for the courage to speak out. It almost thawed her.

  He touched at her arm, lightly.

  She looked down at him, her lips pursed against a smile.

  His left arm swept toward the avenue, the traffic. “All this talk about animals around and stuff,” he said, and tucked his chin close to his chest.

  “Yes?”

  “Well . . . you live alone.”

  “Yes.” She drew the word out in hopes he would know she had already taken his meaning and didn’t want to hear him voice it.

  Suddenly, he was in front of her, walking backward, his hands darting between them to emphasize his point. “Well, see, maybe you’d like to have somebody take care of the place for you, you know, like a private guard or something? I wouldn’t have to live in the house, I could sleep in the shed. I don’t sleep much anyway, hardly at all. I could walk around and make sure—”

  Her hand closed over a wrist and pulled him beside her again.

  They were on the block midway between the police station and the Chancellor Inn, in an island of grey haze between two globular streetlamps buried in the foliage. “Danny,” she said, “I appreciate the offer, really I do, but I’m sure your family would rather have you home with them.”

  He looked up, down, slipped his hands into his hip pockets.

  “Haven’t got any.”

  Her mouth opened, closed; her eyes blinked slowly. She wasn’t sure if she believed him or not; the firm certainly didn’t pay him enough for him to survive on his own. Other jobs, perhaps, though she didn’t know when he would have the time. His expression was sullen, waiting for her to respond, and she glanced up and down the street, looking for someone she could use for an escape. But the village seemed deserted. Only the leaves overhead, scraping and rustling.

  “Danny . . .” The pocketbook pressed hard against her stomach. “Danny, I’ve never asked you this, but where do you live?”

  “Over there,” he said, with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder.

  “Where, exactly, is ‘over there’?”

  “You know.” He shrugged.

  “No,” she told him flatly, “I do not know. Danny, this may sound silly, but do you have anyplace to live at all?”

  He frowned, a shock of black falling over his forehead. “Of course I do. You think I live with the bums on the tracks? Or in the park, maybe? I have a room, okay? One of those boarding places on Devon, all right? My folks are dead, I lie about my age, and Mr. Craig didn’t care so what’s the big deal, anyway?” He looked at her hard, long enough for her to turn away. “Never mind,” he said. “It was just an idea, you know. I said you didn’t have to be afraid of me.” He walked almost stiff-legged to the comer, stopped, stared back over one hunched, sloping shoulder. “Mr. Bartelle,” he said. “He isn’t right for you, either.”

  Stunned by his audacity, Sam could only gape as he vanished behind a hedge; and by the time she recovered the presence of mind to go after him the street was empty of everything but a cat toying with a dead leaf in the center of the tarmac.

  She ate at the Inn, and tasted nothing; she had a drink in the upstairs lounge, and felt nothing; she walked for nearly an hour before going home, and remembered nothing of where she had been or what she had been thinking. As if in a daze she put sweater and pocketbook away in the hall closet, walked to the kitchen and stood in front of the refrigerator. A hand reached out to grip the handle, and she shuddered at the hard chill it gave her. Vince, she thought then, had been wrong for a change: the boy had more than a simple crush on her. She had seen it in his eyes when she’d snapped at him, when she refused his offer of protection, when he’d glared at her from the corner. He was in love with her, badly, and she berated herself harshly for being so blind, wondered with a start how long she had been standing in front of the open door with an empty glass in her hand. As it was, the milk bottle hadn’t nearly enough left. She took it out and placed it on the counter, went to the back door and opened it. The lid of the tin milk box was canted slightly, and she crouched to lift out the day’s delivery. Hesitated, and saw Danny standing on the grass not ten feet away.

  As deliberately as she could, she rose, unsure whether she was angry or afraid. “Danny,” she said when she knew her voice would remain steady, “I’ve had quite enough of this.”

  He did not move.

  “All right,” she said, a decision made. “Maybe it would be better if you didn’t come in to work tomorrow.”

  “You need me, Miss England.”

  His voice was somber, somehow deeper in the moonlight that twisted through the trees in irregular patches. It gave the air about him a silverwhite aura, blacking out his features to leave him nothing but an outline.

  “Danny, I am asking you politely, and for the last time, to please leave me alone.”

  There were no nightsounds, no wind, the world cut away to leave her drifting.

  “You need me.”

  He still had not moved.

  “I can do just fine by myself, thank you.”

  The sense of a smile, of knowledge ungiven: “You need me, Miss England. I’m the only one left.”

  She backed into the kitchen and closed the door just short of damming. Damn those curtains, she thought as she watched him watching the house. Her heel caught on a ch
air leg as she turned, and she kicked it viciously against the counter cabinets, staggering into the hallway where she hesitated in front of the telephone. Who to call first: Vince, or the police?

  I’m the only one left.

  The idea, the implication, that the boy had had something to do with Malcolm and Reg broke gooseflesh on her arms, and she rubbed at them vigorously. But the method . . . She picked up the receiver and was told, a moment later, that Vince’s line was out of order, and the line belonging to the family who lived in the other half of his duplex.

  “Silly,” she muttered as she headed back for the kitchen. It was just as well there was trouble; if she’d been connected she wasn’t sure how she would have explained it. He would have laughed, and the laugh would have put some perspective on a problem more of her creation than Danny’s.

  Nevertheless: I’m the only one left.

  She glanced out the back door. Danny was gone. Then she reached for the teakettle and heard someone on the front porch.

  The footfall was loud, a heel snapping against the flooring. The house picked up the sound, expanded it in the dark and gave it resonance. A second step followed, a third, a fourth. A shadow filled the translucent panes in the door; it was featureless, and flowing, like the shadow in the office. Slowly, one hand rubbing absently against her hip, she eased out of the kitchen and pressed against the staircase wall. There was less fear than there was a helpless anger: he had no right doing this to her, forcing himself on her when she had ordered him to leave. And she had no right huddling here in the dark like a child cowering against a nightmare. After all, she told herself firmly, she wasn’t exactly a weakling; she could take care of herself in most instances, and especially against a thin, spindly-armed boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  The figure on the porch moved before she did. It drifted to one side silently, and Sam hurried to the door, pressed her cheek against it and listened before feeling her way into the parlour and kneeling on the couch. The shades were up, but all she could see was the streetlamp across the street, and the tops of the shrubs beginning to give to a slow-rising wind. Frowning, she leaned closer to the window, peering through the condensation of her breath. It was an awkward position, but she could see the length of the porch, could see no one was there.

  “Damn,” she said.

  A siren in the distance, and the Seth Thomas ticking.

  Vince: he isn’t right for you, either.

  Whatever it was that had prevented her from believing shattered; either he had had a hand in the dying, or he knew what and how and was using it to scare her to him. Or had been until she denied him. And now Vince’s line was down and Danny, outside, was the only one left.

  The milk box tipped over; the bottles rolled across the boards.

  Without thinking, she rushed into the kitchen, could not bring herself to open the door but saw through a pane the Kramers’ black-and-tan tom loping across the lawn after its illicit dinner. She swallowed and let a quick, relieved laugh fill the room briefly. A slow inhalation, and she decided to go after it and let it have all the milk he wanted, just for being the first friendly face she’d seen since the sun set.

  The door was open and the call on her tongue when a long, thick shadow swept around the side of the shed. The tom froze when she gasped, its tail puffed and ears pricked high. It growled once, and the shadow flowed over it. Flowed over it and was gone, but not swiftly enough.

  The door slammed, the lock turned after a fumbling, and as she raced for the telephone she could not help a glance over her shoulder for what the moonlight had caught, what the leaves’ shadows had not hidden: the last few feet of an enormous snake’s body; dark, perhaps black, and thick as a man’s thigh.

  You know, Malcolm had said, they eat their food alive.

  You know, Vince had said, you should see all those damned teeth!

  The phone was dead.

  Over there, Danny had said with a jerk of his thumb.

  The kitchen door slammed inward, the panes shattering and sliding across the floor. Wind followed, and moonlight, and Danny stood on the threshold . . . smiling.

  “You need me,” he said, and it wasn’t the way he had said it before.

  Sam banished thought and gave way to reflex. She whirled around and ran, leaping across the front porch to the steps, to the sidewalk, tripping into the hedge and nearly spilling into the gutter. Refusing to look around, seeing behind every post and shrub the waiting coiled form of Danny’s hungry pet. It would take her, it would crush her, it would drag her away as it had the others. As she knew now it had Vincent. And if it were interrupted it would grind down to save what it could . . . and leave the rest behind.

  For someone to find.

  Her eyes filled with tears, and the shadows of the phone lines terrified her to whimpering.

  She raced across King Street and into the hospital’s waiting room, sobbing, shouting, not feeling at all the needle’s jab in her arm.

  David Greshton held her hand firmly while a nurse shook her clothes from the closet and lay them neatly over the footboard.

  “You’re sure,” he said.

  “I have to get my things,” she told him. “I can’t go like this.”

  “All right. but . . .”

  She smiled and brought his hands to her lips-for a touch, not a kiss. For a week he had been with her, working double shifts just to give her the company, and share the dreams. They played whist and Parcheesi, listened to a radio he brought for her, and he told her that the police had searched for days without finding Danny, though the signs of his vile pet were everywhere in evidence once they knew what to look for-the droppings in the woods, the missing animals, the funnels across the wet grass and the absence of birds. He told her Uncle Leonard had died in his sleep the night of her assault, and he told her nothing of Vince had yet been discovered.

  He did not have to tell her that sooner or later bones would be found, a regurgitation of what the serpent’s digestion refused; sooner or later there would be something to bury.

  He did not have to tell her; she knew it already.

  As she dressed behind the hospital screen, he stood with his back to her and addressed the air. “It’s incredible, Samantha, I still can’t really believe it. He must have told one whale of a story to Craig when he was hired. No one on Devon, or in any of the other boardinghouses in town, ever heard of him. Nobody knows where he came from, or where he’s gone. Actually, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish, the way I see it. He was one weird kid.”

  No, she thought; he was frightening, he was foul.

  “Do you want to wait for Angie?” he asked as he led her to the business office to effect her release.

  She couldn’t. She only wanted to get some fresh clothes from the house and take the next train to Hartford. From Hartford to New York. And from New York to the West Coast. In the beginning she had argued with herself that she was only running away from the tragedies that had stalked her, that she wasn’t solving a thing; and leaving house and firm for so long was tantamount to economic suicide. Then Uncle Leonard’s lawyer dropped by; if she chose now, she wouldn’t have to work another day in her life.

  Before she could change her mind, then, she had wired her friends in Los Angeles and her schoolmates in Portland, had the tickets hired and the sleeper reserved.

  It would be a vacation. A release.

  And if she put enough distance between herself and the Station, maybe, if she were lucky, Danny would have to find someone else to love.

  With a kiss to David’s cheek and a promise to write often, she left the hospital and walked as steadily as she could home. She would miss it, though; she knew she would. Before leaving she would have to call Angie to arrange for someone to take care of the yard and the shrubs, then call Tom Hancock so the police would take a turn around the property once or twice a night until she returned. Call David and thank him for saving . . . whatever was left.

  She pulled her suitcases from the hall closet a
nd lugged them up the stairs. Funny, she thought, how a house gets so musty even after a few days. As if no one lived here at all, not even me.

  “No!” she declared loudly, as loudly as she could. “You’re feeling sorry, Samantha, which won’t solve a thing.” Get on with it, kiddo, get on with it and go.

  Nevertheless, she would miss it. Angie’s sailor, David’s fumbling, the Station itself in a Connecticut spring. She grinned as she reached the landing. Spring; how terribly symbolic. But she hoped California would live up to its billing.

  And she stepped smiling into the bedroom to close out the old life.

  Moving, gliding, the muted hush of ghosts slipping over thin ice clinging to black water, of sighs slipping from the lips of dead men still dying; a shifting, a settling, an expectant satisfaction.

  It flowed out from beneath her bed and coiled effortlessly on the quilt.

  Moving, gliding . . .

  It lifted its massive head near to the ceiling and spread its black hood, its slanted red eyes fixed on hers and . . . smiling.

  Nothing moved. Not the air, not the bed, not her legs, not its head.

  The suitcases fell when her hands lost their feeling.

  You don’t have to be afraid of me.

  She could see it now—silently screaming—in the way his hair was combed and flared, the odd dusk of his skin, the way he moved and talked and started when someone touched him.

  She could see it, wouldn’t believe it, not even when Danny’s mouth opened and she could see all his teeth.

  Moving . . . striking . . .

  Samantha, I need you.

  Part II: Summer, 1950 — Now There Comes A Darker Day

  Sunday evening in late July. When the air is drained of heat, of light, of the small cries of children and the muffled slap of heels on a sunbaked softened pavement; when furred and panting creatures crawl out from behind the latticework of porches and stretch, and yawn, and begin to prowl with no goad at all except they are tired of sleeping; when sashes are lifted and fans begin to growl; when screen doors are latched to close out the moths, and the cat, and the larger winged shadows that are drawn by the lamp; when the lingering northsound of the white ice cream truck brings to mind images of snow and skating and memories best left forgotten; when the sigh of a breeze disturbs sunweary leaves; when the darkness is a cloak to disguise the struggling failure of brittle brown grass and dusty roses.