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

by Charles L. Grant

  He tried then to remember everything he’d been taught.

  “Pat, help me!”

  Sundays in church and extolling the Golden Rule. Muttering an “excuse me” whenever a young kid bumped into him without thinking. Giving advice to Karen whenever her life fell apart, which seemed to happen with monotonous regularity. The Ten Commandments that were obeyed whenever it was convenient for the preacher and the congregation. The loopholes, like tax laws, that allowed permissive coupling and venality and war.

  “Pat . . . help me. I don’t . . .”

  What would it be like, he wondered, to ride into a town and hold people hostage. Hold them, knowing that sooner or later they would run into your arms so you could do what you liked. It was kind of interesting, actually. It would be like an experiment. How much pain could you inflict, how much torture could a man take, how long could you keep it up until, like Jack, it all paled and lost its meaning.

  He watched as Jade was thrown onto the sidewalk, his head meeting the pavement with a thud that stunned him.

  Tony’s head; Harvey’s bone; Karen’s blood.

  He had to admit it wouldn’t lack excitement, and excitement was something he had avoided all his life.

  No. It didn’t make any difference how young he felt, nor how intellectually curious he was, nor how tempting it was to live out his life on a wave of electric fervor. Argue both sides, and it still came out . . . wrong. It was as simple as that; riding with these creatures, with these modern dragons of the night would be pure and simple evil. And when he thought of all the people—men, women, and children—who had died at their hands he felt the anger rekindling, felt the ember fan to flame.

  It was exciting, but it was wrong; it was wrong, but it was exciting.

  His eyes dosed briefly, opened, and he rushed down the steps and knelt at Jack’s side. He could feel the riders watching as he swept a hand through the black hair streaked now with grey. Jack was still alive, a pulse throbbing below his temple, and Patrick glared up at the leader as he waited for his friend to waken. Looked higher and saw the sky beginning to lighten.

  They could have killed him, he thought then; they could have killed him where he knelt, but they no longer had the power.

  He smiled.

  The bikers were restless; he could see their machines trembling.

  “Bastards,” he said to them as loudly as he could, as hard as he dared.

  Thunder/noise, growing.

  His smile broadened to a grin. “Can’t do it alone, right? You can’t even kill a helpless old man.” He laughed, and the dark hours after sunset drained in the sound.

  Concerts in the park, sorting mail and joking, walking the streets to the door of his home.

  Autumn. The perfect season.

  Jack groaned, and Patrick looked down to him, laughed and put his hands around his throat.

  Autumn. The perfect season.

  Endlessly dying.

  Part IV: Winter, 1970 — The Color Of Joy

  It was the holiday season, by calendar and by spirit, and the small house on Quentin Avenue observed tradition faithfully, up to and including the party given On the Friday before Christmas itself.

  On the front door was a wreath. A real one. With a great red bow in its center and tiny silver globes buried in the branches that wound about the wire frame. The nearest streetlamp just managed to strain under the porch roof and touch it, so that the bow and the globes seemed brighter than they were, and clearer, and purer.

  In the tiny foyer, crowded now with coats and hats and a few cashmere scarves precariously clinging to the coatracks against either wall, an equally tiny chandelier with teardrop bulbs was touched by a sprig of mistletoe. A real one. With a small red bow and tiny white berries and gleaming green leaves that pricked when you grabbed them.

  The Christmas tree, set up a full week before the holiday and just in time for the party, stood in the front room’s wide bow window, bedecked and lighted and filling the house with the pungent scent of dying pine. Beneath its lowest boughs packages were scattered, almost all of them hollow despite the ribbons and the seasonal paper and the light dusting of needles. No one touched them. Few gave them more than a polite, cursory glance. The guests knew they were artifice and knew their purpose and only one or two, quite late in the evening, bothered to kneel by the tree and give some of them a tentative, almost embarrassed shake.

  The room to the right of the foyer held the long walnut table that had taken an hour to polish, two hours to cover with bowls and trays, silverware and glasses, a pair of pewter candelabra whose tallows were tall, red and unnervingly slender. There was no place to sit down here, all the chairs had been taken into the living room and the study, but people stayed anyway, either near the food or near the butler’s table laden with bottles most of whose seals had been broken.

  The study behind the living room was just that: bookshelves, a captain’s desk, several weathered and comfortable armchairs, a faded globe on a brass stand, hunting prints on the paneled walls, and a curtained rear window that overlooked a small back yard. The light here was dim, the smoke heavy in spite of the fact that the window was open top and bottom, and more than a few careless spills had stained the burgundy carpet near the entrance to the narrow hallway across from which was the kitchen.

  Upstairs: two bedrooms, a bath, two rooms in the back unused but cleaned.

  At the head of the stairs was a round window over a window seat filled with stuffed toys and old games whose pieces had long since slipped under chairs and under beds and behind doors . . . and disappeared.

  Melissa Redmond stood at the window and looked down at the yard. There were ghosts there, shaded by the cherry trees and frightened by the soft noise that slipped out of the house and over the dead grass. She saw them clearly> and as she watched she brought her glass to one cheek and held it there. For the cold that penetrated, and for the reminder that the ghosts were too long in their fading.

  A young man in a tweed three-piece suit came up the carpeted steps to join her, not touching and not speaking but breathing deliberately loudly so he would not startle her when she turned. He waited for almost five minutes.

  “You have people downstairs, Mel,” he said. Behind darkrimmed glasses his eyes were large and brown, and he blinked them rapidly while one hand reached absently to Hatten a cowlick that sprouted at the back of his head.

  “I know,” she said, though not at all contrite, and not at all sadly. “But sometimes ... I come up here sometimes, Mike, and

  I can still see them all down there. Eddie and Stan working in the garden, Mother standing beside them with her hands on her hips and giving them orders. Eddie wouldn’t pay any attention to her, and Stan would laugh to make her mad.” She sipped from the glass; it was filled with ginger ale. “She put up with a lot from us, you know.”

  Michael nodded, though Mel knew he had never met her mother. “It’s the season,” he told her solemnly.

  Melissa turned and looked up at him, grinning. “Am I supposed to take comfort from that, Counselor?” When he frowned, she touched his arm and stroked it. “Relax, I’m not going to jump out, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I just want you to be happy, that’s all.”

  “So who isn’t?”

  She moved around him to look down the stairwell. Several people wandered past, through the foyer to the living room, and from the study she could hear the giggling strains of an abortive carol.

  “I just don’t like the idea of you being alone in here,” he told her.

  She frowned, but would not let him see it. “Mike, I’m a big girl, or hadn’t you noticed? I’m nearly thirty, I have a good job, and my love life is . . . well, let’s just say it’s reasonably satisfactory.”

  “I still don’t like the idea of you being alone.”

  She would have turned on him, then, and told him she didn’t give a damn what he thought, that she was tired of him dogging her every minute of the day just because he b
elieved her to be some sort of helpless female caught in the throes of the suicide season. But her attention was diverted by a couple heading up toward her. The man was extraordinarily tall, lean, bald without apology and sporting a handlebar mustache waxed into comic curls at either end; the woman was Melissa’s age, much stouter (though definitely not fat), and wearing a tight black sheath that barely allowed her legs to move; as it was, she had to pull up its skirt to permit her to take the stairs without moving sideways.

  “You,” the man said, pointing at her with a finger manicured and tanned, “are supposed to be down there hostessing, or whatever the hell.”

  “And you,” she told him, “are supposed to be down there guesting, or whatever.”

  He rolled his eyes and sighed loudly. “Samuel Thompson Litten is trying to remember the original words to ‘Greensleeves,’ and I’d sooner die than have to sit there and wait for him to give it up.”

  The landing was somewhat crowded now, but Mel didn’t make a move toward any of the rooms. She liked it here, in the center of the house, and brushed Mike politely to one side to take part of the window seat. The woman immediately sat beside her.

  “Mel,” she said, throaty, slightly slurred, “this is the best party you’ve ever given.”

  “It’s the first one, Tammy,” she said, almost losing her grip on a laugh.

  “I know. You shouldn’t give another. You’ll spoil your record.” Mel looked to Mike, who shrugged, and to Paul, who only stared at his shoes.

  There was a silence, a long one, before Tammy cleared her throat.

  “Mel, Paul and I want you to come to our place for Christmas breakfast.” She said it in a rush, as if she’d been wanting to get it out all night and hadn’t had the nerve. And when she was done, a faint blush rose from her neck to spill onto her cheeks. It complemented her black hair perfectly, made brighter her black eyes. “Really,” she said then. “Really.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Mel said quickly, a hand to Tammy’s leg. “And that is about the best Christmas present either of you could have given me.”

  “Told you she wouldn’t come,” Paul said, though Mel could sense he wasn’t entirely displeased.

  “She didn’t say that,” his wife protested.

  “Yes I did,” Mel told her. “You just weren’t listening.”

  Tammy hiccoughed, covered her mouth and blushed even harder. “Am I drunk?”

  “No,” Paul said.

  “Not yet,” Mike said.

  “Yes I am. Oh damn, why do I do this? Every time we go out I think I’ve figured it out right. One before dinner, one during snacks, two while I try to keep Paul from grabbing at every butt in a dress.” She shook her head slowly. “Somehow I always manage to lose track.”

  “After the first one,” Paul said, and skipped backward to avoid the swing of her pointed shoe. “Shame, woman, you’ll make a spectacle of yourself. Michael, do I have grounds for suit here? For that matter, can I sue my own wife?”

  “Well,” Mike said, a hand to his chin, the other in his jacket pocket, “I’ll have to take that under advisement, if you don’t mind. There’s precedent to be searched out, of course, not to mention the financial status of the defendant.” He grinned at Tammy, who was looking bewildered. “That’s you, Tam.”

  Paul then questioned—at the top of his basso voice—Mike’s credentials, and Mel snuggled back into the comer to listen to the banter. It was not particularly original, nor was it especially humorous, but it belonged to her friends and was for that reason extraordinarily special. And in thinking how special they all were to her, she decided that she was, in fact, one of the most lucky people she had ever known. And the happiest. Not that everything was absolutely perfect: the house wanted painting first thing in the spring, her boss at the college seemed more interested in her bust than in her paperwork, and her car was beginning to act its age; but all in all there was nothing wrong with her life. Not now. Not anymore.

  She was even loved by the three people standing around her, and several more waiting for her downstairs; what more could she want, then?

  It certainly wasn’t like the first day she had returned to the Station.

  “Mel?”

  She had come in on the bus, brave, determined, chin set and heart calmed. And it would have been all right if the vehicle hadn’t stopped at the corner of the Pike and Centre Street, if it hadn’t shuddered for nearly a full minute waiting for traffic and forcing her to look down at the doors to the post office. At the place where the bodies had been found. At the curb where her mother had been discovered at dawn, her heart stopped, her clothing torn, but otherwise untouched. The blame had been set—if not legally, at least popularly—on the missing postmaster, but she hadn’t cared about that. It wasn’t the point. The point was, her mother was dead and she had been left to see to it that her brothers were raised the way it had all been planned from the day her father had taken off for god knew where. And she had done it. With more help than she could have imagined was possible from the church and her neighbors she had managed to graduate from high school, get a job and wait for Eddie and Stan to do the same. Then, with the insurance money and savings, she had gone off to college for the education her mother had demanded, in life as well as in dreams after death.

  Her brothers, however, had weathered a furious battle around the kitchen table one night and had both joined the Army. They had convinced her it was cheaper, better for them, better for her, and they probably would have been drafted anyway, so what was the difference?

  The difference was, they never came back. Eddie died in a plane crash on his way from Basic to Advanced Training; and Stan was brought back from Saigon in a flag-draped coffin—and that was before anyone even knew there was a war.

  “Mel, are you listening to me?”

  She had stayed away, then. The house was rented, and the money was used to send her through graduate school to supplement the scholarships. Used to send her around the world. Used to bring her back when she discovered that her mother and brothers were dead, gone, never to return, and there was no sense searching every damned street in every damned country because they would never show up again and as soon as she realized it the sooner she would see that she was killing herself with dreams and delusions and quiet night-weeping.

  And it would have been perfect if the bus hadn’t stopped in front of the post office and she’d been forced to remember—too soon, too soon—the manner of the dying.

  But that had been the first day. The second was somewhat better. The third better still. And on the fourth she landed the position at the community college and within two weeks school had begun and so had her living.

  A hand gripped her shoulder and shook it gently. She watched the bus fade, the post office fade, the reflection of herself in that dust-streaked window shimmer into that of a dark-haired woman with large black eyes and gleaming red lips and dimples in both cheeks that almost made her pretty.

  “Huh?”

  Laughter cloaked her and made her grin sheepishly, brought her up from the window seat with a playful slap at each of them. Someone called to her from below and she shrugged elaborately before heading downstairs, where she was swept almost instantly into the middle of an argument that began, centered around and finally ended an hour later with indictments drunk and sober against the person of the President. Mel tried to follow them as carefully as she could, tried to comment when called upon for arbitration, but thought it all too much like spearing fish in a teacup. Straw men and hot air. Especially when someone attempted a comparison between the Nixon Administration and the events portrayed in Z; that was too much, and she excused herself, laughing, poked her head into the study, where Sam Litten was struggling with notes never meant for his throat, and left again, this time heading for the front porch and what she hoped was a breath of somewhat fresh air.

  It was cold and dry outside, the bare trees and spikes of grass appearing as through a pane of not-quite-clear glass—sharp-edged and britt
le and waiting for the snow. A few houses across the street were already dark, and those still lighted seemed remarkably distant. She hugged herself against the cold, then moved a hand up to draw lightly at her throat.

  A car sped past left to right, heading out toward the valley. At the intersection with Park Street only two houses over she could see a small animal stalking a shadow. A dead leaf dropped into the streetlight and froze for a moment, suspended on end, breaking for the gutter only when the door behind her opened and Sam Litten stepped out.

  “Brother! They have no appreciation of fine music, Mel. None at all.”

  She smiled and set an elbow into his ribs. He was no taller than she, but rotund and pink-faced and trying to salvage with considerable lack of success what brown there was left in what was left of his hair. His leather-patched jacket was tweed, his tie old school, his shirt white, his trousers just short enough to reveal socks that were falling down around his ankles.

  He groaned, stretched, and turned to face her, and Mel closed her eyes briefly against the friendly assault of his gaze.

  “Dr. Redmond, you’re going to catch pneumonia, you know.” He started at the top, touching her quiet red hair parted in the center and falling near to her shoulders; moved to her face and the deep-set green eyes, the narrow stubbed nose, the freckle-sprayed cheeks, the round of her chin; to the chest she had once considered binding to make less prominent, to the prim waistline and the long, slender legs. When she felt he was done she opened her eyes again and managed a smile.

  He seemed flustered and looked away quickly, out to the street. “Awfully quiet for a Friday night,” he said.

  She nodded. “Must be the weather.”

  The sky had been overcast for several days, threatening snow but delivering nothing but pale ghosts of shadows and the blocking of the moon.