Head cases

by Scott Nicholson

  I retrieved everything else I could see before moving to the mound of stones. I stepped over the railing, just missing doing myself an injury on the spikes, and clambered up the rocks, dislodging a few in the process and giving myself several bruises on my knees.

  The blouse was wrapped around the rusted spar and, by straining and stretching, I could just about reach it. Catching hold of the blouse, I pulled, just as my footing gave way. I fell, pulling the blouse with me, and felt the material tear before something solid and heavy hit me on the head forcing me down onto the rocks, rolling dislodged stones until I was brought up against the railings.

  I heard a loud creaking and looked up to see the cross, now with a spar missing, swaying from side to side in the breeze. When I looked down I found the missing piece, lying by my side with Sandra's blouse still wrapped around it. I left it there as I hauled myself over the railings and hobbled back to the house.

  That was it for the rest of the day. I was dazed, bleeding from a head wound and bruised over much of my body. Sandra wanted to fetch the doctor but I talked her out of it. I didn't want anybody to know that I had defaced the cross, not yet anyway, not until I had the chance to try to repair some of the damage.

  I spent the day in bed, most of the time with Sandra beside me, nursing my wounds and wondering what the islanders' reaction would be.

  As darkness filled the room, Sandra fell asleep, but I lay awake, listening to the creaking of the cross, the rasping of iron against stone as it swayed back and forth in the wind.

  At some point I must have fallen asleep. I was awakened by a cold draft hitting me just on the back of the neck. I rolled over, hoping to snuggle against my wife's warm body, but I met only more empty space. It took several seconds for me to realise that she wasn't in the bed.

  Moonlight was streaming in through the window, enough for me to make out her pale figure and the cross which bobbed and swayed hypnotically in front of her. I was out of the room and through onto the grass before I realised that we were both still naked.

  I went back to fetch some clothes, pulling on a long jumper for myself and picking up an overcoat for her. When I got back to the door, she was gone.

  In the moonlight I could just make out the footprints in the grass and I followed them up to the cairn. I called out her name, twice, but there was no response.

  As I got closer I could see that the cairn had collapsed in on itself on the left-hand side. A dark passage led downwards, down into the earth, and there was a dank salty smell wafting up into the night.

  I looked around again but there was no sign of her anywhere. The only assumption I could make was that she was down there somewhere-down there in the earth. She had gone walkabout at night before, sometimes getting as far as the front door in our flat in London, but this was the first time that she had actually left the house.

  I was worried, of course I was, but I wasn't thinking in terms of anything other than the personal danger to her should she stumble in the dark. I wasn't thinking in terms of monsters or dwarves. Not yet, anyway.

  I called her name again, louder this time, but all I heard was the echo of my voice coming back to me. I entered the passage but after only two or three yards it became as black as a pit of hell. It was no good. I needed some source of light.

  Precious minutes were wasted before I located a flashlight, and clouds had covered the moon when I finally went back outside. I called out, not really expecting a response, and none came. I put the overcoat on over the top of the jumper, and with some trepidation I went down into the dark.

  The walls were built of large blocks of sandstone. I had visited several Neolithic tombs, in Carnac, in Orkney, and on Salisbury Plain. This gave the same sense of age, of a time long past. What I hadn't expected, what was completely different, was the overwhelming feeling that this place was in use. The walls ran damp and there was a salt tang in the air, but there was no sign of moss or lichen on the walls, only the damp, glistening stone.

  I pressed on. By shining the light downwards, I could see the barefoot prints which Sandra had made on her descent. I had no choice but to follow.

  The path kept going down, deeper and deeper, and the air was getting colder and damper. I judged that I must be under the sea by now and the thought of all that water above added an extra worry line to my already furrowed brow. At least the passage hadn't diverged.

  I was so busy concentrating on the way ahead that I stumbled when my foot didn't meet the expected step and the path leveled out.

  I was in some sort of chamber. It was hexagonal in shape, about ten yards across, and there was an entrance in every wall. My feet were wet. That was what I was thinking. It's funny how your mind gives you something else to think about at times of stress.

  The thing I was trying to ignore was lying on a slab in the centre of the room. The slab was a pale green marble of a kind I had never seen and she was lying on it with her knees raised in the air as if on an operating table.

  Between her legs something moved-something grey and green and warty and hideous. It slithered and crawled, and I could see that it was inside her, was copulating with her.

  I think I went slightly mad then. I remember grasping the slimy body, almost dropping it as its small wizened face turned towards me, a face lined with age and infinitely deep in its evil. Even as I looked, the life went out of the eyes and the puny head bent in death, one last smile playing on its lips.

  I remember dashing the body again and again against the wall but I don't remember tearing it and mashing it. I must have done it, though, for when I moved towards my wife I had the slimy remains of it all over my free hand and its juices coated my feet and ankles.

  She was alive. I thanked God for that as I cradled her in my arms. She seemed to be in a stupor, but when I stood her upright, I found that she was able to walk.

  I dragged her unyielding body along, grateful that she seemed to be capable of walking. I had one last look around the chamber before we headed for the stairs. The pieces of the creature I had dismembered were bubbling and frothing in a puddle of bloody ooze.

  I fled.

  After only twenty or so steps, I felt her stiffen beside me and then she began to pull me back as she tried to go down once more.

  I am not proud of my next action. I hit her hard across the chin and she fell into my arms. I carried her up the stairs. Quite how I managed it without dropping the torch I am not too sure, and how long it took us I will never know.

  Finally we emerged into the cold night air. I laid her on the grass beyond the railings and tried to tumble the rocks over the passage. I had just covered the entrance when the screaming began.

  'The baby. Oh God. It's coming. It's coming.'

  I don't remember much of the next half hour, only fragments-driving like a maniac as she sobbed quietly behind me, the sudden light in the deer's eyes just before the car hit it dead on, smashing the car's headlights into a million tinkling fragments.

  I remember the small twinkling lights in the black distance as I just managed to avoid the cliff edge and, finally, the iron gate on the path which I almost fell over as the doctor came towards me and I collapsed into a faint.

  I have a vague memory of being put in an armchair and practically force-fed whiskey as my wife was carried upstairs and the doctor called for some help, but my legs wouldn't move and my arms were heavy and sleep called me back again.

  I dreamed hot lurid fantasies of violence and fire, of rape and bloodletting, and of a cold black fury which carried all before it. I woke from screams into screams.

  My legs pushed me out of the chair and towards the door long before my brain was fully awake and I was halfway up the stairs before I recognised the voice behind the screaming. I reached the door just as the screams stopped.

  Early morning sunlight was streaming into the room, lighting a scene which will be forever etched into my memory.

  The doctor is standing off to one side, his left hand covering his mouth, his right cl
utching his chest as if to keep his heart in.

  An old woman is lying across the bed in a dead faint, her grey wisps of hair mingled with the blood from my wife's legs.

  My wife is lying there, throat muscles straining, mouth open in a long soundless scream which refuses to come, her gaze fixed on the shape writhing on the carpet, ignoring the blood flowing from her, ignoring the woman across her legs, all else immaterial to her pain at the sight of our child. And there on the floor lies our future, burning golden in the first rays of the sun, being cleansed in the purifying light of the new day, my son.

  The last thing I see before darkness takes me away for a long time is the face, the small wizened features and the age-old eyes, the red mouth which squeals at me as I bring my foot down, hard, and all the members of my family scream in unison.

  DO YOU KNOW ME YET?

  By Scott Nicholson

  It all started with a story. You know the one I mean, don't you, Doctor?

  Of course you do. You know everything. You smile and nod and write down little words on your paper and then go home at the end of the day, safe in the knowledge that I'm the crazy one and you're normal.

  But let me tell you something. These walls work both ways. They not only keep people in, they keep you "normal" people out. Except you have a key, don't you? You can come and go anytime you want. Just like my ideas. They come and go anytime I want.

  I know what you just wrote. "Episodic paranoia?" With a question mark. Where's your smile now, doctor? Try to hide it under that bald head of yours, it won't do any good. I can read thoughts. That's why I'm here. That's why they put me here.

  Except they're the crazy ones. See, they can read thoughts, too. Only they do it better than me. And the world calls them "leading lights" and "visionaries," the critics rave about how they "stare unflinchingly into the darkness." The editors fight over them, make fools of themselves in their rush to outbid each other. Agents snap like sharks in a bloody sea, hoping to get a piece.

  Sorry. I'm getting angry, and my last doctor told me that getting angry is not the path to healing. And I want to be cured. I really do. I want to get outside again. They won't let me have any pencils or pens or other sharp objects, and it's really hard to write novels with crayons. Plus editors won't look at handwritten manuscripts.

  Tell about how it started? Again? How many years did you go to school to earn a piece of paper that empowers you to judge me? Ten years of college, just like I thought. Seems like you'd need a good memory to get through all those classes.

  But I'll do it. Because I'm a storyteller, and you're the audience. Even if I can read your thoughts and know that you don't believe a word of what I say. At least you're honest, and by that, I mean you don't lie to my face. Not like them.

  It started way back then, with my story about the girl with psychokinesis. You don't believe in psychokinesis. But that's okay. It's not what you believe that matters. It's what I believe, and what I know.

  I wrote that story in the early 1970's. Well, actually, I didn't get to write it. But I thought about it almost every day for two years. This girl is in high school, see, and all her classmates pick on her because she's so weird. Her mom's a religious zealot, and the girl doesn't have anybody to turn to when her mental powers start developing. PK always comes on with adolescence, see?

  I never figured out how it was going to end, but I really was going to start writing. I bought a Royal typewriter and a bunch of paper. You can look it up, it's all in that civil suit I brought against that creep who stole my story. I can't mention his name, because of legal reasons, but one day the truth will come out.

  So anyway, imagine my anger when that story came out as a bestseller in paperback, movie rights sold, and that low-down dirty thief quit his day job and became an overnight success. Sure, his agent put this spin on later, about how the guy wrote six hours a day for fifteen years, about how he'd been submitting stories since he was twelve or so, and that he'd been publishing short stories in naughty magazines. But you know the lengths they go to when they have to cover their tracks. And everybody knows they got the millions. Millions that should be mine.

  Ah, you just crossed out the question mark, didn't you? "Episodic paranoia." No doubt about it, in your mind. You're smug, Doctor. As smug as they are. Everybody's right, and I'm wrong.

  Go on? Sure, I'll go on. See, I'm controlling my temper. Just like the last doctor told me to do. And you're thinking that if you let me talk, I'll calm down and you can be done with me in time for your five o'clock martini. See me smile.

  Back before I was a writer, when I was just a kid, I had this other idea. About a woman who has the Devil's baby. When the book came out about that one, I just figured it was a coincidence. But then when that guy stole my idea about the little girl who gets possessed by Satan and a Catholic priest tries to save her, I decided I'd better become a writer, too. I figured that if my ideas were so good that other people wanted to steal them, I'd better write them myself. That's when I came up with the psychokinesis idea.

  Have I ever written anything? Sure, I have. I get a good sentence or two down, and then I stare at the paper. It's called "writer's block," and only creative people get it. That's why you breeze right through those papers you submit to the trade journals. That's the reason all these other writers are so prolific. It's easy when somebody else is doing your thinking for you.

  Well, I decided I'd hurry through my next couple of books before somebody could steal my ideas. Except that one guy types faster than I do. So he beat me to the one about the virus that wipes out most of the world so God and the Devil can fight over the survivors, and he beat me to the one about the haunted hotel. And get this…

  Whenever I got writer's block, do you know what I used to type? "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." And you-know-who steals it and everybody thinks it's the most clever thing to ever grace a page. And they call me crazy.

  His best trick was when he "released" all these books that he'd supposedly written before he got famous. I had all of those ideas in one night, right after the PK book came out. You know, the walking race where only the winner survives, the same idea again except this time it's set in the future and the competitors are paid to run for their lives, one where a man blows up stuff because he doesn't like progress, and one where a kid shoots up his high school. That last one was so dumb I didn't think anybody would steal it. But you-know-who types a lot faster than he thinks, so he'd probably mailed it to his publisher before he realized what it was about.

  And he was clever, because he knew I was on to him. He even came up with a pen name for those books so that I would have to sue him twice. I guess he figured I couldn't afford lawyers' fees. I was just a poor writer, see? Never mind that I'd never actually published anything.

  It was bad enough when only a few people were picking my brain. Once in a while, I could feel them, up there in my skull, tiptoeing around and fighting each other for the best ideas. But then people across the ocean got into the act. People in England and some people who couldn't even speak English. That's what I call power, when your ideas are so universal that they cross lingual and cultural barriers. But my head was getting crowded.

  Ah, you just crossed out a word. Now it's just "paranoia." And you're about to write "delusions of grandeur." Why do they let you have a pencil and not me?

  We both know why, don't we? Because then I would write down my ideas before they could steal them. The hospital's in on it, too. Yes, you can smile about it, like you've got a secret. But we both know better.

  Let's see, where were we? Because you are my audience and I don't want to lose you.

  Oh, yes. My idea about a bunch of old men who had fallen in love with a ghost a long time ago. A different writer got that one. But instead of getting mad, I became more determined than ever. I quit my job and did nothing but think all the time, getting wonderful ideas one after another. Psychic vampires, sympathetic vampires who are more romantic than scary, a killer clown that
's really a UFO buried under the ground, a puzzle box that opens another dimension, giant rats that live in the sewer system, paranormal investigators who discover a haunted town, a child that's really the Antichrist, so many ideas I could hardly keep track.

  Everyone was stealing from me. Even writers who could barely make out a shopping list. Only the critics called it the "horror boom," and you couldn't pass the paperback rack in the supermarket without an army of foil-covered monsters grinning out at you. My monsters. Some I wasn't too proud of, but they're like children. You still have to love them, even the dumb and ugly ones.

  I just kept getting ideas, and they kept stealing them. They got richer while I got madder. And I mean "mad" in the real way, not in the crazy way. But the maddest I ever got was when that British writer pulled a satire on me.

  See, he wrote this story you may have read. Called it "Next Time You'll Know Me. " I know the story, and I've never even read it. Because I met him at a convention, and as I was shaking his hand, I was thinking that I hoped he didn't steal any of my ideas, because then I'd have to get him, and he seemed like such a nice man.

  Of course, I'd never get him in real life, because only crazy people do things like that. But he looked at me, and he had a twinkle in his eye, and he started writing the story right there in his head. My story! About how a psycho thinks writers are stealing his ideas. I was going to say something, to claim copyright infringement, but the next woman in line pushed me away so she could shake the famous writer's hand.

  Ever wonder where ideas come from? No, I suppose not. You don't have very much imagination. I guess you can't afford to, in your line of work.

  Well, see, I wondered about where ideas came from, after that British writer made me so mad. And it took me years of thinking about it before I realized that ideas came from me. So I made myself stop getting them, so the other writers couldn't steal them.