The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  “Hey, Frank,” Ratface asked, his shotgun crooked under his arm, “where'd the old man keep his money?”

  Frank towered there perplexed, the berserker-lust draining out of him—almost bashful—and frightened worse than ever before in all his years on the trail. What should he shout now? What should he do? Who was he to resist such perfect evil? They were five to one, and those five were fiends from down under, and that one a coward. Long ago he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

  Mama was the first to break the tableau. Her second captor had relaxed his clutch upon her hair; she prodded the little girls before her and leaped for the door.

  The hair-puller was after her at once, but she bounded past Ratface’s shotgun, which had wavered toward Frank, and Alice and Edith were ahead of her. Allegra, her eyes wide and desperate, tripped over the rungs of a broken chair. Everything happened in half a second. The hair-puller caught Allegra by her little ankle.

  Then Frank bellowed again, loudest in all his life, and he swung his axe high above his head and downward, a skillful dreadful stroke, catching the hair-puller’s arm just below the shoulder. At once the man began to scream and spout, while Allegra fled after her mother.

  Falling, the hair-puller collided with Ratface, spoiling his aim, but one barrel of the shotgun fired, and Frank felt pain in his side. His bloody axe on high, he hulked between the five men and the door.

  All the men’s faces were glaring at Frank, incredulously, as if demanding how he dared stir against them. Three convicts were scrabbling tipsily for weapons on the floor. As Frank strode among them, he saw the expression on those faces change from gloating to desperation. Just as his second blow descended, there passed through his mind a kind of fleshy collage of death he had seen once at a farmyard gate: the corpses of five weasels nailed to a gatepost by the farmer, their frozen open jaws agape like damned souls in hell.

  “All heads off but mine!” Frank heard himself braying. “All heads off but mine!” He hacked and hewed, his own screams of lunatic fury drowning their screams of terror.

  For less than three minutes, shots, thuds, shrieks, crashes, terrible wailing. They could not get past him to the doorway.

  “Come on!” Frank was raging as he stood in the middle of the parlor. “Come on, who’s next? All heads off but mine! Who’s next?”

  There came no answer but a ghastly rattle from one of the five heaps that littered the carpet. Blood-soaked from hair to boots, the berserker towered alone, swaying where he stood.

  His mind began to clear. He had been shot twice, Frank guessed, and the pain at his heart was frightful. Into his frantic consciousness burst all the glory of what he had done, and all the horror.

  He became almost rational: he must count the dead. One upstairs, five here. One, two, three, four, five heaps. That was correct: all present and accounted for, Frank boy, Punkinhead Frank, Crazy Frank. All dead and accounted for. Had he thought that thought before? Had he taken that mock roll before? Had he wrought this slaughter twice over, twice in this same old room?

  But where were Mama and the little girls? They mustn’t see this blood-splashed inferno of a parlor. He was looking at himself in the tall mirror, and he saw a bear-man loathsome with his own blood and others’ blood. He looked like the Wild Man of Borneo. In abhorrence he flung his axe aside. Behind him sprawled the reflections of the hacked dead.

  Fighting down his heart pain, he reeled into the hall. “Little girls! Mrs. Anthony! Allegra, O Allegra!” His voice was less strong. “Where are you? It’s safe now!”

  They did not call back. He labored up the main stair, clutching his side. “Allegra, speak to your Frank!” They were in none of the bedrooms.

  He went up the garret stair, whatever the agony, then beyond Frank’s Room to the cupola stair, and ascended that slowly, gasping hard. They were not in the cupola. Might they have run out among the trees? In that cold dawn, he stared on every side; he thought his sight was beginning to fail.

  He could see no one outside the house. The drifts still choked the street beyond the gateposts, and those two boulders protruded impassive from untrodden snow. Back down the flights of stairs he made his way, clutching at the rail, at the wall. Surely the little girls hadn’t strayed into that parlor butcher shop? He bit his lip and peered into the Sunday parlor.

  The bodies all were gone. The splashes and ropy strands of blood all were gone. Everything stood in perfect order, as if violence never had touched Tamarack House. The sun was rising, and sunlight filtered through the shutters. Within fifteen minutes the trophies of his savage victory had disappeared.

  It was like the recurrent dream which had tormented Frank when he was little: he separated from Mother in the dark, wandering solitary in empty lanes, no soul alive in all the universe but little Frank. Yet those tremendous axe blows had severed living flesh and blood, and for one moment, there on the stairs, he had held in his arms a tiny quick Allegra: of that reality he did not doubt at all.

  Wonder subduing pain, he staggered to the front door. It stood unshattered. He drew the bar and turned the key, and went down the stone steps into the snow. He was weak now, and did not know where he was going. Had he done a Signal Act? Might the Lord give him one parting glimpse of little Allegra, somewhere among these trees? He slipped in a drift, half rose, sank again, crawled. He found himself at the foot of one of those boulders—the farther one, the stone he had not inspected.

  The snow had fallen away from the face of the bronze tablet. Clutching the boulder, Frank drew himself up. By bringing his eyes very close to the tablet, he could read the words, a dying man panting against deathless bronze:

  In loving memory of

  FRANK

  a spirit in prison, made for eternity

  who saved us and died for us

  January 14, 1915

  “Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,

  And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,

  Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him

  In this clay carcass crippled to abide?”