by Otto Penzler
Call it nostalgia or loneliness. Call it whatever you want. But suddenly the image of her wry glance from beneath the slant of hair leaped into mind.
I wanted to see her again.
“Listen,” I said, “I know this is kind of out of the blue, but you wouldn’t be free for dinner would you?”
She paused a moment. The shadow of the door had fallen across her face. She laughed uncertainly, and when she spoke, her voice was husky and uncertain. “I don’t know, Rob. That was a long time ago. Like I said, I’m a little risk aversive these days.”
“Right. Well, then, listen—it was really great seeing you.”
I nodded and started across the lawn. I had the door of the rental open when she spoke again.
“What the hell,” she said. “Let me make a call. It’s only dinner, right?”
I WENT BACK to Washington for the inauguration.
Lewis and I stood together as we waited for the ceremony to begin, looking out at the dead. They had been on the move for days, legions of them, gathering on the Mall as far as the eye could see. A cluster of the living, maybe a couple hundred strong, had been herded onto the lawn before the bandstand—a token crowd of warm bodies for the television cameras—but I couldn’t help thinking that Burton’s true constituency waited beyond the cordons, still and silent and unutterably patient, the melting pot made flesh: folk of every color, race, creed, and age, in every stage of decay that would allow them to stand upright. Dana Maguire might be out there somewhere. She probably was.
The smell was palpable.
Privately, Lewis had told me that the dead had begun gathering elsewhere in the world, as well. Our satellites had confirmed it. In Cuba and North Korea, in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the dead were on the move, implacable and slow, their purposes unknown and maybe unknowable.
“We need you, Rob,” he had said. “Worse than ever.”
“I’m not ready yet,” I replied.
He had turned to me then, his long pitted face sagging. “What happened to you?” he asked.
And so I told him.
It was the first time I had spoken of it aloud, and I felt a burden sliding from my shoulders as the words slipped out. I told him all of it: Gran’s evasions and my reaction to Dana Maguire that day on CNN and the sense I’d had on Crossfire that something else, something vast and remote and impersonal, was speaking through me, calling them back from the grave. I told him about the police report, too, how the memories had come crashing back upon me as I sat at the scarred table, staring into a file nearly three decades old.
“It was a party,” I said. “My uncle was throwing a party and Mom and Dad’s babysitter had canceled at the last minute, so Don told them just to bring us along. He lived alone, you know. He didn’t have kids and he never thought about kids in the house.”
“So the gun wasn’t locked up?”
“No. It was late. It must have been close to midnight by then. People were getting drunk and the music was loud and Alice didn’t seem to want much to do with me. I was in my uncle’s bedroom, just fooling around the way kids do, and the gun was in the drawer of his nightstand.”
I paused, memory surging through me, and suddenly I was there again, a child in my uncle’s upstairs bedroom. Music thumped downstairs, jazzy big band music. I knew the grown-ups would be dancing and my dad would be nuzzling Mom’s neck, and that night when he kissed me good night, I’d be able to smell him, the exotic aromas of bourbon and tobacco, shot through with the faint floral essence of Mom’s perfume. Then my eyes fell upon the gun in the drawer. The light from the hall summoned unsuspected depths from the blued barrel.
I picked it up, heavy and cold.
All I wanted to do was show Alice. I just wanted to show her. I never meant to hurt anyone. I never meant to hurt Alice.
I said it to Lewis—“I never meant to hurt her”—and he looked away, unable to meet my eyes.
I remember carrying the gun downstairs to the foyer, Mom and Dad dancing beyond the frame of the doorway, Alice standing there watching. “I remember everything,” I said to Lewis. “Everything but pulling the trigger. I remember the music screeching to a halt, somebody dragging the needle across the record, my mother screaming. I remember Alice lying on the floor and the blood and the weight of the gun in my hand. But the weird thing is, the thing I remember best is the way I felt at that moment.”
“The way you felt,” Lewis said.
“Yeah. A bullet had smashed the face of the clock, this big grandfather clock my uncle had in the foyer. It was chiming over and over, as though the bullet had wrecked the mechanism. That’s what I remember most. The clock. I was afraid my uncle was going to be mad about the clock.”
Lewis did something odd then. Reaching out, he clasped my shoulder—the first time he’d ever touched me, really touched me, I mean—and I realized how strange it was that this man, this scarred, bitter man, had somehow become the only friend I have. I realized something else, too: how rarely I’d known the touch of another human hand, how much I hungered for it.
“You were a kid, Rob.”
“I know. It’s not my fault.”
“It’s no reason for you to leave, not now, not when we need you. Burton would have you back in a minute. He owes this election to you, he knows that. Come back.”
“Not yet,” I said, “I’m not ready.”
But now, staring out across the upturned faces of the dead as a cold January wind whipped across the Mall, I felt the lure and pull of the old life, sure as gravity. The game, Burton had called it, and it was a game, politics, the biggest Monopoly set in the world and I loved it and for the first time I understood why I loved it. For the first time I understood something else, too: why I had waited years to ring Gwen’s doorbell, why even then it had taken an active effort of will not to turn away. It was the same reason: because it was a game, a game with clear winners and losers, with rules as complex and arcane as a cotillion, and most of all because it partook so little of the messy turmoil of real life. The stakes seemed high, but they weren’t. It was ritual, that’s all—movement without action, a dance of spin and strategy designed to preserve the status quo. I fell in love with politics because it was safe. You get so involved in pushing your token around the board that you forget the ideals that brought you to the table in the first place. You forget to speak from the heart. Someday maybe, for the right reasons, I’d come back. But not yet.
I must have said it aloud for Lewis suddenly looked over at me. “What?” he asked.
I just shook my head and gazed out over the handful of living people, stirring as the ceremony got under way. The dead waited beyond them, rank upon rank of them with the earth of the grave under their nails and that cold shining in their eyes.
And then I did turn to Lewis. “What do you think they want?” I asked.
Lewis sighed. “Justice, I suppose,” he said.
“And when they have it?”
“Maybe they’ll rest.”
A YEAR HAS passed, and those words—justice, I suppose—still haunt me. I returned to D.C. in the fall, just as the leaves began turning along the Potomac. Gwen came with me, and sometimes, as I lie wakeful in the shelter of her warmth, my mind turns to the past.
It was Gran that brought me back. The cast had come off in February, and one afternoon in March, Gwen and I stopped by, surprised to see her on her feet. She looked frail, but her eyes glinted with determination as she toiled along the corridors behind her walker.
“Let’s sit down and rest,” I said when she got winded, but she merely shook her head and kept moving.
“Bones knit, Rob,” she told me. “Wounds heal, if you let them.”
Those words haunt me, too.
By the time she died in August, she’d moved from the walker to a cane. Another month, her case manager told me with admiration, and she might have relinquished even that. We buried her in the plot where we laid my grandfather to rest, but I never went back after the interment. I know what I would fi
nd.
The dead do not sleep.
They shamble in silence through the cities of our world, their bodies slack and stinking of the grave, their eyes coldly ablaze. Baghdad fell in September, vanquished by battalions of revolutionaries, rallying behind a vanguard of the dead. State teems with similar rumors, and CNN is on the story. Unrest in Pyongyang, turmoil in Belgrade.
In some views, Burton’s has been the most successful administration in history. All around the world, our enemies are falling. Yet more and more these days, I catch the president staring uneasily into the streets of Washington, aswarm with zombies. “Our conscience,” he’s taken to calling them, but I’m not sure I agree. They demand nothing of us, after all. They seek no end we can perceive or understand. Perhaps they are nothing more than what we make of them, or what they enable us to make of ourselves. And so we go on, mere lodgers in a world of unpeopled graves, subject ever to the remorseless scrutiny of the dead.
CONSIDERING THE FACT that he died at the age of only forty-three, Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) was not only a prolific writer but a remarkably influential one. Born in Los Angeles to a bookseller and his wife, he became interested in horror and supernatural fiction by reading the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales and sold his first story, “The Graveyard Rats,” to it at the age of twenty-two. Except for his military service, his entire career was spent as a freelance author. The Great Depression forced him to abandon his education, but in the 1950s he returned to school to study for a master’s degree. In 1940, he married the writer Catherine L. Moore and thereafter much of their work was collaborative, producing stories and novels under their own names and more than a dozen pseudonyms. Among the authors who have dedicated books to him are Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Bloody Sun), Richard Matheson (I Am Legend), and Ray Bradbury (Dark Carnival ).
As Lewis Padgett, he wrote two excellent mystery novels, The Day He Died (1947) and The Brass Ring (1946). As Kuttner, he wrote Man Drowning (1952) and a popular series about a lay psychoanalyst, Michael Gray: The Murder of Eleanor Pope (1956), The Murder of Ann Avery (1956), Murder of a Mistress (1957), and Murder of a Wife (1958). Several of his works have been filmed, including The Twonky (1953), a comic science fiction movie starring Hans Conreid, based on “The Twonky” (published in the September 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction); Timescape (1992), a science fiction film starring Jeff Daniels and Ariana Richards, based on the Kuttner/Moore novella Vintage Season (published in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction); and The Last Mimzy (2007), starring Rhiannon Leigh Wryn, Chris O’Neil, and Timothy Hutton, based on the couple’s short story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (published in the February 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction).
“The Graveyard Rats” was first published in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales.
OLD MASSON, THE caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest and most neglected cemeteries, had a feud with the rats. Generations ago they had come up from the wharves and settled in the graveyard, a colony of abnormally large rats, and when Masson had taken charge after the inexplicable disappearance of the former caretaker, he decided that they must go. At first he set traps for them and put poisoned food by their burrows, and later he tried to shoot them, but it did no good. The rats stayed, multiplying and overrunning the graveyard with their ravenous hordes.
They were large, even for the mus decumanus, which sometimes measures fifteen inches in length, exclusive of the naked pink and gray tail. Masson had caught glimpses of some as large as good-sized cats, and when, once or twice, the grave-diggers had uncovered their burrows, the malodorous tunnels were large enough to enable a man to crawl into them on his hands and knees. The ships that had come generations ago from distant ports to the rotting Salem wharves had brought strange cargoes.
Masson wondered sometimes at the extraordinary size of these burrows. He recalled certain vaguely disturbing legends he had heard since coming to ancient, witch-haunted Salem—tales of a moribund, inhuman life that was said to exist in forgotten burrows in the earth. The old days, when Cotton Mather had hunted down the evil cults that worshipped Hecate and the dark Magna Mater in frightful orgies, had passed; but dark gabled houses still leaned perilously toward each other over narrow cobbled streets, and blasphemous secrets and mysteries were said to be hidden in subterranean cellars and caverns, where forgotten pagan rites were still celebrated in defiance of law and sanity. Wagging their gray heads wisely, the elders declared that there were worse things than rats and maggots crawling in the unhallowed earth of the ancient Salem cemeteries.
And then, too, there was this curious dread of the rats. Masson disliked and respected the ferocious little rodents, for he knew the danger that lurked in their flashing, needle-sharp fangs; but he could not understand the inexplicable horror which the oldsters held for deserted, rat-infested houses. He had heard vague rumors of ghoulish beings that dwelt far underground, and that had the power of commanding the rats, marshaling them like horrible armies. The rats, the old men whispered, were messengers between this world and the grim and ancient caverns far below Salem. Bodies had been stolen from graves for nocturnal subterranean feasts, they said. The myth of the Pied Piper is a fable that hides a blasphemous horror, and the black pits of Avernus have brought forth hell-spawned monstrosities that never venture into the light of day.
Masson paid little attention to these tales. He did not fraternize with his neighbors, and, in fact, did all he could to hide the existence of the rats from intruders. Investigation, he realized, would undoubtedly mean the opening of many graves. And while some of the gnawed, empty coffins could be attributed to the activities of the rats, Masson might find it difficult to explain the mutilated bodies that lay in some of the coffins.
The purest gold is used in filling teeth, and this gold is not removed when a man is buried. Clothing, of course, is another matter; for usually the undertaker provides a plain broadcloth suit that is cheap and easily recognizable. But gold is another matter; and sometimes, too, there were medical students and less reputable doctors who were in need of cadavers, and not overscrupulous as to where these were obtained.
So far Masson had successfully managed to discourage investigation. He had fiercely denied the existence of the rats, even though they sometimes robbed him of his prey. Masson did not care what happened to the bodies after he had performed his gruesome thefts, but the rats inevitably dragged away the whole cadaver through the hole they gnawed in the coffin.
The size of these burrows occasionally worried Masson. Then, too, there was the curious circumstance of the coffins always being gnawed open at the end, never at the side or top. It was almost as though the rats were working under the direction of some impossibly intelligent leader.
Now he stood in an open grave and threw a last sprinkling of wet earth on the heap beside the pit. It was raining, a slow, cold drizzle that for weeks had been descending from soggy black clouds. The graveyard was a slough of yellow, sucking mud, from which the rain-washed tombstones stood up in irregular battalions. The rats had retreated to their burrows, and Masson had not seen one for days. But his gaunt, unshaved face was set in frowning lines; the coffin on which he was standing was a wooden one.
The body had been buried several days earlier, but Masson had not dared to disinter it before. A relative of the dead man had been coming to the grave at intervals, even in the drenching rain. But he would hardly come at this late hour, no matter how much grief he might be suffering, Masson thought, grinning wryly. He straightened and laid the shovel aside.
From the hill on which the ancient graveyard lay he could see the lights of Salem flickering dimly through the downpour. He drew a flashlight from his pocket. He would need light now. Taking up the spade, he bent and examined the fastenings of the coffin.
Abruptly he stiffened. Beneath his feet he sensed an unquiet stirring and scratching, as though something was moving within the coffin. For a moment a pang of superstitious fear shot through Masson, and then rage replaced it as he r
ealized the significance of the sound. The rats had forestalled him again!
In a paroxysm of anger Masson wrenched at the fastenings of the coffin. He got the sharp edge of the shovel under the lid and pried it up until he could finish the job with his hands. Then he sent the flashlight’s cold beam darting down into the coffin.
Rain spattered against the white satin lining; the coffin was empty. Masson saw a flicker of movement at the head of the case, and darted the light in that direction.
The end of the sarcophagus had been gnawed through, and a gaping hole led into darkness. A black shoe, limp and dragging, was disappearing as Masson watched, and abruptly he realized that the rats had forestalled him by only a few minutes. He fell on his hands and knees and made a hasty clutch at the shoe, and the flashlight incontinently fell into the coffin and went out. The shoe was tugged from his grasp, he heard a sharp, excited squealing, and then he had the flashlight again and was darting its light into the burrow.
It was a large one. It had to be, or the corpse could not have been dragged along by it. Masson wondered at the size of the rats that could carry away a man’s body, but the thought of the loaded revolver in his pocket fortified him. Probably if the corpse had been an ordinary one Masson would have left the rats with their spoils rather than venture into the narrow burrow, but he remembered an especially fine set of cufflinks he had observed, as well as a stickpin that was undoubtedly a genuine pearl. With scarcely a pause he clipped the flashlight to his belt and crept into the burrow.
It was a tight fit, but he managed to squeeze himself along. Ahead of him in the flashlight’s glow he could see the shoes dragging along the wet earth of the bottom of the tunnel. He crept along the burrow as rapidly as he could, occasionally barely able to squeeze his lean body through the narrow walls.
The air was overpowering with its musty stench of carrion. If he could not reach the corpse in a minute, Masson decided, he would turn back. Belated fears were beginning to crawl, maggot-like, within his mind, but greed urged him on. He crawled forward, several times passing the mouths of adjoining tunnels. The walls of the burrow were damp and slimy, and twice lumps of dirt dropped behind him. The second time he paused and screwed his head around to look back. He could see nothing, of course, until he had unhooked the flashlight from his belt and reversed it.
