by Otto Penzler
“Come one, come all,” said Marvello softly, staring out at them. “Come one, come all.”
He took a pull at the flask, replaced it, and leaned into the microphone, standing firmly on the balls of his little feet.
“Juicy, juicy, juicy,” he crooned, watching the front curve of them filling in the midway. “Lots of blood, lots of blood, lots of blood. Lots of fresh, chewy flesh, too, friends, lots of it. Sweet, sweet flesh like you haven’t had between your teeth since God alone knows how long. Yummy, yummy, yummy.”
He reached down to push a button and a soft red coiling of light began making its way ’round and ’round the opening of the tent, pulsing like a newly opened, still bleeding wound. They saw it, of course, they always saw it, and they headed for it just like flies heading for shit, as they were meant to.
He’d often noticed those among them that reminded him of people he’d known and he’d wonder was that old Charlie Carter he just saw stumble in there? Was that whatsisname who used to sell papers at that newsstand on the corner of Dearborn and Washington? Was that Clara? She had a great laugh, did Clara. He could remember just how it felt when he held her shoulders. He’d sure as hell hoped that thing hadn’t been Clara.
They started cramming themselves into the entrance. Somehow or other they always managed it. There were snarls and struggles and so on, but in the end they always somehow managed it.
“That’s right, dear hearts,” he said, smiling down at them, but he knew there weren’t any of them listening to him now, not after he’d turned on the doorway lights. “Have a fine old time, enjoy yourselves to the fullest.”
At this stage of the game he could sing old sweet songs if it struck his fancy, and he sometimes did, just for the hell of it, or because he was feeling mellow. From here on in the Midway did all the work. From here on in it was purely automatic. But the old habits die hard.
“Let that one-legged gentleman through, folks,” he said after he’d observed a hopping fragment get pushed aside by the eager multitude for the fourth or fifth time. “There may not be all that much left of him, but I absolutely guarantee that what there is is just as hungry as the most complete among you. I absolutely guarantee it.”
He smiled quietly and took another pull from his flask. What the hell, he thought, what the hell, the night’s work was drawing softly and successfully to its close, so what the hell.
The damndest thing was that once he actually had seen someone he knew go into the tent, really and truly had, no doubt about it, but the whole thing had given him a real hoot, a genuine kick in the ass, praise be, because it’d been a man he’d truly hated, Mr. Homer Garner, onetime proprietor of the Garner Hardware Company of Joplin, a real revolving son of a bitch who’d done him dirty back when he was just a kid and really needed the money, didn’t know any better way to get hold of it. It had given Marvello undiluted joy to observe the even-uglier-than-usual, pus-leaking remnants of Mr. Homer Garner shamble helplessly into the tent.
He was glad, you might even say genuinely grateful, that he’d never seen anybody he liked go in there, since he was certain sure he would not have enjoyed that in the least. Of course the danger of such a thing happening had diminished considerably through the years. He didn’t suppose there were all that many left in either category, those he’d hated or those he’d liked, when you came right down to it. He supposed most of them were dead by now, really dead, not just shuffling-around dead. Dead and buried dead, the good, old fashioned way.
Marvello leaned over the rostrum, propping himself on spread fingertips, and sized up the Midway. The crowd was down to the final stragglers now, the really timid ones, wandering in at last from wherever they’d been shyly hiding their bones. It wouldn’t be long at all now. The show was almost over.
He glanced down at the glowing readout, watching how the number was growing at a slower and slower pace now that the big rush was over. They kind of relaxed when there weren’t so many of them around. They almost sort of strolled in when you got down to the last little trickle.
The readout showed a good score, of course. It was always a good score.
“You don’t want to miss it,” he called out softly to the final, staggering arrivals, then he took another pull, washing the booze around his teeth before he swallowed it. “Nossir, you don’t want to miss it.”
One left, now, just one. Standing out there in a cockeyed stance, swaying, looking around with its dim eyes, pawing the air with its shriveled little hands. A tough one to turn, this baby. A real hard sell.
“All your friends and loved ones are in there, my handsome fellow,” he said, smiling out at the solitary figure.
On an impulse, he turned off the lights moving around the doorway, the lights that pulled them in no matter what. He felt like bringing this one in himself.
“Why be lonely?” he called out, cooing, first waving his cane in the air to get the thing’s attention, and then, when he’d caught its eye, pointing it at the entrance and giving its tip a tiny, emphasizing twirl. “Come, come, your solitude serves no purpose, and it’s self-inflicted to boot. Cut it short, old chum, cut it short. All those near and dear are but a few short steps away, a mere totter or two. They are all eagerly awaiting your august presence inside. They’re all inside.”
It looked up at Marvello, aware of him for the first time. Rags of skin swung from its forearms, blowing slightly in the night breeze. It took a step or two forward. It lifted its head and sucked the odors coming from the tent through its nose hole.
“Smells even better in the tent, friend,” he said. “Say, don’t be a spoil sport, don’t be a party pooper. You only lived once.”
It wavered idiotically for another half minute and then, its jaws starting to work, starting to wetten, it began to shuffle steadily ahead. Marvello nodded down at it, finishing off his flask as it passed by him and stepped into the darkness of the entrance. There was a final electrical crackling, a last wisp of smoke.
Marvello carefully slipped the flask back into its pocket, threw a series of switches, then hopped gracefully off the platform just a moment before it began to pull itself smoothly back into a slot which had opened at the bottom of the tent.
The showman stood on the hot, dry, dusty ground, his hands in his pockets, and watched, interested as always, while the entire Midway slowly started to fold in on itself. Marvello never failed to enjoy this moment. Sometimes he felt it was, in a way, the best part of the whole show.
First the poles shortened, smoothly telescoping, then the wires and ropes rolled back in perfect synchronization onto hidden spools as the fabric of the main and smaller tents sucked inward, beginning with large tucks, then working down to smaller and smaller ones, all of them tidy, all of them precise, and soon the whole thing had reduced itself to a neat rectangular block which confined and sculpted itself still further, until, when it had neatly resolved itself unmistakably into the shape of a huge truck, highly polished panels rose from all around its base to form the truck’s sides and top and wheel guards, and shiny bits of chrome and glass rotated into view to make up its grille and headlights and trim.
There on the side of the truck, in proud, tall letters of glistening gold, a bold sign read:
* MARVELLO’S * MIRACULOUS * MEATPIES *
Marvello regarded the truck with satisfaction for a long moment before he walked to its side, opened its door, and made himself comfortable in the driver’s seat. He turned the waiting ignition key, and when the engine instantly began a strong, steady purring, he reached forward to the glove compartment, extracted the full bottle of whiskey waiting there, pulled its cork, and took two long, slow, deeply satisfactory swallows.
He rolled down the window, looked out in a friendly fashion at the empty space which had been the Midway just a little while before, and gave it a friendly wave. He drove smoothly across the soft bumpiness of the field until he reached the straight, flat Kansas highway, and there he turned northward, following the beams of his headlights onto his
next gig.
OFTEN DESCRIBED BY critics and fellow writers as the greatest stylist of the contemporary horror genre, (John) Ramsey Campbell (1946– ) was born in Liverpool and set many of his novels and stories there and in the fictional city of Brichester in the same region. Heavily influenced by the work of H. P. Lovecraft, he published three short-story collections in a similar style before producing his first novel, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976; revised edition 1985). The following year, 1977, he wrote the novelizations of three films as Carl Dreadstone (a house name under which three additional novels were written by others), successfully bringing a pulpy style that evoked the classic films (The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula’s Daughter, and The Wolfman). Among the best of his later novels are The Face That Must Die (1979), Incarnate (1983), Ancient Images (1989), Midnight Sun (1991), and The Grin of the Dark (2008). Among the many awards Campbell has received are five World Fantasy nominations (three winners), sixteen British Fantasy Society nominations (ten winners), and two Bram Stoker Award nominations (both winners). He has been named the lifetime president of the British Fantasy Society.
While much of his work is explicitly violent, Campbell’s use of metaphor, symbolism, and imagery allows a poetic tone to suffuse his prose, suggesting horrors that remain in the memory long after the initial shock of a starkly brutal occurrence has passed.
“It Helps If You Sing” was first published in Book of the Dead, edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector (New York: Bantam, 1989).
THEY COULD BE on their summer holidays. If they were better able to afford one than he was, Bright wished them luck. Now that it was daylight, he could see into all the lowest rooms of the high rise opposite, but there was no sign of life on the first two floors. Perhaps all the tenants were singing the hymns he could hear somewhere in the suburb. He took his time about making himself presentable, and then he went downstairs.
The lifts were out of order. Presumably it was a repairman who peered at him through the smeary window of one scrawled metal door on the landing below his. The blurred face startled him so much that he was glad to see people on the third floor. Weren’t they from the building opposite, from one of the apartments that had stayed unlit last night? The woman they had come to visit was losing a smiling contest with them. She stepped back grudgingly, and Bright heard the bolt and chain slide home as he reached the stairs.
The public library was on the ground floor. First he strolled to the job center among the locked and armored shops. There was nothing for a printer on the cards, and cards that offered training in a new career were meant for people thirty years younger. They needed the work more than he did, even if they had no families to provide for. He ambled back to the library, whistling a wartime song.
The young job-hunters had finished with the newspapers. Bright started with the tabloids, saving the serious papers for the afternoon, though even those suggested that the world over the horizon was seething with disease and crime and promiscuity and wars. Good news wasn’t news, he told himself, but the last girl he’d ever courted before he’d grown too set in his ways was out there somewhere, and the world must be better for her. Still, it was no wonder that most readers came to the library for fiction rather than for the news. He supposed the smiling couple who were filling cartons with books would take them to the housebound, although some of the titles he glimpsed seemed unsuitable for the easily offended. He watched the couple stalk away with the cartons, until the smoke of a distant bonfire obscured them.
The library closed at nine. Usually Bright would have been home for hours and listening to his radio cassette player, to Elgar or Vera Lynn or the dance bands his father used to play on the wind-up record player, but something about the day had made him reluctant to be alone. He read about evolution until the librarian began to harrumph loudly and smite books on the shelves.
Perhaps Bright should have gone up sooner. When he hurried round the outside of the building to the lobby, he had never seen the suburb so lifeless. Identical gray terraces multiplied to the horizon under a charred sky; a pair of trampled books lay amid the breathless litter on the anonymous concrete walks. He thought he heard a cry, but it might have been the start of the hymn that immediately was all he could hear, wherever it was.
The lifts still weren’t working; both sets of doors that gave onto the scribbled lobby were open, displaying thick cables encrusted with darkness. By the time he reached the second floor he was slowing, grasping any banisters that hadn’t been prised out of the concrete. The few lights that were working had been spray-painted until they resembled dying coals. Gangs of shadows flattened themselves against the walls, waiting to mug him. As he climbed, a muffled sound of hymns made him feel even more isolated. They must be on television, he could hear them in so many apartments.
One pair of lift doors on the fifth floor had jammed open. Unless Bright’s eyes were the worse for his climb, the cable was shaking. He labored upstairs to his landing, where the corresponding doors were open too. Once his head stopped swimming, he ventured to the edge of the unlit shaft. There was no movement, and nothing on the cable except the underside of the lift on the top floor. He turned toward his apartment. Two men were waiting for him.
Apparently they’d rung his bell. They were staring at his door and rubbing their hands stiffly. They wore black T-shirts and voluminous black overalls, and sandals on their otherwise bare feet. “What can I do for you?” Bright called.
They turned together, holding out their hands as if to show him how gray their palms looked under the stained lamp. Their narrow bland faces were already smiling. “Ask rather what we can do for you,” one said.
Bright couldn’t tell which of them had spoken, for neither smile gave an inch. They might be two men or even two women, despite their close-cropped hair. “You could let me at my front door,” Bright said.
They gazed at him as if nothing he might say would stop them smiling, their eyes wide as old pennies stuck under the lids. When he pulled out his key and marched forward, they stepped aside, but only just. As he slipped the key into the lock, he sensed them close behind him, though he couldn’t hear them. He pushed the door open, no wider than he needed to let himself in. They followed him.
“Whoa, whoa.” He swung round in the stubby vestibule and made a grab at the door, too late. His visitors came plodding in, bumping the door against the wall. Their expressions seemed more generalized than ever. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?” Bright cried.
That brought their smiles momentarily alive, as though it were a line they’d heard before. “We haven’t anything to do with him,” their high flat voices said, one louder than the other.
“And we hope you won’t have,” one added while his companion mouthed. They seemed no surer who should talk than who should close the door behind them. The one by the hinges elbowed it shut, almost trapping the other before he was in, until the other blundered through and squashed his companion behind the door. They might be fun, Bright supposed, and he could do with some of that. They seemed harmless enough, so long as they didn’t stumble against anything breakable. “I can’t give you much time,” he warned them.
They tried to lumber into the main room together. One barged through the doorway and the other stumped after him, and they stared about the room. Presumably the blankness of their eyes meant they found it wanting, the sofa piled with Bright’s clothes awaiting ironing, the snaps he’d taken on his walks in France and Germany and Greece, the portrait of herself his last girlfriend had given him, the framed copy of the article he’d printed for the newspaper shortly before he’d been made redundant, about how life should be a hundred years from now, advances in technology giving people more control over their own lives. He resented the disapproval, but he was more disconcerted by how his visitors looked in the light of his apartment: gray from heads to toes, as if they needed dusting. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Where are you from?”
“We don’t matter.”
“Atter,�
� the other agreed, and they said almost in unison: “We’re just vessels of the Word.”
“Better give it to me, then,” Bright said, staying on his feet so as to deter them from sitting: God only knew how long it would take them to stand up. “I’ve a lot to do before I can lie down.”
They turned to him as if they had to move their whole bodies to look. Whichever responded, the voice through the fixed smile sounded more pinched than ever. “What do you call your life?”
They had no reason to feel superior to him. The gray ingrained in their flesh suggested disuse rather than hard work, and disused was how they smelled in the small room. “I’ve had a fair life, and it’s only right I should make way for someone who can work the new machines. I’ve had enough of a life to help me cope with the dole.”
His visitors stared as if they meant to dull him into accepting whatever they were offering. The sight of their faces stretched tight by their smiles was so disagreeably fascinating that he jumped, having lost his sense of time passing, when one spoke. “Your life is empty until you let him in.”
“Isn’t two of you enough? Who’s that, now?”
The figure on his left reached in a pocket, and the overalls pulled flat at the crotch. The jerky hand produced a videocassette that bore a picture of a priest. “I can’t play that,” Bright said.
His visitors pivoted sluggishly to survey the room. Their smiles turned away from him, turned back unchanged. They must have seen that his radio could play cassettes, for now the righthand visitor was holding one. “Listen before it’s too late,” they urged in unison.
