Mister October - Volume Two

by Edited by Christopher Golden

  When you’re thinking about sex, the only person you have to please is yourself.

  At least once a day, think about the greatest performance you ever heard.

  Every now and then, remember Marilyn Monroe.

  Put your garbage in the bin.

  When spring comes, notice it.

  Taste what you eat, dummy.

  God pities demons, but He does not love them.

  No matter how poor you are, put a little art up on your walls.

  Let other people talk first. Your turn will come.

  Wealth is measured in books and records.

  All leases run out, sorry.

  Every human being is beautiful, especially the ugly ones.

  Resolution and restitution exist only in fantasy.

  Learn to live broken. It’s the only way.

  Dirty dishes are just as sacred as clean ones.

  In the midst of death, we are in life.

  If some miserable bastard tries to cheat you, you might as well let the sorry piece of shit get away with it.

  As soon as possible, move away from home.

  Don’t buy shoes that hurt your feet.

  We are all walking through fire, so keep walking.

  Never tell other people how to raise their children.

  The truth not only hurts, it’s unbearable. You have to live with it anyway.

  Don’t reject what you don’t understand.

  Simplicity works.

  Only idiots boast, and only fools believe in “bragging rights.”

  You are not better than anyone else.

  Cherish the dents in your armor.

  Always look for the source.

  Rhythm is repetition, repetition, repetition.

  Snobbery is a disease of the imagination.

  Happiness is primarily for children.

  When it’s time to go, that’s what time it is.

  Little Red, his Hobbies and Amusements

  Apart from music, books, and television, he has no hobbies or amusements.

  Epistle of C---- M---- to R---- B----, Concerning Little Red

  Dear R----,

  Have you heard of the man, if he is a man, called Little Red? Has the word reached you? Okay, I know how that sounds, but don’t start getting worried about me, because I haven’t flipped out or lost my mind or anything, and I’m not trying to convert you to anything. I just want to describe something to you, that’s all. You can make up your own mind about it afterward. Whatever you think will be okay with me. I guess I’m still trying to make up my own mind—probably that’s one reason why I’m writing you this letter.

  I told you that before I left Chicago the last time, I took some lessons from C---- F----, right? What a great player that cat is. Well, you know. The year we got out of high school, we must have listened to Live in Las Vegas at least a thousand times. Man, he really opened our eyes, didn’t he? And not just about the trombone, as amazing as that was, but about music in general, remember? So he was playing in town, and I went every night and stayed for every set, and before long he noticed I was there all the time, and on the third night I bought him a drink, and we got talking, and he found out I played trombone, and when and where and all that, and he asked me if I would sit in during the second set the next night. So I brought my horn and I sat in, and he was amazing. I guess I did okay, because he said, “That was nice, kid.” Which made me feel very very good, as you can imagine. I asked could he give me some lessons while he was in town. Know what he told me? “I can probably show you some things, sure.”

  We met four times in his hotel room, besides spending an hour or two together after the gig, most nights. Mainly, he worked on my breathing and lip exercises, but apart from that the real education was just listening to him talk, man. Crazy shit that happened on the road with Kenton and Woody Herman, stories about the guys who could really cut it and the guys who couldn’t but got over anyhow, all kinds of great stories. And one day he says to me, “When you get to New York, kid, you should look up this guy Little Red, and tell him I said you were okay.”

  “What is he,” I asked, “a trombone player?”

  Nah, he said, just a guy he thought I should know. Maybe he could do me some good. “Little Red, he’s hard to describe if you haven’t met him,” he said. “Being with the guy is sort of like doing the tango.” Then he laughed.

  “The tango?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You might wind up with your head up your ass, but you know you had a hell of a time anyway.”

  So when I got to New York I asked around about this Little Red, and plenty of people knew him, it turned out, musicians especially, but nobody could tell me exactly what the guy did, or what made him so special. It was like—if you know, then there’s no point in talking about it, and if you don’t, you can’t talk about it at all, you can’t even begin. Because I met a couple of guys like that, when Little Red’s name came up they just shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads. One guy even walked out of the room we were in!

  Eventually I decided I had to see for myself, and I called him up. He acted sort of cagy. How did I hear about him, who did I know? “C---- F---- said to tell you I was okay,” I said. All right, he said, come on over later, around 10, when he’d be free.

  About 10:30, I got to his building—55th off 8th, an easy walk from my room on 44th and 9th. I buzz his apartment, he buzzes me in. And here he is, opening the door to his apartment, this skinny guy with a red beard and long red hair tied back in a ponytail. His face looks sad, and he looks pretty tired, but he gives me a beer right away and sits me down in his incredibly messy room, stuff piled up in front of a wall of about a million records, and asks me what I’d like to hear. I dunno, I say, I’m a trombone player, is it possible he has some good stuff I maybe don’t know about? And we’re off! The guy has hundreds of great things I’d never heard before, some I never heard of at all, and before I know it five or six hours have gone by and I have to get back to my room before I pass out in his chair. He says he’ll make me a tape of the best stuff we heard, and I go home. In all that time, I realized, Little Red said maybe a dozen words altogether. I felt like something tremendously important had happened to me, but I couldn’t have told you what it was.

  The third time I went back to Little Red’s, I started complaining about feeling stuck in my playing, and he put on an old Vic Dickenson record that made my head spin around on my shoulders. It was exactly what I needed, and he knew it! He understood.

  After that, I started spending more and more time at his place. Winter had ended, but spring hadn’t come yet. When I walked up 9th Avenue, the air was bright and cold. Little Red seemed not to notice how frigid his apartment was, and after a while, I forgot all about it. The sunlight burned around the edges of the shades in his kitchen and his living room, and as the time went by it faded away and turned to utter darkness, and sometimes I thought of all the stars filling the sky over 55th Street, even though we wouldn’t be able to see them if we went outside.

  Usually, we were alone. He talked to me—he spoke. There were times when other people came in, said a few things, then left us alone again.

  Often, he let his words drift away into silence, brought some fresh bread in from his kitchen, and shared it with me. That bread had a wonderful, wonderful taste. I’ve never managed to find that taste again.

  A couple of times he poured out wine for me instead of beer, and that wine seemed extraordinary. It tasted like sunshine, like sunshine on rich farmland.

  Once, he asked me if I knew anything about a woman named something like Simone Vey. When I said I’d never heard of her, he said that was all right, he was just asking. Later he wrote out her name for me, and it was spelled W-E-I-L, not V-E-Y. Who is this woman? What did she do? I can’t find out anything about her.

  After a couple of weeks, I got out of the habit of going home when it was time to sleep, and I just stretched out on the floor and slept until I woke up again. Little Red almost alway
s went to sleep in his chair, and when I woke up I would see him, tilted back, his eyes closed, looking like the most peaceful man in the world.

  He talked to me, but it wasn’t as though he was teaching me anything, exactly. We talked back and forth, off and on, during the days and nights, in the way friends do, and to me everything seemed comfortable, familiar, as it should be.

  One morning he told me that I had to go, it was time. “You’re kidding,” I said, “This is perfect. I don’t really have to leave, do I?”

  “You must go,” he said. I wanted to fall to the floor and beg, I wanted to clutch the cuffs of his trousers and hang on until he changed his mind.

  He shoved me out into the hallway and locked the door behind me. I had no choice but to leave. I stumbled down the hall and wandered into the streets, remembering a night when I’d seen a mouse creep out of his kitchen, bless him by name, and receive his blessing in return. When I had staggered three or four blocks south on 8th Avenue, I realized that I could never again go back.

  It was a mistake that I had been there in the first place—he had taken me in by mistake, and my place was not in that crowded apartment. My place might be anywhere, a jail cell, a suburban bedroom with tacky paintings on the wall, a bench in a subway station, anywhere but in that apartment.

  I often try to remember the things he said to me. My heart thickens, my throat constricts, a few words come back, but how can I know if they are the right words? He can never tell me if they are.

  I think: some kind of love did pass between us. But how could Little Red have loved me? He could not, it is impossible. And yet, R----, a fearful, awkward bit of being, a particle hidden deep within myself, has no choice but to think that maybe, just maybe, in spite of everything, he does after all love me.

  So tell me, old friend, have you ever heard of Little Red?

  Yours,

  C----

  HOLOGRAM SKULL COVER

  By Jeff Strand

  “Whoa! Look at that!” said Jimmy, grabbing a copy of Rick Hautala's Night Stone off the shelf. He tilted the book back and forth. “It changes from a face to a skull! That's freaky!”

  He handed the book to his friend Gary. The cover had a little girl holding a doll. It was a regular doll, with a pink dress and pink bows in its hair, and it didn't have cracked porcelain skin or a missing eye or a sinister grin or anything that would make it creepy, but all dolls were creepy.

  “That's cool as hell,” said Gary.

  Jimmy took the book back and ran his index finger over the hologram, half expecting to be able to touch teeth and hollow sockets. “How did they do that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Hey!” shouted the bookstore owner from behind the register. “This ain't a library!”

  “I didn't even open it!” Jimmy insisted, feeling a sense of indignation even though he and Gary spent a couple of hours here every Sunday reading comic books for free.

  “I've got a business to run. Buy it or scram.”

  Jimmy tilted the book again, switching back and forth, skull to face, skull to face, skull to face. There was no question that this would be the most awesome book ever written. The old house in Maine was a haven for evil... it said above the title. He'd never been to Maine, but from the pictures he'd seen it did seem like a place where old houses would be havens for evil.

  He dug through his pockets, coming up with three dollars and twenty-seven cents. It cost $3.95 plus tax. “Do you have a buck?” he asked Gary.

  “Why?”

  “Because I need this book.”

  “Then we can't get a Tangy Taffy!”

  “So what? We can live without candy this once.”

  Gary looked at him as if he'd uttered the most horrific blasphemy imaginable. He pouted for a moment, but then grudgingly handed Jimmy a dollar. “You know the book's a quarter mine, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that's fine.”

  Jimmy wanted to ride home and start reading immediately, but he also didn't want to be a crappy friend, so he stuck to the plan of riding their bikes around town. But as soon as it started to get dark, he raced home and hurried inside.

  “Whatcha got?” his sister Lizzy asked.

  Jimmy took the book out of the bag and held it up. “Check out this cover.”

  “Oh, wow, it's a cat.”

  “It's not a cat!”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Jimmy looked at the cover. “It's a face that changes into a skull.”

  “No, it's a face that changes into a cat. That's pretty neat.”

  Jimmy held the book up to the light and tilted it back and forth. “It's a skull, dummy.”

  Oh, sure, Lizzy got mad when he played jokes on her, but it was perfectly fine for her to play a joke on him and try to make him think he was crazy.

  “Whatever,” Lizzy said.

  Jimmy ignored his stupid sister and went upstairs to his bedroom. He took off his shoes, plopped down on his bed, and began to read. Normally he didn't like books that took place in the olden days, but this one captured his attention immediately, and by page twenty-five it had switched to June 1986, just a few months ago.

  When Mom called him for dinner an hour later, he was already a hundred pages into it. He'd never read anything so fast. If the books he had to read in school were this cool, he'd be getting A's on every test!

  He took the book with him, hoping he could sneak in a page or two during the meal. When Mom asked what he was reading, he held up the book. She took it from him. “Ooh, I'm not sure I want you reading scary stuff.”

  “I won't have nightmares.”

  “That's a weird last name. How do you pronounce it?”

  “I don't know.”

  Mom turned the cover side-to-side. “Why does the face change into a car?”

  “It's not a car. It's a skull.”

  “Looks like a car to me.”

  Was she joking? The thing on the cover didn't look anything like a car. “Your eyes must be messed up,” he said.

  “Hey!” said Dad. “What did I say about being respectful?”

  “I was kidding!”

  “Don't kid at the dinner table.”

  “What does it look like you to?” Mom asked, handing Dad the book.

  Dad adjusted his glasses. “A face.”

  “No, when you move it.”

  “Oh. A car.”

  “Yeah, okay, ha-ha,” said Jimmy, reaching for his book. He hadn't pulled any pranks this week, so he wasn't sure why his family had chosen tonight to get back at him.

  “You don't need it during dinner,” said Dad, setting the book on the floor. “Lizzy!” he called out. “Your mother said it was time to eat!”

  “In a minute!”

  “No, not in a minute! Now, young lady!”

  Mom rolled her eyes as they listened to Lizzy stomp her way down the stairs. But after the fourth stomp, there was a yowl; she'd stepped on Felix. Lizzy cried out, and everybody got to their feet at once as they heard Lizzy tumble down the stairs.

  The cat shot past them as Jimmy and his parents hurried into the living room. Lizzy lay at the foot of the stairs, her head twisted at a ghastly angle and a trickle of blood running down the side of her mouth. Her eyes were as sightless as those of a doll.

  Jimmy stood there, stunned, as Mom and Dad wailed and picked up his sister. He knew from reading it somewhere that you weren't supposed to move somebody who'd injured their neck, but his parents weren't thinking straight. They rushed out the front door, hurriedly putting Lizzy in the back seat of the car. She wasn't moving at all.

  “Get in!” Mom screamed at him.

  Jimmy started to move toward the vehicle, then froze as he realized that a horrific fate lay in store for them. “No! You'll get killed by a car!”

  “Goddamn it, Jimmy, get in!”

  Jimmy wanted to just run back to his room and throw up. He couldn't let them leave in a car! Not after what they'd....

  No. That was insane. Lizzy tripped on their
cat because she was annoyed and wasn't paying attention. Nothing more. He couldn't let a book mess with his mind that way, and he didn't know for sure that his sister was dead, so every second could count.

  He got in the back seat with her and Dad sped out of the driveway and down the street. As he turned the corner, they narrowly missed a huge truck, but didn't narrowly miss the other car that was headed toward them.

  The windshield exploded.

  Jimmy struck the back of the seat and, for a moment, everything went black.

  Then somebody—maybe it was the guy who had the pool parties—was pulling him out of the car. Mom and Dad had been too worried about Lizzy to think to fasten their seat belts. As with Lizzy, Jimmy didn't know they were dead, but...yes, actually he did know that.

  * * *

  A couple of days later, Aunt Helen took him through the house to get some of his stuff. The copy of Night Stone was on the floor where they'd left it.

  Jimmy still wanted to know how the story turned out, but he didn't want to touch the evil book. He didn't even want to look at it, and yet he couldn't stop his eyes from being drawn toward it.

  Aunt Helen noticed him looking at it and picked up the book. “Is this yours?” she asked.

  Jimmy quickly caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the metallic-looking surface of the hologram. He shook his head. “No.”

  “Okay.” She tilted the book. “Oh, look, the face turns into a teddy bear!”

  LUX ET VERITAS

  By Thomas F. Monteleone

  “You want me to do what?” said Carlo Duarte.

  He was sitting in a booth in a bar ’n’ grill called The Coach’s Place in White River Junction, Vermont. Two televisions displayed different college basketball games. Across from him was a woman dressed in black, and everything about her could be described by the word indeterminate.