Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters

by Barker, Clive; Golden, Christopher; Lansdale, Joe R. ; McCammon, Robert; Mieville, China; Priest, Cherie; Sarrantonio, Al; Schow, David; Langan, John; Tremblay, Paul

  And Shelly would hop up and grab the phone and laugh without even asking who it was, and stand there grinning into the phone and saying, “I know, me too!” and “It’s beautiful” and “I can’t wait”, and as I ran out the door she’d wave at me and sort of bounce on her heels like it was her sixth birthday again, an inhuman gleam in her eye.

  I got more “mature” as the weeks went on, and by the time we were doing costumed rehearsals, the makeup girls didn’t even need to draw wrinkles.

  It wasn’t all smiles and hugs among the Elevator Nine, though smiling and hugging constituted a frighteningly large percentage of the time they spent together. They fought over the music for their first concert: the Judge wanted “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”; Jake said it sounded gay. They fought about the group name: it ended up being “Resoun-Ding,” though Grace’s “Nine-in-Hand” was my favorite. It might have passed the vote if anyone else could handle more than three bells.

  They fought over costumes: Catherine thought the “Ring it!” shirts sounded too much like a jewelry ad, “And besides, T-shirts are tacky.” Danny refused to wear a button-down, Eugene vetoed short sleeves. They ended up in v-neck sweaters that made them look like escapees from a Mr. Rogers concert. I figured at least Morgan would complain, but she pulled out some hair and smiled and hugged Jake, and I sat in the back of the church hall where they practiced and watched them all dinging on cue under Judge Warner’s direction.

  Danny had three of the little bells. Grace had her five, Jake had the one bell he rang two-handed. Almost everyone else handled two notes except Steve, who rang his one bell evenly in time—he didn’t even have one specific note; he had to be assigned whatever bell rang at the beginning of every measure, because he didn’t like random timing.

  When he practiced his part (he always came early to practice) the tones came out clear and steady, like a church bell. He never did as well when they were all there staring at the Judge and swinging their arms, with Steve standing awkwardly at one end, sounding the beat.

  As soon as the play was over I lost the excuse of going to rehearsals and I had to go back to the church hall and sit through handbelling again, and if it wasn’t for Steve and his one steady note I’d have been peeling pages out of the hymnal for tinder to torch myself with.

  One Thursday Grace invited everyone over (“We should carpool,” Catherine said, then “No, Jake, you can’t drive, go with Eugene”), and on the way to the car, Steve and I ended up alone.

  “Steve, why handbells?”

  “It’s what they need,” he said, then bit his lip like he’d said something he shouldn’t have, and I felt vindicated for guessing that the handbells were no good.

  “I already knew that part, don’t worry,” I lied, “Shelly sort of blabs, I just don’t get the bells.”

  “Me neither,” he said, and we smiled at each other in front of the car until Shelly and Dad showed up.

  Steve and Shelly insisted I sit in the front, and I could feel Steve getting in the car behind me, ready for a silent ride, and I felt his door close before he really shut it—a quick thud, then nothing.

  We were all surprised the day the movie offer came.

  “We want to do a documentary,” said the guy who showed up at the hall, “it’s such an amazing story, and now with the concert coming up—”

  “We have to go,” said Morgan, clutching the E to her chest, and behind her Grace said, “If you ask us again we’re going to consider it harassment and have our attorneys involved,” and when the door closed, somehow Dad and I were on the wrong side of it. For a second I was angry—I mean, I’d hated sitting through the rehearsals, but why were they treating us like we’d invited the producers?

  The guys asked, “Is it true about the lawyers?”

  “Yes,” Dad said, and I nodded. It wasn’t, but we were both angry at these guys for getting us thrown out of rehearsal.

  We got ice cream while we waited for Shelly, and halfway through Dad said, “I’m really getting sick of her practicing.”

  “I’m glad we got kicked out,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said.

  I went back to the courthouse, even though everything had been fixed for a long time and there wasn’t a chance of me finding anything. Steve was there, too, and the two of us stood side by side and watched people hopping in and out of the elevators.

  “What really happened to you?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. My eyes were closed.”

  “But the bells,” I said, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and shook his head, and he looked suddenly sixteen and not in his thirties.

  So I didn’t say anything else, because it wasn’t like there was anything I could do, and we stood next to each other a little while longer, listening to the sound of people’s shoes on the marble. I liked it; but by then I liked any sound that wasn’t a brass bell.

  Eventually he turned around and said without looking at me, “I can give you a ride,” and I said yes, because it was better than the bus, and because it felt like a date, even though that was sort of weird.

  He had a beat-up truck, and as I got into the passenger seat he yanked something out from under the windshield wipers.

  When he was inside he handed me the thin stack of paper, and as he pulled out I sorted through it.

  A note in lipstick—NEVER FORGET THE 9 WE LOVE YO, and whoever it was had run out of space. Nice one. A lottery ticket, already scratched off with a two-dollar win; I put it on the dash. A receipt with FUCK OFF scrawled on the back. The business card from those movie guys.

  It felt strange to handle these things; Shelly’s life for the last months had been the Nine’s, not ours, so Dad and I didn’t really know what was happening with her. I wondered what kind of notes she got; if people were nice to her, or if she had a stack of receipts in her room that read FUCK OFF on the back, and she wrapped the bells in them to keep them safe.

  We weren’t allowed into rehearsals after that.

  I joined the next play, because Dad had gotten lucid for a moment without the bells in his head and said he totally supported both his kids. It was Oliver Twist, and I got to be Nancy’s friend, so my job was mostly to sit around and look poor. Dad came to the first full run-through like he wanted to support us both equally, one daughter with a bit part in a play and one daughter who had survived an elevator crash and rang handbells ten hours a day.

  I told Shelly about the play two nights before her concert, at the dinner table. (Morgan or Catherine dropped her off after rehearsals these days; we weren’t even allowed to drive her around.)

  She smiled and said, “That’s so awesome!”

  She didn’t say, “Like my handbells,” and that’s when I really started to worry.

  That night I pretended to be asleep until the ringing started; then I crept down the stairs and peered into the dining room.

  Shelly was looking out at the street; with her hair pulled back into a ponytail I could see her rapturous profile, and as she struck each note she kept her arm in front of her, holding the bell like a torch, like the sound was a signal, like she was using the bell to catch rain.

  The sounds were irregular —melodic, not rhythmic like Steve, so it was a five-second pause and then suddenly two notes on top of each other, the most uneasy thing I’d ever heard —but I sat on the stairs and watched her for a long time, and after long enough I began to hear a weird reverb, like somehow the bells both rang together, mingled, and made the whole carillon, and whenever it happened Shelly closed her eyes, grinned even wider, until she looked like her ninth-grade Homecoming picture.

  I went back up the stairs and sat in bed, shivering, until I heard Shelly’s bedroom door close.

  All that night I couldn’t sleep, because I could hear her through the walls, and her breathing had taken on the weird, halting pattern of the bells—a small sound, a quick thud, then nothing.

  The Deep End

  Robert R. McCammon

  Summer was dying. The
late afternoon sky wept rain from low, hovering clouds, and Glenn Calder sat in his Chevy station wagon, staring at the swimming pool where his son had drowned two weeks ago.

  Neil was just sixteen years old, Glenn thought. His lips were tight and gray, and the last of his summer tan had faded from his gaunt, hollowed face. Just sixteen. His hands tightened around the steering wheel, the knuckles bleaching white. It’s not fair. My son is dead—and you’re still alive. Oh, I know you’re there. I’ve figured it all out. You think you’re so damned smart. You think you’ve got everybody fooled. But not me. Oh no—not me.

  He reached over the seat beside him and picked up his pack of Winstons, chose a cigarette and clamped the filter between his lips. Then he punched the cigarette lighter in and waited for it to heat up.

  His eyes, pale blue behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, remained fixed on the Olympic-sized public swimming pool beyond the high chain link fence. A sign on the admissions gate said in big, cheerful red letters: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON! SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER! Beyond the fence were bleachers and sundecks where people had lolled in the hot, sultry summer of north Alabama, and there was a bandstand where an occasional rock band had played at a pool party on a Saturday night. Steam rose from the glistening concrete around the pool and, in the silence between the patter of raindrops, with his windows rolled down and the moody smell of August’s last hours inside the car, he thought he could hear ghostly music from that bandstand, there under the red canopy where he himself had danced as a kid in the late fifties.

  He imagined he could hear the shouts, squeals and rowdy laughter of the generations of kids that had come to this pool, here in wooded Parnell Park, since it had been dug out and filled with water back in the mid-forties. He cocked his head to one side, listening, and he felt sure that one of these ghostly voices belonged to Neil, and Neil was speaking like a ripple of water down a drain, calling “Dad? Dad? It killed me, Dad! I didn’t drown! I was always a good swimmer, Dad! You know that, don’t you . . . ?”

  “Yes,” Glenn answered softly, and tears filled his eyes. “I know that.”

  The lighter popped out. Glenn got his cigarette going and returned the lighter to the dashboard. He stared at the swimming pool as a tear crept down his cheek. Neil’s voice ebbed and faded, joining the voices of the other ghosts that were forever young in Parnell Park.

  If he had a dollar for every time he’d walked through that admissions gate he’d be a mighty rich man today. At least he’d have a lot more money, he mused, than running the Pet Center at Brookhill Mall paid him. But he’d always liked animals, so that was okay, though when he’d been young enough to dream he’d had plans of working for a zoo in a big city like Birmingham, travelling the world and collecting exotic animals. His father had died when he was a sophomore at the University of Alabama, and Glenn had returned to Barrimore Crossing and gone to work because his mother had been hanging on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He’d always planned on going back to college but the spool of time just kept unwinding: he’d met Linda, and they’d fallen in love. And then they’d gotten married and Neil was born four years later, and . . .

  Well, that was just the story of life, wasn’t it?

  There were little flecks of rain on his glasses, caused when the drops ricocheted off the edge of the rolled-down window. Glenn took them off to wipe the lenses with a handkerchief. Without the glasses, everything was kind of fuzzy, but he could still see all right.

  His hands were trembling. He was afraid, but not terrified. Funny. He’d thought for sure he’d be scared shitless. Of course, it wasn’t time yet. Oh, no. Not yet. He put his glasses back on, drew deeply at his cigarette and let the smoke leak from his mouth. Then he touched the heavy-duty chain cutter that lay on the seat beside him.

  Today—the last day of summer—he had brought his own admission ticket to the pool.

  Underneath his trousers he was wearing his bathing suit—the red one, the one that Linda said he’d better not wear around the bull up in Howard Mackey’s pasture. Glenn smiled grimly. If he hadn’t had Linda these past two weeks it might’ve made him slip right off the deep end. She said they were strong, that they would go on and learn to live with Neil’s death, and Glenn had agreed—but that was before he’d started thinking. That was before he’d started reading and studying about the Parnell Park swimming pool.

  That was before he knew.

  After Neil had drowned, the town council had closed the pool and park. Neil had been its third victim of the summer; back in June a girl named Wanda Shackleford had died in the pool, and on the fourth of July it had been Tom Dunnigan. Neil had known Wanda Shackleford. And Glenn remembered that they’d talked about the incident at home one night.

  “Seventeen years old!” Glenn had said, reading from a copy of the Barrimore Crossing Courier. “What a waste!” He was sitting in his Barcalounger in the den, and Linda was on the sofa doing her needlepoint picture for Sue Ann Moore’s birthday. Neil was on the floor in a comfortable sprawl, putting together a plastic model of a space ship he’d bought at Brookhill Mall that afternoon. “Says here that she and a boy named Paul Buckley decided to climb the fence and go swimming around midnight.” He glanced over at Linda. “Is that Alex Buckley’s boy? The football player?”

  “I think so. Do you know, Neil?”

  “Yeah. Paul Buckley’s a center for Grissom High.” Neil glued a triangular weapons turret together and put it aside to dry, then turned to face his father. Like Glenn, the boy was thin and lanky and wore glasses. “Wanda Shackleford was his girlfriend. She would’ve been a senior next year. What else does it say?”

  “It’s got a few quotes from Paul Buckley and the policeman who pulled the girl’s body out. Paul says they’d had a six pack and then decided to go swimming. He says he never even knew she was gone until he started calling her and she didn’t answer. He thought she was playing a trick on him.” He offered his son the paper.

  “I can’t imagine wanting to swim in dark water,” Linda said. Her pleasant oval face was framed with pale blond hair, and her eyes were hazel, the same color as Neil’s. She concentrated on making a tricky stitch and then looked up. “That’s the first one.”

  “The first one? What do you mean?”

  Linda shrugged uneasily. “I don’t know. Just . . . well they say things happen in threes.” She returned to her work. “I think the City should fill in that swimming pool.”

  “Fill in the pool?” There was alarm in Neil’s voice. “Why?”

  “Because last June the Happer boy drowned in it, remember? It happened the first weekend school was out. Thank God we weren’t there to see it. And two summers before that, the McCarrin girl drowned in four feet of water. The lifeguard didn’t even see her go down before somebody stepped on her.” She shivered and looked at Glenn. “Remember?”

  Glenn drew on his cigarette, staring through the rain-streaked windshield at the pool. “Yes,” he said softly. “I remember.” But at the time, he’d told Linda that people—especially kids—drowned in pools, ponds and lakes every summer. People even drown in their own bathtubs! He’d said. The city shouldn’t close Parnell Park pool and deprive the people of Barrimore Crossing, Leeds, Cooks Springs and the other surrounding communities. Without Parnell Park, folks would have to drive either to Birmingham or go swimming in the muddy waters of nearby Logan Martin lake on a hot summer afternoon!

  Still, he’d remembered that a man from Leeds had drowned in the deep end the summer before Gil McCarrin’s daughter died. And hadn’t two or three other people drowned there as well?

  “You think you’re so damned smart,” Glenn whispered. “But I know. You killed my son, and by God you’re going to pay.”

  A sullen breeze played over the pool, and Glenn imagined he could hear the water giggle. Off in the distance he was sure he heard Neil’s voice, floating to him through time and space: “It killed me, Dad! I didn’t drown . . . I didn’t drown . . . I didn’t . . . I—”

  Glenn clamped a h
and to his forehead and squeezed. Sometimes that made the ghostly voice go away, and this time it worked. He was getting a whopper of a headache, and he opened the glove compartment and took a half-full bottle of Excedrin from it. He popped it open, put a tablet on his tongue and let it melt.

  Today was the last day of August, and tomorrow morning the city workmen would come and open the big circular metal-grated drain down in the twelve-foot depths of the deep end. An electric pump would flood the water through pipes that had been laid down in 1945, when the pool was first dug out. The water would continue for more than two miles, until it emptied into a cove on Logan Martin lake. Glenn knew the route that water would take very well, because he’d studied the yellowed engineering diagrams in Barrimore Crossing’s City Hall. And then, the last week of May, when the heat had come creeping back and summer was about to blaze like a nova, the pipes would start pumping Logan Martin lake water back through another system of filtration tanks and sanitation filters and when it spilled into the Parnell Park swimming pool it would be fresh, clean and sparkling.

  But it would not be lifeless.

  Glenn chewed a second Excedrin, crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray. This was the day. Tomorrow would be too late. Because tomorrow, the thing that lurked in the public swimming pool would slither away down the drain and get back to the lake where it would wait in the mud for another summer season and the beckoning rhythm of the pump.

  Glenn’s palms were wet. He wiped them on his trousers. Tom Dunnigan had drowned in the deep end on the fourth of July, during the big annual celebration and barbecue. Glenn and Linda had been eating sauce-sloppy barbecues when they’d heard the commotion at the pool, and Linda had screamed, “Oh my God! Neil!”