by Brian Hodge
I wanted two bacon double cheeseburgers with extra tomatoes and mayo. Kaiser roll or onion, either was okay. Plus fries and a pickle and a two-liter bottle of Coke. Man, I loved to drink Coke. Then I wanted some Hostess pies for dessert, all three favorite flavors so I didn’t have to choose. One apple, one lemon, and one chocolate. It would be the greatest meal known to man. I totally deserved it.
They’d said they’d bring my meal at nine o’clock. I sat there and counted the hours, then the minutes, trying to think about something, anything, that wouldn’t make me sad or ascared. Finally, I heard them coming toward my cell. It was a whole bunch of guards, talking and laughing. I smiled at them as Scott opened the door and put the tray down in front of me. I couldn’t believe it. My last meal.
I looked down at what they’d brought me. It had to be a joke: a wilty salad and two slices of Wonder Bread. Even for a salad, this one was awful. It didn’t even have any chicken on it. Someone was going to jump out and yell, “Surprise!” with my real meal. Weren’t they?
They couldn’t do this to me! Everyone knows they have to give you whatever you want for your last meal. They have to! I looked up at the guard, feeling like I wanted to cry. This was so fucking unfair.
“Problem?” Scott said, nudging the guy next to him and smirking. I looked from him to my salad and back. “I can think of a few little girls who’ll never eat salad again, thanks to you. Be lucky I don’t cram that plate o’ greens down your fucking throat.” These blacks were so quick to do violence. It was disgusting. I thought about that, right up until they took me to a room that looked like it was for surgery. They asked me if I had anything I wanted to say.
“Let it be known that my last day on earth, my very last meal, even, was ruined by meanness. All I wanted was a couple of cheeseburgers, and they wouldn’t let me have them. The one thing I asked for, they kept from me for nothing but plain ol’ meanness. Story of my fucking life.” I hoped that asshole Scott would find out what I’d said about him. Dick. Through the window I could see Mama dabbing her eyes with a hankie. I waved goodbye to her. I wished I could have died doing something way more fun than this.
This sucked.
Epilogue
(Chandra)
Closure
Michael Goretti was pronounced dead at twelve thirty-five a.m. on the twenty-fourth Sunday of the year, which also happened to be Father’s Day. I vowed that this would be the last Father’s Day I’d think of The Villain. This day rightfully belonged to the memory of my real father. Father had been recruited to this country to be a car designer. They said they needed him to save their company, so we all moved to America. Father said the only reason he became an engineer was to help people live better lives. Father was murdered. Murdered by people who believed he was stealing their jobs, when he was trying to save them from bankruptcy. Idiocy.
Durga and I continued living with Grandmother. We bought a large condominium and went on with our lives. Unbeknownst to us, Father had set up trust funds that would become ours when we each turned twenty-one. We were not destitute; there was enough money for us to get a proper education. There were even book offers, though I couldn’t see sharing the private details of our lives with complete strangers, just for money.
I’m not sure Durga will ever fully forgive me for my part in Mother’s death. Nor am I sure I’ll ever forgive myself. We are in therapy still, individually and as a family. I can only hope we will continue to move away from the past, conquering obstacles as we go.
Thomas was arrested briefly for setting the fatal fire. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but I’d left his lighter at the scene. The police had to let him go, eventually. He had an alibi. He never forgave me, though. He seemed to think I planted the lighter on purpose, to frame him and save myself. Sad, really … and paranoid.
I had just come home from class when Grandmother pointed me toward a package on the dining table. I cringed when I saw the name in the left corner. The wife of—damn. Yet another person I was certain would never forgive me. Despite months and months of talk therapy, I felt almost as reviled as The Villain. I was tempted to throw the unopened package directly into the dumpster outside. It was heavy, but didn’t rattle when I shook it.
“What’s that?” Durga had entered the room with her school bag in tow. I lifted the package to show her the name. “Oh … what’d she send you?” I eventually decided it was better to open it and know than to throw it away and always wonder.
I unwrapped the brown paper to reveal a cheap, spiral notebook, the kind we used to take notes with in class. Flipping through it, I saw that it looked to be just about full, with neat handwriting.
They say if you get dropped on the head as a baby, you’ll never be right again. It used to be a joke, don’t know if it still is, but when somebody does something stupid or shocking somebody might say, “What? D’ja get dropped on the head when you were a baby?”
Stuck in the very front of the notebook was a piece of pink stationery paper with pale daisies. Written in a much sloppier hand was a short note:
My husband wrote this in the days before he died. I believe he wanted to explain to me, and to everyone, what he was about to do. I also believe that by shooting him, you prevented his becoming a murderer. My husband is in heaven now, thanks to you.
I wasn’t at all sure what to make of it. Her religion had helped her get over her husband’s death. Lucky her. I read all about The Villain in that notebook. I had to admit I found the author’s words enlightening, fascinating even. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to tell everyone the truth about what had happened to us. Most of the truth, anyway. It would put us back under the light of public scrutiny. But if we could save even one girl from suffering a terrible fate, it would be worth it, wouldn’t it?
Fin
RED DREAMS
By Dennis Etchison
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Red Dreams © 1984 by Dennis Etchison. First published by Scream/Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
The stories listed below first appeared in slightly different form under the following copyrights:
"TALKING IN THE DARK" © 1984 by Charles L. Grant. First published in the anthology Shadows 7, edited by Charles L. Grant.
"WET SEASON" © 1965 by Star Press, Inc. From Gamma Magazine.
"I CAN HEAR THE DARK" © 1978 by Dennis Etchison. First published in the anthology Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VI, edited by Gerald W. Page.
"THE GRAVEYARD BLUES" © 1973 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Copyright assigned to the author.
"ON THE PIKE" © 1977 by Dennis Etchison. From The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
"KEEPER OF THE LIGHT" © 1973 by Phenix Publishers, Ltd. From California Girl Magazine.
"BLACK SUN" © 1974 by Damon Knight. From the anthology Orbit 13, edited by Damon Knight.
"WHITE MOON RISING" © 1977 by Stuart David Schiff. First published in the anthology Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff.
"THE CHILL" © 1981 by Dennis Etchison. First published in Weirdbook Magazine.
"THE SMELL OF DEATH" © 1971 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Copyright assigned to the author.
"DROP CITY" © 1974 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Copyright assigned to the author.
"THE CHAIR" © 1983 by Dennis Etchison. First published in the anthology The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror, edited by Charles L. Grant.
The following story appeared for the first time in this collection: "NOT FROM AROUND HERE" © 1984 by Dennis Etchison.
To
NORMAN LOWE
1945-1980
We wanted more; we looked to find
An open door, an utter deed of love
Transforming day's evil darkness….
—Kenneth Patchen
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Karl Edward Wagner
TALKING IN THE DARK
WET SEASON
I CAN HEAR THE DARK
THE GRAVEYARD BLUES
ON THE PIKE
KEEPER OF THE LIGHT
BLACK SUN
WHITE MOON RISING
THE CHILL
THE SMELL OF DEATH
DROP CITY
THE CHAIR
NOT FROM AROUND HERE
Introduction by Karl Edward Wagner
Dennis Etchison describes himself as an "overworked, underslept, professional wrestling fan" with the "goal to teach John Studd a thing or two in the squared circle." He has also been described as a blend of James Dean and Dudley Moore with a dash of Woody Allen. Friends would add that Etchison probably passed up a career as a stand-up comedian when he turned to writing his own particular brand of horror fiction.
Etchison has been selling short fiction since 1960, but only in the last few years has he begun to receive deserved acclaim as the finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced. It is never an easy matter to make a name (or earn a living) solely through short fiction, and Etchison, never very prolific, hasn't helped things with his intensely introspective stories of urban paranoia and personal alienation. The average shock fan, in search of shambling multi-tentacled horrors, psychotic slashers, or scarlet-fanged vampires, will find Etchison at best incomprehensible. The reader of supermarket-pop horror, accustomed to stock characters, soap-opera situations, menacing and/or menaced children, and reassuring happy endings, will consider Etchison a public menace. Even among serious fans of the horror genre, the elusive, ultimately negativistic nature of Etchison's writing is too subtle for some readers and too downbeat for others.
It would be a pat conclusion to describe Etchison as "cult writer"—a writer who is not well known to the general readership, but who has gained a small and enthusiastic circle of fans. Unfortunately this has not been the case. Throughout most of his career Etchison has worked in total obscurity—a circumstance that for many years has led each new editor who has encountered an Etchison story lurking somewhere in the slush pile to proclaim Etchison as his or her New Discovery and to characterize him as The Young California Writer. Characteristically, Etchison has taken all this in his usual bitter good humor, and he has been known to don his authentic wrestling mask at conventions and to appear thus as The Unknown Writer.
But no longer The Unknown Writer. Etchison's 1981 story, "The Dark Country," won both the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award for best short fiction of that year. This was the title story of his first collection of short stories, The Dark Country, published by Scream/Press in 1982. It has taken more than twenty years, but at last followers of the fantasy/horror genre have discovered Dennis Etchison. They are not likely to forget him.
And it's high time.
A native Californian, Dennis Etchison was born in Stockton on March 30, 1943. He has lived most of his life in the Los Angeles area, and his present home is on a wooded ravine off North Beverly Glen Boulevard. Not surprisingly, Etchison has a keen interest in films—an interest which seems to be a trait common to writers of fantasy/horror fiction. For Etchison this has been more than just a hobby, as he has done a great deal of screenwriting, including screenplay adaptations of works by Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Colin Wilson, as well as his own fiction. He has also written the novelizations of several recent horror films: The Fog, Halloween II, Halloween Ill, and Videodrome (these last three under his pseudonym, Jack Martin).
Some of Etchison's other interests are less typical of a fantasy writer. For many years now he has not owned a car—making him the only pedestrian in Los Angeles who is not without a car due to obedience to current fads or to reliance upon chauffeured limos. When his last car broke down one time too many, Etchison simply left it stalled there on the freeway and walked off without a backward glance. This is an attitude toward freeways and things mechanical that shows through in Etchison's writings. These things are impersonal, incomprehensible, and not to be trusted.
When not engaged in the suicidal feat of walking down North Beverly Glen Boulevard (with its absence of sidewalks and abundance of blind downhill curves), Etchison likes to spend his days lounging about his house, chain-smoking and watching television—soaps, game shows, and wrestling matches. For watching films, he much prefers the religious experience of the movie theatre to the home comforts of the tube. A bachelor who loves to eat but cannot cook, Etchison is a connoisseur of junk food, fast fares, and all-nite marts. His is a love-hate relationship with, and a fascination and dependence upon, the drive-thru convenience trappings of modem urban life. I cannot imagine Etchison writing a horror story about a haunted gothic mansion, but I do know that he has discovered unsuspected horrors in game shows, in mass-advertised kitchen appliances, in all-nite convenience stores, in Interstate rest areas, in Laundromats, in television laugh-tracks, in hospitals, in class reunions, in fad cults, in amusement parks, in walking. Etchison preys upon all those little insecurities that are the gnawing basis of modern terrors—only a very short reach of the imagination from real fears. Sometimes a very, very short reach—one hopes, nonetheless, a reach.
Etchison is that rarest of genre writers: an original visionary. One cannot describe his work as "in the tradition of" or "a new interpretation of" or even "a bold new departure from." Etchison's nightmares and fears are intensely personal, and his genius is to make us realize that we share them. In a genre plagued with stultifying adjectives and florid fine-writing, Etchison's prose is as clean and precise as a surgeon's scalpel. Etchison does not belong to the pulp tradition of horror fiction, with slobbering monsters, haunted mansions, and eldritch gods. Nor does he belong to the modem school of mainstream horror, with its recycled formula plots involving trendy middleclass couples threatened by demonic possession and/or psychic powers. Etchison's nightmare visions are those of loneliness—of an individual adrift in a society beyond his control, beyond his comprehension, in which only sheep-like acceptance and robot-like non-awareness permit survival. Underlying it all is a sort of desperate, dark humor—condemned men joking as they are led to the gallows.
Etchison's characters always seem to be striving ineffectually to recall some imperfectly remembered moment, to reach some dimly realized goal. They are uneasy and afraid in commonplace situations because they are outsiders within our superficially safe society. One may point to such influences as Charles Beaumont or Harlan Ellison, similarities of theme with Ramsey Campbell or M. John Harrison, but perhaps the kinship is greater toward such writers as Franz Kafka and Albert Camus. At times Etchison seems very much a product of young California of the 1950s betrayed by the impersonal selfishness of the affluent California of today. In Dennis Etchison's writings, one sees Jim, James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause, now as a middle-class man who is profoundly discontent with the society he is growing old in, beset by nostalgic memories of a past that failed him, threatened by vision of an inescapable future.
Red Dreams is Etchison's second collection, compiled from over two decades of short fiction work. A number of his earlier stories are collected here, as well as several of his most recent works. Etchison maintains that his early stories are his least favorite, despite a certain fondness for them "because they represent my state of mind at that age." Of "Not From Around Here," one of his most recent works, appearing in this book for the first time, Etchison states, "This is my favorite piece of short fiction to date, and certainly the most personally meaningful—a kind of summing up of themes and concerns which have obsessed me for years." Red Dreams is a good cross-section of Etchison's writing career, and no doubt each reader will form his own opinions as to which stories stand out and for what reasons. These opinions will be personal ones, and validly so—for these are personal visions.
As for myself, I look to the future Etchison collection when he will consider his current works of fiction only of nostalgic interest, and point toward his then-current stories as best expressing his concepts and abilities. A perfectionist is
never satisfied with what he has created, and Dennis Etchison is a perfectionist.
But consider: if Red Dreams is an example of what Etchison has accomplished in his first twenty years of writing, what does he intend to do to us during the next two decades…?
—Karl Edward Wagner
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1984
TALKING IN THE DARK
In the damp bedroom Victor Ripon sat hunched over his desk, making last-minute corrections on the ninth or tenth draft, he couldn't remember which, of a letter to the one person in the world who might be able to help. Outside, puppies with the voices of children struggled against their leashes for a chance to be let in from the cold. He ignored them and bore down. Their efforts at sympathy were wasted on him; he had nothing more to give. After thirty-three years he had finally stepped out of the melodrama.
He clicked the pen against his teeth. Since the letter was to a man he had never met, he had to be certain that his words would not seem naive or foolish.
Dear Sir, he reread, squinting down at the latest version's cramped, meticulously cursive backhand. He lifted the three-hole notebook paper by the edges so as not to risk smearing the ballpoint ink.
Dear Sir…
First let me say that I sincerely hope this letter reaches you. I do not have your home address so I have taken the liberty of writing in care of your publisher. If they forward it to you please let me know. I am not in the habit of writing to authors. This is the first time. So please bear with me if my letter is not perfect in spelling, etc. I have been reading your Works for approximately 6 yrs., in other words since shortly after I was married but more about that later. Mr. Christian, Rex if I may call you that and I feel I can, you are my favorite author and I your greatest fan. Some people say you are too morbid and depressing but I disagree. You do not write for children or women with weak hearts (I am guessing) but in your books people always get what they deserve. No other author I have read teaches this so well. I can see why you are one of the most popular authors in the world. I have all 6 of your books, I hope there are only 6, I wouldn't like to think I missed any! (If so could you send me a list of the titles and where I might obtain them? A S.A.S.E. is enclosed for your convenience. Thank you.) My favorite is THE SILVERING, I found that to be a very excellent plot, to tell the truth it scared the shit out of me if you know what I mean and I think you do, right? (Wink wink.) MOON OVER THE NEST is right up there, too. My wife introduced me to your novels, my ex-wife I should say and I guess I should thank her for that much. She left me 2½ years ago, took the kids to San Diego first and then to Salt Lake City I found out later. I don't know why, she didn't say. I have tried to track her down but no luck. Twice with my late parents' help I found out where she was staying but too late. So that is the way she wants it, I guess. I miss the kids though, my little boy especially. In your next book, THE EDGE, I noticed you made one small mistake, I hope you don't mind my pointing it out. In that one you have Moreham killing his old girlfriend by electrocution (before he does other things to her!) while she is setting up their word processor link. Excuse me but this is wrong. I know this because I was employed in the Computer Field after dropping out of Pre-Med to support my family. The current utilized by a Mark IIIA terminal is not enough to produce a lethal shock, even if the interface circuits were wired in sequence as you describe (which is impossible anyway, sorry, just thought you might like to know). Also the .066 nanosecond figure should be corrected…
