by Paula Guran
“This is different.”
“How?”
“This isn’t like work. This book just flows, as if someone were telling me the story. I’m just writing it down.”
“All the same—“
“And I’m much more relaxed than I used to be. For the first time since I was twelve, I’m not having any trouble with insomnia. I’m asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and sleeping hard for about ten hours a night.”
“And talking and crying out in your sleep,” Jo added.
“Really?” Grace frowned.
“And when I come into your room, you’re impossible to wake.”
“I was probably just having a nightmare.”
“It happened last time I was here, too.”
“Well, I’m . . . ” The howling came.
“You’re what?” Jo challenged.
“Shhh. That’s him.”
“What’s him?” Jo blinked at her.
It grew louder. “That howling.”
“What howling?”
It seemed to reverberate all around them, making Grace tremble.
“It grows louder every night.”
“What does?”
Grace stared at her. “Can’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Hear him calling?” She closed her eyes and felt the physical pull. It was both a summons and a promise.
“Grace? Grace.” Jo’s hands on her shoulders startled her into dropping her glass of juice. “I don’t hear anything. What do you hear?”
“That dog.” She didn’t like the way Jo was looking at her.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. You’re the one who’s half deaf. That’s it, I’m going to bed.”
“It’s barely ten o’clock.”
“I’m tired. I’ve been working all day. Goodnight, Jo.”
Upstairs in her room, she undressed, turned out the light, and started to climb into bed. She heard the hound’s cry again, at once sinister and beckoning. She went to the window and looked out at the moon-streaked landscape. The night was filled with magic and mystery, with the scent of ripening summer. One shadow separated itself from the others and came toward the house.
He stood beneath her window, and she saw him, full and strong in the moonlight, for the first time. The silvery light shone on the straight, dark length of his back. His chest was broad and deep, his legs long and gracefully swift. He raised his proud face to hers and met her gaze, deliberately and intently. Held frozen in her position at the window, Grace looked into those strange, intelligent eyes and knew why he never ate the food she put out for him, why he never left footprints in the woods, and why no one else had ever seen Louise Racinet’s dog. She felt his glowing amber gaze move over her face, her hair, her body, and she knew.
Only she would ever hear his voice in the woods. Only she would ever see him take shape in the shadows and glide through the night to call upon his chosen one. And in her heart, she had known it long before this moment.
Obediently, she turned to the bed and waited for him.
The book was finished a month later. Grace delivered it personally to an astonished editor, then returned quickly to Jo’s house in the woods. She didn’t like to be away at all, and especially not at night. The erotic, inspiring whirlpool of her nights was manna to her now.
The telephone call came only three days later. “Grace! My God! This is incredible!” her editor raved.
“Oh, good. Glad you like it.”
“Like it? I love it. I devoured it, I couldn’t put it down, I . . . I . . . Oh, wow, this is the most exciting thing I’ve read in ages! It’s erotic and lyrical and surprising and suspenseful . . . Grace, this is extraordinary work! The sky’s the limit for this book.”
“Oh, good. Look, I’m trying to work right now. Could you just send me the rest of the advance money, and we’ll talk more next week?”
There was a slight pause. “Sure. Of course. Look, are you okay? I mean, I think you should take some time off, Grace. You’ve earned it. Why don’t—“
“Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.” Grace hung up.
At twilight she heard him. His cry came from deep in the heart of the woods. He hadn’t come to her since her return from the city. And he didn’t come tonight, either.
“I want you to leave,” Jo told her.
“I can’t.” She hadn’t written a word in two months. Not since summer’s end. Not since finishing The Hound Lover.
“I don’t think this place is good for you anymore. Quite the opposite,” Jo said.
“He’ll come back. I know he’ll come back.”
“Who?” Jo stared at her. “Grace, were you having an affair?”
Grace drew in a sharp breath and tried to pull herself together. She hadn’t mentioned the howling in the woods—or anything remotely connected to it—since the night she had realized the nature of the Hound Lover. Jo would certainly force her to leave— and probably go back into treatment—if she mentioned it now. “I meant it,” Grace said. “It will come back.”
“The writing? Of course it will,” Jo said instantly. “It did once already, didn’t it? But it’s time for a change of scenery.”
“No. I like it here. Am I in your way?”
“You know that’s not the problem.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“Jesus, look at yourself. You’re smoking three packs a day. You’re drinking again. You never eat. You never see people or go out or do anything but stare at your laptop all day. Then you sit alone on the porch like a zombie at night, just staring off into space.” Jo shook her head. “You’re acting even stranger than before you wrote that book.”
“And I haven’t written a word—“
“Can’t you give yourself a break? You just finished writing a book after three years of thinking you’d never write again. You’ve done it, for God’s sake!”
“For God’s sake?” Grace tilted her head back and blew out a wreath of smoke. “No, I don’t think it was written for His sake at all.”
“What? No, never mind. Look, I don’t want to fight about this. But will you at least think about moving out of here?”
After Jo left the room, Grace murmured, “Where in hell would I go?”
The torment was unbearable. She could hear him, faintly, so faintly, from very far away, but she never saw him. Each night was an eternity of yearning unfulfilled. Each day was an endless, dismal hell. It was a tremendous effort to endure Jo’s visits. Grace knew she was thinner than ever, with dark circles under her eyes, a hacking cough from too many cigarettes, and a faintly unpleasant odor when she forgot to bathe.
Autumn ended with an early frost, and the cold, bleak landscape suited Grace’s mood. At Jo’s insistence, she started seeing a local psychiatrist. He prescribed something to help her sleep, but her prosaic dreams frustrated her even more than her insomnia and she quit taking the pills. She was afraid that if she told the psychiatrist the truth, he’d have her removed from the house, so her sessions with him were vague and pointless.
I will never write again. It’s over.
Grace sat staring at the words she had written.
The cursor blinked, its staccato rhythm urging her to write more, but she ignored it. She saw the truth before her. She had just written the last words she would ever write. Her life had been about writing. Without that, what was left?
She took a deep breath and looked out the window into the dark night. He answered her for the first time in days. Faint and far away, but unmistakably an answer.
Had Louise Racinet known what that thing out there was before she gave herself to it in the final embrace? Grace still wasn’t sure she knew. The dark, secret places of the forest were his domain, and had been for centuries. His story, his image, was both a lure and a warning, for the untamed, bestial power he had sought had eventually engulfed and enslaved him. The paintings were symbolic and disturbing. The book was
a dark fantasy. Both were products of tormented hearts. But neither Grace nor the artist were insane. The Hound Lover existed; not alive, not of this world, but unmistakably real. And he had used their gifts for his own ends.
Grace turned off the kitchen light and went to the door, staring sightlessly into the dark as the voice in the woods continued to beckon her forth.
He had found a willing vessel in her; talent without inspiration, imagination without direction, genius without hope. In the silence of dark nights and bleak days, he had offered her a bargain she could never have refused, even if she had fully understood its implications. He had paid in full, and so had she. And now that it was over, she was nothing but a drained, empty husk, ready to embrace for all eternity the sweet oblivion of the night.
She pushed open the back door. The night was bitterly cold. It didn’t matter. He would take her long before the cold killed her, just as he had taken Louise Racinet. And as with Louise, they would find her empty body and never know why she had gone with him.
How could they know? How could they possibly know?
Jo met the new tenant of the old Hamilton house the following summer. “That place on the other side of the woods, right?”
“That’s right,” the woman answered. She was young, Jo noticed, twenty-five at the most. “I’m renting for the whole summer. I came to get away from all the distractions in the city.”
“It’s great up here, isn’t it? I’ve got to come up more often.” Her visits had been infrequent since Grace’s death. The message left on the laptop had said it all: I’ll never write again. It’s over. Rationally, she knew Grace had rejected all help; but guilt was never rational. It had taken a long time to recover from the site of Grace’s body lying in the woods. Jo had berated herself for ever telling her about how Louise Racinet had died; clearly that story had planted the seed in Grace’s fertile imagination. Trying not to think about it anymore, Jo asked, “What have you been doing since you arrived?”
“Long walks. Trying to work.” The woman sighed a bit and added, “And reading. I’ve just started the new Grace Wedeck.”
Jo blanched. “Oh?” She hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to read her friend’s final book. Maybe she never would; the memories were too sad.
“It’s fabulous. Such a pity she died so young. Suicide, you know. Her second attempt, the newspapers said.”
“Yes. She was very unhappy. Unstable.” Jo omitted the jargon explanations of Grace’s local psychiatrist.
“I just wish I could tell her what an inspiration this book is.”
“You’re a writer, too?”
“No. Composer.” She shrugged self-consciously and added, “Or trying to be. I haven’t written anything really, you know, groundbreaking yet. That’s why I came here. To concentrate.”
“Well, I’m sure it’ll happen for you up here. A lot of creative people have found this area very inspiring, you know.”
“Yes. I can see why.” The woman nodded. Her eyes sparkled with hope as she smiled dreamily. “At night I hear, I don’t know— call it music—in the woods.”
He thought about all he had done for the children and thought about the war and all that had to be done afterwards, knew then that his love for the children, their needs, were the obsessions of his life, his reason to live . . .
In the Cold, Dark Time
Joe R. Lansdale
It was the time of the icing, and the snow, and razor-winds blew across the lands and before and behind them came the war and the war went across the lands worse than the ice, like a plague, and there were those who took in the plague and died by it, or were wounded deeply by it, and I was one of the wounded, and at first I wished I was one of the dead.
I lay in bed hour on hour in the poorly heated hospital and watched the night come, then the day, then the night, then the day, and no time of night or day seemed lost to me, for I could not sleep, but could only cough out wads of blood-tainted phlegm and saliva that rose from my injured lungs like blobby bubbly monsters to remind me of my rendering flesh. I lay there and prayed for death, for I knew all my life had been lost to me, and that my job in the war was no longer mine, and when the war was over, if it was ever over, I would never return to civilized life to continue the same necessary job I had pursued during wartime. The job with the children. The poor children. Millions of them. Parentless, homeless, forever being pushed onward by the ice and the war. It was a horror to see them. Little, frostbitten waifs without food or shelter or good coats and there was no food or shelter or good coats to give them. Nothing to offer them but the war and a cold, slow death.
There were more children than adults now, and the adults were about war and there were only a few like myself there to help them. One of the few that could be spared for the Army’s Children Corps. And now I could help no one, not even myself.
In the bed beside me in the crumbling, bomb-shook hospital was an old man with his arm blown off at the elbow and his face splotched with the familiar frostbite of a front-line man. He had turned toward me, staring, but not speaking. And in the night, I would turn, and there would be his eyes, lit up by the night-lamp or by the moonlight, and that glow of theirs would strike me and I would imagine they contained the sparks of incendiary bombs for melting ice, or the red-hot destruction of rockets and bullets. In the daylight the sunlight toured the perimeters of his eyes like a firefight, but the night was the worst, for then they were the brightest and the strangest.
I thought I should say something to him, but could never bring myself to utter a word because I was too lost in my misery and waiting for the change of day to night, night to day, and I was thinking of the children. Or I tell myself that now. My thoughts were mostly on me and how sad it was that a man like me had been born into a time of war and that none that was good in me and great about me could be given to the world.
The children crossed my mind, but I must admit I saw them less as my mission in life than as crosses I had borne on my back while climbing Christlike toward the front lines. Heavy crosses that had caused me to fall hard to the ground, driving the pain into my lungs, putting me here where I would die in inches far from home.
“Why do you fret for yourself?” the old man said one morning. I turned and looked at him and his eyes were as animal bright as ever and there was no expression on his crunched, little face. “I fret for the children.”
“Ah,” he said. “The children. Your job in the Corps.” I said nothing in reply and he said not another word until the middle of the night when I drifted into sleep momentarily, for all my sleep was momentary, and opened my eyes to the lamplight and the cold hospital air. I pulled a Kleenex from the box beside my bed and coughed blood into it.
“You are getting better,” he said.
“I’m dying,” I said.
“No. You are getting better. You hardly cough at all. Your sleep is longer. You used to cough all night.”
“You’re a doctor, I suppose?”
“No, but I am a soldier. Or was. Now I am a useless old man with no arm.”
“In the old days a man your age would have been retired or put behind a desk. Not out on the front lines.”
“I suppose you’re right. But this is not the old days. This is now, and I’m finished anyway because of the arm.”
“And I’m finished because of my wound.”
“The lungs heal faster than anything. You are only finished if you are too bitter to heal. To be old and bitter is all right. It greases the path to the other side. To be young and bitter is foolish.”
“How do you know so much about me?”
“I listen to the nurses and I listen to you and I observe.”
“Have you nothing else to do but meddle in my affairs?"
“No.”
“Leave me be.”
“I would if I could, but I’m an old man and will not live long anyway, wounded or not. I have the pains of old age and no family and nothing I would be able to do if I leave here. All I know is
the life of a soldier. But you will recover if you believe you will recover. It is up to you now.”
“So you are a doctor?”
“An old soldier has seen wounds and sickness, and he knows a man that can get well if he chooses to get well. A coward will die. Which are you?”
I didn’t answer and he didn’t repeat the question. I turned my back to him and went to sleep and later in the night I heard him calling.
“Young man.”
I lay there and listened but did not move.
“I think you can hear me and this may be the last I have to say on the matter. You are getting better. You sleep better. You cough less. The wound is healing. It may not matter what your attitude is now, you may heal anyway, but let me tell you this, if you heal, you must heal with your soul intact. You must not lose your love for the children, no matter what you’ve seen. It isn’t your wound that aches you, makes you want to die, it’s the war. There are few who are willing to do your job, to care for the children. They need you. They run in hungry, naked packs, and all that is between them and suffering is the Children Corps and people like you. The love of children, the need not to see them hungry and in pain, is a necessary human trait if we are to survive as a people. When, if, this war is over, it must not be a war that has poisoned our hopes for the future. Get well. Do your duty.”
I lay there when he was finished and thought about all I had done for the children and thought about the war and all that had to be done afterwards, knew then that my love for the children, their needs, were the obsessions of my life. They were my reason to live, more than just living to exist. I knew then that I had to let their cause stay with me, had to let my hatred of the world and the war go, because there were the children.
The next day they came and took the old man away. He had pulled the bandage off of the nub of his arm during the night and chewed the cauterized wound open with the viciousness of a tiger and had bled to death. His sheets were the color of gunmetal rust when they came for him and pulled the stained sheet over his head and rolled him away.
