“Daddy, I’m home!”
“Hello, Sookie. How was school today?”
School had been terrible, as always, first because it separated them and second because the teachers and the other kids were strange and loud and often hostile. Daddy’s gentle kindness hadn’t prepared her for any of that. They taunted her because of her differences. Worse, they said cruel things about him because he didn’t work like other fathers but stayed at home to take care of her, living on her mother’s inheritance.
“Daddy, they laughed at me today.” She had almost been afraid to tell him, afraid that he might laugh, too. But then he held out his arms to help her climb up on his knee and she knew that in this one place she was safe from laughter, protected by his love.
“Now why would anyone laugh at my Sookie?”
“We’re studying the Middle East and Miss Fredericks asked me to read part of the lesson. You know those things they build fires in?”
He thought for a moment, “Braziers?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Well—”
The woman shook her head and opened her eyes, forcing the memory away. “He’s not here now. He’s in the hospital and he’s dying. This is the happiest—” The harsh sound of her own voice startled her.
She turned to close the front door and as she did, she caught a glimpse of that hated face in the hall mirror. Sunlight glinted in silver-blonde hair. She had given up dyeing it several years before. It had fooled no one anyway.
“Why—aren’t you Sookie Nichols? I saw your father on TV the other night. I haven’t laughed so hard in years. The man’s a genius!”
This place held no good memories for her now. He’d spoiled everything. She would do what she came here to do, then she would go away where she’d never have to look at it again.
Moving carefully so as not to aggravate the pain she carried inside her, she walked down the hall and through the kitchen. In the shed that connected the house to the workshop she’d never been allowed to enter, she found a few logs and the axe her father had used for kindling. She made two trips, not just because a doctor had warned her against exertion. She had been planning this for so long. It would never do to rush the final moments.
When she returned for the axe, she hesitated for a moment by the workshop door. The place had fascinated her when she was a little girl. Delightful surprises had come out of it—puppets that tap danced on wooden drums, a scooter, a fleet of boats, a doll house with furniture that might have been crafted by elves. She used to tease and coax him to let her take just one look inside, sure that there was some kind of magic beyond that door.
If he had made only the toys and nothing more maybe she still could have believed in the magic—and in him.
She left the lock on the door unforced, contemptuous now of the workshop’s tarnished secrets. In the living room’s huge stone fireplace she built a fire. The wood was so dry that it blazed up at once. As it did, she was overcome by a feeling of urgency. He was far away in a hospital, almost comatose, but he might rouse himself and ask for Sookie. If he did he would find out what she’d done, send someone after her, to stop her.
She ran outside to fetch the case and to reassure herself that there was no one driving up the road from town. At that moment the road was empty. But how long would that be true? How long would she have to do what she had to do?
Her heart thumped uncomfortably in her chest. That always happened at moments like this. The specialist said there was nothing organically wrong but how could he know? How could anyone know something like that beyond any possibility of doubt?
There had been times—when her husband deserted her, when her son was arrested—times she had wondered if she, too, had been a product of her father’s magic workshop, whether she had a heart at all. She felt unreal, manipulated by outside forces but unaffected by them deep inside herself. In a way she welcomed the discomfort, as proof.
In the living room she put the case down and knelt beside it to open the catches. Her hands were trembling. She had to stop for a moment to calm herself. This was the hardest part. She’d thought about throwing it unopened on the fire, but if she did that she could never be sure that Sookie would not come back to haunt her.
No. She had to do this the right way. She had to be strong now. She tried to ignore the small pain that fluttered in her chest.
The change had started with Alfred. Dumb Alfred with the lumpy nose, mindless smile, the painted-on hair. Daddy’s magic had been in his hands—only in his hands, then—and with Alfred she’d always been able to see his lips moving. He’d made Alfred as a birthday surprise for her, taught himself ventriloquism from books. He’d been so pleased with his own gift. By then she was old enough to feel protective of this gentle, child-like man. She’d never told him.
Maybe she should have. Maybe it would have ended there.
She remembered a February day she’d come home eager to tell him about the party and the lacy, anonymous valentine that had been left on her desk. But for the first time—had it been the first or had it only felt that way?—he wouldn’t listen, was too impatient to hold her on his lap. He was excited about a secret of his own.
“I’ve made a sister for Alfred. Been working on her for months to get her just right. I can’t wait for you to see. Sit here—” He pushed her toward the footstool, then hurried down the hall toward the workshop.
It was puzzling but not hurtful—not very much. He was always excited when he had a new surprise to show her. But then he brought her out—her—the other one.
It had been a shock to see her own face carved from a block of wood, the same blue eyes with what he called a pixie-tilt, the short nose, even a mop of real hair, silver-blonde like her own. But then he sat down and put the doll on his knee—in her place—and it turned its head and looked at her.
“Hi. My name is Sookie.” His lips didn’t move.
It wasn’t her name, not her real name, only one of the pet names he called her. And that made it worse, that he could give away a love-name. Her face. Her place next to him.
She’d tried to cry then but she couldn’t because there was a weight on her chest making it hard to breathe. He saw the almost-tears and he put the doll aside, picked her up and held her.
“Honey, why are you upset? Don’t you see? I made her because I love you so much—”
Shocked by the enormity of the betrayal, she couldn’t speak. She tried hard to believe what he was saying. It was the hardest thing she had ever tried. She wanted to believe him because not-believing would mean that the most important thing in her life had been a lie.
“—Little girls have to grow up and this way I can keep a part of you little forever, close to me—”
A hint of suppressed laughter in his voice. Had it always been there? Was that simply the first time she heard it?
She tried to believe, pretended that she did, forced a smile to her face and felt it stiffen there when he picked the doll up again and began to play his silly little game. Something had been stolen from her and something else came to take its place. Pain.
She unfastened the catches and lifted Sookie out of the case. Her lips twitched with disgust. The doll didn’t seem alive without Daddy’s magic to animate it. The limbs flopped and the joints made clacking noises. It looked more like a troll now than a human being but part of that might be due to age. Twenty-five years was a very long time for something made of wood, something carried all over the world and used so hard.
He’d found a new career with Sookie. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he’d found a career because no one but a little girl could think that just being a father was a fit occupation for a man. At first it had been something he did to amuse her—or rather, himself, because she took it so badly. Then it was a hobby, to entertain at the church picnic and the Christmas program at school. Then he discovered people wanted to pay him to work in theaters and later, on TV.
By then it hardly mattered to her. She had finally seen him in front of an
audience and her feeling for him could never be the same. It was a curious twist. Sookie had manipulated him, made him show how he felt about his own flesh and blood daughter.
Flesh and blood? Really? It must be true. Could a block of wood feel this kind of pain?
She reached for the axe, unleashing her anger, feeling it grow from the hard knot she’d kept inside her all these years. He was dying, helpless. He couldn’t stop her this time.
The first blow, the first bone-deep shiver as she struck at the hated face, and she was there again at the theater, the first time she had been able to nerve herself up to watch him in front of an audience. She stood in the wings—
—pain engulfed her every time she raised her arms but she could not stop—
—saw him sit down, put Sookie on his knee, and smooth her dress. The curtains rolled back. The audience applauded. Daddy smiled and Sookie smiled—of course she smiled. Her expression was permanent, painted-on. How could people say she looked like a real little girl?
—one blue fragment skittered across the floor—
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hello, Sookie. How was school today?”
—bits of silver-blonde hair flew like feathers—
The audience laughed. Daddy smiled. She saw the wickedness in that smile, the hint of suppressed laughter. He made the dummy speak. She even sounded like a real little girl, chirping brightly. But he made her say stupid things.
—the pain, the sharp, red pain in her chest—
“—things they build fires in?”
He seemed to think for a moment. “You mean braziers?”
“I guess so,” the dummy said. “But I thought they were talking about brassieres.”
Laughter had only been a wave before. Not it was an explosion, a sharp, red explosion. How they laughed—
—laughed—
—how he must have laughed at her secretly when she sat on his knee telling him all her childish problems. How he must have hated her, blamed her for needing him when he wanted to get out away. How he lied, later.
“Honey, I swear I don’t remember. It was just something I dreamed up to make people laugh.”
Sobbing now, she gathered up the fragments and began to throw them into the fire. Splinters and lumps, a finger, a knee, a shoe. The hair was the worst. Bits of it on the floor and in her mouth. So much hair. Where had he had the wig made? Where had he found one the exact silver-blonde shade of her own hair?
“—never laughed at you. I love you. When I made Sookie I put some of that love into her, so I’d always have a part of my own little girl close to me. That’s why people enjoy it so much, because of the love. Little girls have to grow up—”
The flames licked over the fragments like tongues, tasting, blackening. The pain in her chest had turned to flames, spreading, licking at her arms, her legs, her head. There was a roaring in her ears.
“—little girls have to grow up—”
But Daddy, I can’t grow up. You took that away from me too when you made Sookie. You gave her my face and my name. You gave her my soul. That’s why I’ve made such a mess of things. There’s no one who cares for me, nothing in my life but this—
—sharp, red, burning pain—
One very old, very wise blue eye looked at her through the curtain of flame.
“Daddy! Daddy!”
Sookie wasn’t sure which one of them had screamed. She only knew that both of them were dying.
COME TO THE PARTY by Frances Garfield
I’m not certain whether people who want to write tend to marry other people who want to write, or whether living with a writer tends to infect an otherwise normal spouse with this same madness—perhaps as a defensive measure. Frances Garfield, whose husband is also a writer, is a case in point. Born Frances Marita Obrist in Deaf Smith County, Texas on December 1, 1908, she was a music student at Wichita University when she met a promising young science fiction writer, Manly Wade Wellman. In 1930 they were married, moving soon to New York where Wellman became a regular contributor to Weird Tales and many of the science fiction pulps. Garfield herself sold three stories to Weird Tales and another to Amazing Stories in 1939 and 1940, but the birth of their son cut short her writing career. After three decades Frances Garfield returned to writing, and in recent years she has published short fiction in Whispers, Fantasy Tales, Fantasy Book, Kadath, as well as in several anthologies. Since 1951 she and Wellman have made their home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they continue to keep two typewriters busy. Chapel Hill is also the setting of the very real experiences that inspired “Come to the Party.”
Dusk was fast overcoming the autumn twilight. Nora felt no closer to Steve Thomas’s country house than they’d been half an hour earlier. She snuggled closer to big Jeff in the back seat and tried to see the road ahead. The headlights bravely probed a path, but the darkness seemed to nestle nearer and gloomier to either side.
Willie, in the front seat beside Sam, bent her ginger head above a crude, penciled map, which the four had begun to fear was false.
“Steve just doesn’t know how to draw maps,” Willie half moaned. “And he promised to put up signals to show where to turn off onto his private road. Why ever did I pick a publisher who throws his parties on the far side of nowhere?”
“But, my dear, this publisher picked you out,” reminded silver-haired Sam at the wheel. “A dozen others turned you down—”
“Please. Why bring that up?” Willie appealed. But he went on.
“Here was Steve with his little regional publishing house, pretty much on the far side of nowhere itself, a county away. Regional, and he wanted a regional novel for the Christmas trade. And he liked yours very much. And here we are, on our way to cheer you on while you autograph a thousand or so flyleaves.”
Sam loved his writer wife, and showed it by his teasing. Nora knew he smiled his special smile of affectionate amusement, blue eyes slanted and twinkling.
“He said there might be about a dozen guests,” protested Willie. “He said he’d invited some special friends who might like my book and buy it. And tell all their friends—so they’d buy it too. For Christmas gifts. Word-of-mouth advertising, Steve called it.”
“Yes. Cheaper than published advertising,” remarked Sam.
“There’s that little white church again,” said Jeff, big and trying to sound cheerful. “How many times have we passed it? Three? Or maybe four?”
“Four, I’m sure,” put in Nora. “And there’s the little gray house that keeps following us.”
“Damn,” said Sam. “This curve looming ahead is boringly familiar. We seem to be in orbit—”
A grotesquely painted van charged into the glare of headlights, squarely in the center of the road. Sam cursed and wrenched the wheel. The car swayed onto the grassy shoulder. The tremendous van shot past, its driver goggling out, blocky white teeth gleaming from a dark thicket of beard. Then he was gone, and Sam twisted back onto the road.
“Whew,” gasped Willie. “Thank God you were driving, Sam, not me.”
Nora tossed her thick, black hair out of her eyes. Her hand tingled where Jeff had gripped it so powerfully. She could still see that staring, shaggy face.
“It’ll be a great party if we ever get there,” she said in a feeble attempt at humor. “Look, isn’t that the church again?”
“I wonder if anybody will find the place,” ventured Willie.
“Pessimist,” chuckled Sam. He loved everything about Willie, including her novel about a woman’s passion for both her husband and her husband’s brother. Nora had overheard a neighbor woman ask Sam which of the characters he was supposed to be. “A little of both,” he had said, with a perfectly straight face, slant blue eyes twinkling as usual.
“There’ll be people there all right,” promised burly Jeff. “And Nora and I are here to give you moral support, Willie.” He, too, admired the book, had helped Willie read proof on it. The four were close friends, always enjoyed each other, never bored tog
ether.
“That van looks better behind us than in front of us,” said Sam. “Maybe he’s lost out here, too, rolling round and round. Look, a mist is coming up.”
An owl hooted in the distance, strangely loud and clear above the motor’s purr. No houses showed now, only great twisted trees crowded at the sides of the road, branches laced overhead. Willie gave a sudden, happy squeak.
“Look—a bit of tinsel on a post,” she cried. “That’s bound to be Steve’s signal.”
“And a driveway just past it,” said Sam, turning deftly. “A long one, too.”
They followed turns, rises, and falls in the bumpy road. Dark thickets massed to right and left. They heard nothing, no sound but the motor. Nora saw a grotesquely hunched tree that reminded her of a cedar of Lebanon she remembered from Winchester Cathedral. Weird.
“Turn there,” directed Willie, pointing ahead. And Sam turned.
“Geez, how well you obey Willie,” laughed Nora. “One word from me and Jeff does the exact opposite.”
Jeff said nothing. He stared out of the window, lips clamped; his cheek had a taut crease where there should be a dimple.
Sam bumped the car over the coarse outflung roots of a great oak, and stopped on the tall grass. Ahead of them showed a great, bleakly drab house. Wavering lights from the tall windows tinted the dim evening. A broad chimney, rosy in the dusk, climbed the side wall. Large pillars rose along a wide porch.
“Okay.” Jeff touched Nora’s shoulder, and she felt his great hand tremble. “Let’s go on in.”
Willie smoothed her cap of ginger curls and freshened her lipstick. Nora shook her long, dark hair and moved to follow Jeff. “Odd,” she said. “I don’t see any other cars.”
“They’ve probably been and gone,” joked Sam, coming along behind with Willie. “It took us long enough to find the place.”
The Year's Best Horror Stories 12 Page 12
