Dark Delicacies II: Fear; More Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World's Greatest Horror Writers

by Unknown

  A mammoth shadow blocked out the blueness of the lake and the light from the sun. The dog had leaped. It came down with a loud splash, causing the lake around it to vibrate. Jim watched, horrified, and a moment later, his feet touched bottom.

  Not too deep here, but deep enough, he thought. If I can just hold my breath a little longer, the dog will go away.

  Jim kept staring upward, watching. The monster dog-paddled about on the surface. Jim turned his head in the direction of the pier. He couldn’t see anything there, just darkness. He thought: I’ll swim that way, maybe find a pier post for support, slide up it to the surface, get a breath, come back down, out of the way of the dog. Eventually, the bastard has to give up.

  He looked up.

  The dog was swimming straight down toward him.

  Jim moved, but… his feet were caught. Something had him. He realized it was his bike. He had his foot twisted up between the spokes. He had stepped down right on top of the wheel. He squatted, grabbed his ankle with both hands, and pulled back with all his strength.

  He felt something snap in his ankle, and a pain like someone jamming a hot rod through the bottom of his foot all the way up into his intestines shot through him until he thought he would lose his last bit of breath, open his mouth to scream and fill up with water.

  But he was loose. He swam along the bottom, his ankle throbbing. Then his head was snapped back violently.

  The dog had lunged at him, its teeth tangling in his long hair, then, just as quickly, he was freed as his hair was ripped loose.

  The surface. He had to make the surface. He was on his last breath.

  He pushed up, and just as he broke the surface of the water, he let out with a scream. The dog had bitten his leg just below the knee, and it was pulling him down. The pain was excruciating. He could feel bones shifting in his leg. He had just enough time for a breath before he went under.

  How? Jim thought. How can the dog breathe and bite me too? How is that? How can that be done?

  The pain subsided slightly, and Jim saw the shape of the dog move in the water, go past him for the surface.

  Finally, thought Jim, the demon has to have air too.

  Jim dove deep, began to swim toward the dark shadow of the pier. It hurt to move his legs, but the alternative was worse than the pain. He hadn’t swum far when there was a tug on his foot, snapping his tennis shoe off. He whirled in the water, looked back.

  The dog was on him. He could see its shape, and he could see the shape of his shoe coming free of the animal’s mouth, falling toward the bottom.

  In that moment, he realized that his heel was shooting with pain; the dog had gotten more than shoe.

  The dog made a kind of porpoise-style lunge for Jim’s face.

  No more, thought Jim. No more.

  As the dog came forward, Jim grabbed at its throat, clenching both hands around it. But the dog continued to push forward, turning its head like a shark about to roll, its mighty jaws clamping down on Jim’s face like a vise. Jim could feel bones shifting in his skull, teeth tearing into his cranium, the side of his jaw. He pounded at the dog with his fists, hitting as hard as he could.

  The dog squeezed harder.

  Jim managed one hand above the dog’s snout, found an eye, pushed his thumb into it with all his might. The dog shook him like a rag, but Jim hung on. Kept pushing with his thumb. Jim felt as if his head were swelling, as if his chest was about to explode, but he didn’t let go.

  It was the dog that let go and fought to the surface.

  Jim went up behind him, broke the water just after the dog, clamped his arms around the animal’s neck and latched his teeth on the dog’s ear, filling his mouth with a foulness he couldn’t imagine. Then the blood hit the back of Jim’s throat, and he began to gnaw, jerk his head, taking off a piece of the ear. The dog let out with a sharp bark, tried to twist, but Jim wrapped his legs around the dog’s torso, hooked his ankles together, squeezed his arms with all his might, shifted sideways until he could bring his teeth into the dog’s throat.

  The dog thrashed and rolled in the water. They went under fighting, the dog snapping and Jim biting.

  They floated to the bottom, struggling. Jim released his grip, tried to swim for the surface for some air, but he was jerked down. He thought at first it was the dog, but he could feel it was some kind of weed on the bottom that had wrapped around his ankle, holding him.

  The dog swam at him. Jim tried to strike the dog with his fists, but underwater the blow was weak. He dodged the dog’s muzzle, clamped his arms around its neck, stuck his cheek against the behemoth’s neck. The powerful dog writhed, tried to tear loose, couldn’t. It broke for the surface. Jim clung to it. The weed around his ankle snapped free, and the dog brought him up.

  They broke into the sunlight.

  Jim twisted his head, bit the dog in the throat, jerked his head from side to side. A sound like growling came from his mouth. The dog growled too, rolled over and over in the water, but Jim clung with his teeth, his mouth filing with hot gore.

  Then the rolling ceased, and the dog twisted on its back, floating. Jim came loose of its throat, grabbed at its chest, tried to pull himself on board, striking out with his fists as he did.

  The dog began to slip beneath the water.

  Jim paddled his feet, worked his arms, stuck his face into the water, and looked down.

  The giant dog was floating toward the bottom, face up. Jim thought he could see the yellow of its remaining eye, but decided it was an illusion, because in the next moment he could only see the shape of the animal and the odd shape of his bike below, the dog coming down on top of it, rolling, then churning, being gently carried away by the underwater current.

  Jim painfully swam toward the pier, but there was no getting out there. The support posts were too tall. He hung onto a post for a moment, then swam toward shore. He crawled onto the sandy bank, discovered he couldn’t walk. His ankle was broken. A bone in his foot too. The knee of his right leg wouldn’t work either. His face was on fire, and his jaw crunched when he moved. He crawled over the sand until he was on the pier. He kept crawling until he reached the tip of the pier. He lay there on his stomach, looked out at the water.

  The dog did not appear.

  Jim grinned, his broken jaw aching, his teeth full of dangling, dark dog flesh.

  Jim the Conqueror, he thought.

  He let out with a wild, bloodcurdling, primal scream that echoed across the lake and into the trees beyond.

  THE ACCOMPANIST

  JOHN HARRISON

  I NEVER THOUGHT I would tell anyone this story. I convinced myself no one would believe it. It would surely be dismissed as fantasy, or worse, hallucination. But perhaps the real reason is that I wanted what happened to remain a secret of mine, precious and inviolate. There hasn’t been a day in almost seventy years I haven’t thought back to that December evening to marvel at what happened.

  Now that Liberty is gone and my days are certainly numbered, I suppose there’s no good reason to keep it to myself anymore. Besides, I’m too old to give a damn whether anyone believes me. It’s hard enough holding this pencil.

  I was only eighteen when I first met him. I’d been hired by The Mutual Life Insurance Co. as an apprentice accountant in their Pittsburgh office. Those were heady times for a young man like me. The country was booming, life was swollen with possibility, fortune was easily within reach. It was a dangerous time, too; more so than we realized at the time. We were lurching into the modern age. Seeds of economic chaos and social upheaval were already rooted in that fertile soil of ambition and self-assurance. Soon, we’d reap the riotous harvest of that discontent.

  My first impression of him was curious, to say the least. I’d been forewarned by the office manager, Zack Smith.

  “You’ll like Matthew Perdu. He’s a brilliant man with numbers. Maybe the best we got. He’s a little, how shall I say, distracted. But you’ll learn a great deal, don’t worry ’bout that.”

&
nbsp; I’d expected a nice old gentleman with thick glasses and a thin voice. Instead, I was shown a man no more than thirty, with eyes as sharp as polished crystal and penetrating as the most intimate question; with a shock of unruly hair that seemed, as I noticed later, to rise and fall as he spoke. “He may not be with us much longer,” Smith had said with sincere regret. “His, uh, habits don’t quite conform to our standards, I’m afraid.”

  “Habits?” I asked, fearing… no, hoping for some scandalous revelation. At my age, I craved the unusual, the taboo.

  “His hours are irregular…”

  Aha, I thought enthusiastically.

  “I’ve put up with it because he is good, and, frankly, I like him. But you can’t run an office allowing individualism its head. Bad for morale, you know.”

  Well, by now I was thoroughly intrigued, and my first view of him did nothing to dispel the curiosity. He was sitting at his high desk tapping methodically on a set of company books with his pencil as if working out some intricate musical pattern. He never heard us come in. He simply stared off through the window in front of him, tapping and swaying; humming, too, I believe, although it sounded more like chanting. As we stood there and watched, I thought I saw Smith smile affectionately.

  “Ah hem,” Smith coughed.

  Perdu turned and I swear his hair stood up a bit when he saw us.

  “This is Justin Redding, Perdu, the young man I told you about.”

  He smiled gently and came right over to me. “Yes, of course,” he said, almost singing.

  “Matthew is aware of your background, Justin, and knows what you should do. Mark him well. You will learn. You will learn.”

  I got the impression he meant more than bookkeeping.

  Matthew was indeed the skilled and patient teacher that Smith had predicted. His sense of humor made the days fly as he punctuated his coaching with remarks on all manner of things, usually barbed with what I considered an appealing and healthy cynicism. No fool this man. He was highly educated and could comment reasonably on most subjects, even though his habit of drifting off mid-sentence to a place only he could go was, at times, a little embarrassing for me.

  I soon discovered his real passions were music and the cinema. They called it moving pictures back then, and it was considered a rather low-class form of entertainment. His interest in it only served to feed my fascination with him. So when he invited me to his home for supper one evening, I accepted immediately.

  He had a small apartment in the same neighborhood as my boarding house, and it appeared extremely well kept and comfortable, not the quarters of a bachelor with the absent-minded qualities of Matthew Perdu.

  “I want you to meet my wife, Liberty,” he said as he led me to the kitchen.

  She was standing over a counter in the center of the room preparing supper. I think my heart must have stopped for a split second because I almost fainted. My mouth went instantly dry, and I heard a marvelous tone rush by my ears.

  “I’ve brought a friend home for dinner,” Matthew said. “Justin Redding, the new young man at the firm.”

  How do you do’s were difficult but I managed. She had a smile that could melt iron and that wonderfully thick hair folded on the back of her head framed a magnetic expression of utter calm. Her voice was almost a whisper, but it wasn’t timid. I had never seen such a beautiful woman.

  Matthew must have sensed my innocent infatuation with his wife, but he carried on in his inimitable way talking about this and that. Liberty was quiet most of the time, only occasionally commenting on what he was talking about. They seemed to know each other profoundly. I just sat there and marveled… at both of them.

  “Are you the spirited sort?” he asked me over coffee.

  “I’d like to think so,” I said eagerly.

  “Good. In a moment we’ll go downtown.”

  “Downtown?” But he was already up and out of the room. He returned a few minutes later carrying a stack of music manuscripts and signaled me to come along. I made my way to the kitchen and stammered with thank-you’s and see-you-again’s.

  Liberty smiled broadly at me. I’ll never forget that smile. It never faded until the day she died.

  Matthew and I took a trolley downtown and got off at Smithfield Street. He explained on the way that he had another job at night, one which he loved more than all else except it paid too little money. He’d met a man indirectly through our firm, a Mr. J. P. Harris, who had a number of ventures in the entertainment field, one of which was a storefront shop (he called it a Nickelodeon) where he exhibited motion pictures to paying customers. When Mr. Harris found out that Matthew was a pianist of some skill, the older man asked my friend to consider accompanying the shows at his establishment. It was an offer Matthew accepted on the spot.

  I’d heard about this “movie” experience but was never allowed to go. My parents were a bit puritanical. Oh, I’d sneaked into the burlesque hall around the corner on Forbes Ave. once with several other boys, and at the time that was something to see, let me tell you. But I had no idea what to expect from this adventure.

  Mr. Harris’s Nickelodeon was not the spare, odorous theater I’d expected. Not at all like the burlesque hall. In fact, this place had a certain class and charm, which, I found out later, was the owner’s expressed intention. He fully expected the movie industry to flourish, and he wanted to encourage the proper sort of people to attend.

  As soon as we arrived, Matthew got me a seat and quickly disappeared. I caught sight of him moments later sitting at a piano near the front of the room. There were several other men in the room waiting patiently for the program to begin. All appeared to be veterans of this type of amusement.

  After a few minutes the room darkened. I could hear movement and behind me somewhere, the cranking of machinery starting up. Suddenly a flickering light shot out over my head in a beam, exploding on the wall in front of me with the most magical set of moving photographs. The play was entitled Tess of the Storm Country. A dynamic young woman named Pickford had the lead. I can’t remember too much about the movie itself (it was a flop, it turns out), but the dizzying experience in that theater irrevocably changed my perception of the whole world. I instantly became a devoted enthusiast of the motion picture.

  My only recollection of Matthew during the movie was as a figure off to the side of the room swaying back and forth to the rhythms of music and story. In fact, his music and the images on the wall became inseparable to me. His movements seemed to correspond exactly to the emotions on the screen. When the action was passionate, so was he; when it was calm, he seemed at ease. I was embarrassed to tell him this afterward because I felt I’d betrayed his invitation by not concentrating solely on his playing. On the contrary, he was delighted with my “review.”

  I left him there for a second performance and returned home alone. Made the trip in an exalted state and didn’t sleep much that night. But I wanted to talk with Matthew more. I wanted to see more movies with him.

  I wanted to see Liberty again.

  Matthew was late for work the next morning.

  It was a mild summer that year, and Matthew and Liberty often took me with them on their weekend rides into the country for picnics. We went to concerts together, and exhibits at Carnegie’s new museum. I loved their company and still treasure those memories as some of the happiest of my life. I continued to be astonished at Matthew’s store of knowledge, and Liberty seemed to grow more beautiful every day. I also learned that there was a certain impishness to her. She was a practical joker at heart, but never cruel or condescending.

  I also went to the movies a lot that summer. In the beginning I’d accompany Matthew, but later on I began to go by myself, arriving just before the performance to sneak into a seat before he noticed. I’d become accustomed to this infant art form and soon developed a crude sophistication about it. I could distinguish the difference in the qualities of movies. I became familiar with the names of the New Jersey companies that made them. I was a fan of
certain performers, especially the Pickford girl.

  But I soon realized how great a part Matthew played in my enjoyment. One night when he was ill and couldn’t play, I watched a movie I’d seen twice before (I was a repeat offender, you see). I enjoyed the story without Matthew’s music, but surprisingly not as much as before. Somehow I felt the movie was not exactly the same one I’d seen earlier. Now, I always went to the Nickelodeon sober. I watched carefully. I studied, you might say, and this was the third viewing of this particular story. But there were minor differences. Sometimes these discrepancies were simply my emotional response to a scene. For example, in the previous viewings I’d been outraged by the behavior of a particular male character toward his wife. On this occasion, however, I felt somewhat sympathetic to his situation. Other differences were more manifest. I remembered an entire section of the plot happening differently from what I witnessed that night. On my way home I was angry with myself for the confusion. I’d come to think of myself as a bit of a movie aficionado. But what kind of an aficionado can’t remember a movie from one night to the next? I puzzled over this for some time.

  When I told Matthew about this later, he only smiled enigmatically.

  I’d often sit in his apartment and watch him practice at the piano while Liberty prepared our supper. His repertoire was extraordinary, all of it memorized. Composers I’d never heard of: Satie, Webern, and some truly challenging stuff by a man named Schoenberg who apparently liked mathematics a whole lot more than melody.

  “I practice scales and intervals constantly. Liberty has to leave the house and take a walk sometimes,” he smiled gently. “Says it makes her feel odd. But this constant repetition reacquaints my fingers with the keyboard so that I never have to look… or think. I’m more interested in sound and texture than melody or chord progression.”