The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  At just a minute short of midnight the bathtub started screaming again.

  On his side of the fourposter the big, bear-shaped man clenched his paw-like fists and feigned deep untroubled sleep. On the opposite side his lovely blonde wife sat bolt upright, her frilly diminutive nightie twisting around her smooth body, and gave him a punch in the kidneys.

  “Oh, shoot. There it is all over again,” said Tinkle Snowden. The moonlight knifing into the second-floor bedroom made her deeply tan skin shimmer in a highly provocative way.

  Still huddled in one of his hibernatingposes, Boswell Snowden bit his tongue and waited for the pain in his lower back to subside.

  “This is really gross, Boz,” said Tinkle, full lips next to his shaggy ear. “A bathtub that wails like a banshee is . . . gross.”

  “Hum?” He faked a mumbled yawn.

  “What sort of impression must we be making on the other people who live here in Hollow Hills Circle?” She placed an icy hand on his naked shoulder. “Our bathtub screams, our furnace chuckles like a madman, our . . . what the heck is that?”

  Down the hall the toilet had begun yodeling.

  “Houses make noises at night,” said Snowden.

  Tinkle said, “It’s not just noises, Boz, as you know darn well.”

  “You’re not used to being on the ground so much,” suggested her husband, trying not to hear the awesome noises rolling down the hall from the bathroom.

  “Well, no, I never heard a biffy yodeling when I was a flight attendant for TransAm Airways, no.” She swung one long handsome leg over the bed edge. “I’m going to march right down to the John and—”

  “Listen, some things you ought not to fool with, hon.”

  “No darn bathtub’s going to spoil my . . . oh, ugh!”

  He lumbered into a sitting position. “What now?”

  “I just stepped in something horrible and slimy. It’s all over the bedchamber floor,” his wife said. “Oh, how gross . . . it’s blood. Our lovely rug’s awash with blood, Boz.”

  “Probably only a leaking faucet.” He elbowed over to Tinkle’s side of the bed to stare down at the dark floor.

  “What sort of faucet would leak blood?”

  “Moonlight plays strange tricks on your eyes,” suggested Snowden, striving to put a soothing note into his rumbling voice. “That stuff looks more like chocolate than blood to me anyway.”

  “Well, it’s not fun putting your bare foot down in lukewarm chocolate either,” she said. “And where’d gallons of it come leaking from?”

  “Oh, there has to be a simple explanation.”

  “Heck, that’s what you always say,” she complained, making a tentative swipe at her toes with her forefinger. “One would think, Boz, that you, of all people, the nation’s leading author of supernatural fiction would—”

  “I’m not exactly the leading writer of weird stuff,” he corrected. “There are three guys ahead of me.”

  “But Curse of the Demon has been number nine on the darn New York Times list for weeks and weeks.”

  “Meaning eight books are ahead of us.”

  “But it’s been optioned by Mecca-Universal for a six-figure advance,” persisted Tinkle. “On top of which you’re dead sure to win the Grisly Award from the Occult Writers of America at the banquet at the Biltmore in New York City next—”

  “That’s Ghastly, not Grisly.”

  “Well, grisly or ghastly, you ought to believe in a real occult phenomenon when it happens right smack . . . darn, that is so blood.” She’d clicked on her frill-shaded bedside lamp.

  Her fingertip was red-smeared. The bedroom carpet, usually a sedate buff color, was now a soggy crimson across most of its four hundred square feet.

  “Aw, looks more like rusty water to me.”

  “Rusty water? You could use this stuff to give sick people transfusions, Boz,” his wife said. “I’d like to see you phone up Burt Nostradamus the plumber and tell him you’ve got twenty gallons or so of blood spilled on the rug and you think a rusty faucet did—”

  “We won’t be using Nostradamus anymore.”

  “Simply because he wanted to interview you?” Tinkle continued to study her fingertip. “Personally I think it’s darn admirable that he doesn’t want to be a plumber all his life and aspires to become a writer of—”

  “Your average plumber in this part of Connecticut makes more money than 97 percent of the freelance writers in the country,” said Snowden. “Furthermore, Nostradamus writes for the National Intruder, which ain’t my idea of the main current in American—”

  “It’d be nice publicity for you, Boz.”

  “Sure, ‘Crazed Author Plagued by Real Life Horrors!’ I don’t need that sort of publicity, honey.”

  “Before you had this fantastic success with Curse of the Demon, Boz, before you’d gotten that $100,000 advance from Usher House Books for the hardcover and the $230,000 from Midget Books for the paperback, before we’d met when you took that TransAm flight out to Hollywood to talk turkey with the movie moguls, back then you’d have jumped at—”

  “Exactly. Now I don’t need cheap publicity. Turn off the damn light.”

  “The bathtub is still screaming. Boz, this has been happening almost every night for the past three weeks,” persisted Tinkle. “This house has to be haunted or possessed. I bet it’s the site of a long-forgotten murder.”

  “This house is not even a year old.”

  “You absolutely have to find out what is wrong, what evil force holds our house in its sway.”

  “Ignore it,” he advised, rubbing at his beard and then pretending to assume a ready-to-sleep position.

  “You keep saying that and it keeps getting worse. First it was only an occasional maniacal laugh in the middle of the night or a few drops of blood forming on a wall.” She paused to take a breath. “The whole dreadful process is accelerating. I really believe this horrible house wants to drive me goofy, the same way the mansion in Curse of the Demon did to poor Alice.”

  “Alicia,” he corrected.

  “Well, whatever. It’s a silly name for a girl. Boz, maybe we ought to move before the house destroys—”

  “I’ve been writing professionally for eleven years, Tinkle,” he said, rising up on one shaggy elbow. “I’m nearly thirty-eight and this is my first real taste of success. This damn house represents something to me, a goal I’ve reached. No one is going to take it away or scare me into . . . never mind. Let’s go to sleep.”

  “What do you mean no one? Do you know what’s behind these ghostly manifestations?”

  He waited a few seconds before answering, “No.”

  The screaming was waning, growing weak. So was the yodeling.

  “What about the blood?” asked Tinkle.

  “It’ll be gone by morning.”

  She punched him in the side. “See? You do believe it’s supernatural. Real blood wouldn’t possibly go away just—”

  “If you’re not in the mood for going to sleep, what say we make love?”

  “With the house full of demons and goblins and lord knows what else?” Shivering, Tinkle folded her arms across her breasts.

  Her husband turned his massive back on her, and soon began producing snoring sounds.

  “I think we’re not the only ones,” Tinkle said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “Not the only ones with a haunted house. Nobody’s said anything directly to me, yet I suspect . . . well, it’s possible all the houses in the circle are haunted,” she replied. “Isn’t that a really gross possibility? Something really terrible must’ve happened here a long time ago.”

  “More recently than that,” murmured Snowden into his pillow.

  The smell of sulfur awakened Max Kearny seconds before his bedside clock commenced bonging in impossibly loud and sepulchral tones. The brimstone scent was a familiar, though not recently experienced one. Wide awake, he hopped out of bed and made his way across the unfamiliar moonlit room. As he reached h
is trousers on the wicker armchair where he’d tossed them, an unearthly wailing came drifting up from the patio below.

  Pants in hand, Max sprinted to a window.

  There was a dark figure crouched next to the barbecue pit. Ducked low, it went scurrying away into the shadowy brush beyond the flagstones.

  Max narrowed one eye. Turning away from the window, he tugged his pants on. “I think I see the real reason I’m a house guest,” he said to himself. He shed the pajama top he’d been sleeping in, pulled on a rugby shirt and moved to the doorway.

  He was a middle-sized man, slim and forty-one. He wore his grey-spattered black hair in a sort of shaggy crewcut.

  Three steps into the upstairs hall and he stepped in something warm and slick, and went sliding and skidding.

  He hit the balustrade, teetering on the brink of plummeting over into the yawning stairwell. Saving himself, he pushed back and stopped when he was leaning against the wall.

  “That you out there, Max?” called a female voice.

  “Yeah, it is.” He wiped two fingers across his bare sole. “So you can come on out.”

  The other bedroom door opened and a plump red-haired woman in a terry robe peered out. “Can’t sleep, huh?”

  A thin-faced man, his sandy blond hair sleep-tousled, looked out over the redhead. “Nightmare, Max?”

  Inspecting his fingers, Max said, “Blood.”

  “Wake up,” urged the red-haired woman, “you’re still dream—”

  “C’mon, Nita,” said Max as he wiped his hand on a pocket tissue. “I don’t mind being conned now and then, but it can cease now.”

  “Sometimes when you mix pills and booze,” suggested Nita McNulty, eyes not meeting his, “it causes . . . oh, hell, we do love you, Max, and we’re sorry Jillian didn’t come east with you on this trip. And we’re happy you’re our house guest while your advertising work keeps you back here.”

  “You’re one of our favorite California people,” picked up her husband, “and I miss you more than almost any other friend we left out there when we moved to Connecticut six years ago and I went to work for Muck magazine.”

  “But?” supplied Max.

  “Let’s go downstairs into the living room,” suggested Nita. “I’ll brew a pot of coffee and . . . oh, you’re into herb teas now, aren’t you.”

  “I can forgo beverages of any kind, if you give me an explanation.”

  “Downstairs,” said Gil McNulty, coming out into the hallway and taking hold of Max’s arm. “Safer . . . that is, easier to chat down there.”

  “Watch out,” warned his wife. “Don’t step in the blood.”

  “Ah, so you folks do see it, too.”

  Wrapping her yellow robe more tightly around her wide body, Nita led the way down the stairs.

  Before any of them reached the ground floor, the upstairs toilet started yodeling.

  Max was the only one who flinched. Noticing, he asked, “This happens regularly?”

  “Most nights,” answered Gil, yawning. He’d pulled khaki slacks on over his paisley pajamas, giving himself makeshift anklets. “Around midnight or thereabouts.”

  “We’re, sort of, used to it.”

  When they were settled in the living room, Gil said, “We would’ve invited you out for this weekend anyway, Max.”

  “Sure, I know.” He glanced up at the ceiling.

  A glistening black patch was forming on the white plaster; some thick black liquid was oozing through.

  “The houses here in Hollow Hills Circle are all good houses, well-built, all ten of them.” Nita was watching the growing black puddle. “Working for the Hollow Hills Realty Agency I could be a mite prejudiced, since I have to sell them. But, honestly, Max, there is nothing technically wrong with any of the ten. What’s been happening isn’t due to shoddy materials or faulty construction.”

  “No, that wouldn’t account for blood-curdling wails and corridors of blood,” he said, remembering to sip his peppermint tea.

  “I told you he’d be sympathetic,” said Gil across to his wife.

  Nita held her mug of coffee tightly in both plump freckled hands. “Part of the problem, Max, is my being responsible for the selling of the particular houses. They go for $200,000, which is a damn good price for this part of Connecticut. Little over an hour from New York City, really wonderful shopping mall only a few minutes downhill, brand-new middle school and a whole new high school complex planned for—”

  “Spiel,” mentioned her husband.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. Anyhow, Max, I have four more yet to sell. That’s $800,000 worth of houses and my commission will be . . . quite nice.”

  “But something is wrong with one of the houses, with this one?”

  Gil gave a bitter laugh. “If it were only this one.”

  Sitting up and putting his cup on the glass coffee table, Max said, “You mean people are experiencing similar stuff in other house in the circle?”

  “In all of them,” Nita replied, staring sadly into her coffee.

  The black splotch in the ceiling began to drip.

  Max rose, crossed to where the drops were hitting the rug and probed with a finger. “Some kind of foul-smelling sludge.”

  “It always disappears in an hour or two,” said Gil.

  “How long has all this been going on?”

  “Nearly three weeks,” answered Gil. “At first there were only small things. Odd gurgles from the pipes, modest little drippings. We had our friend Burt Nostradamus the plumber in to check out most of the early complaints. Thing is, it’s been growing increasingly worse. Now we also get screams, wails and howlings.”

  “Blood dripping in big puddles, toilets glowing in the dark, little fuzzy creatures lurking under tables . . . Oh, Max, you must realize how awful things like this will affect the property values.”

  “Every single resident of the circle has complained?”

  “That’s right, every . . . well, no,” said Nita, thoughtful. “For some reason the Snowdens haven’t uttered a negative word. Which is odd, considering.”

  “He’s Boswell Snowden,” added Gil.

  Max said, “Guy who wrote Curse of the Demon?”

  “The same,” replied his friend. “This ought to be right up his alley, but he and his nifty . . . well, she is pretty attractive, Nita, don’t scowl . . . he and his wife are acting as though nothing is wrong.”

  “Acting?”

  “I’ve done a couple of midnight prowls,” said Gil, “while the . . . manifestations were in full swing. I’m just about certain every damn house in Hollow Hills Circle is suffering from the same sort of haunting or whatever. That includes the Snowden place as well as the homes Nita hasn’t even sold yet.”

  “I’ll never sell them,” she sighed. “The poor people I conned into buying into this beautiful spot are barely speaking to me now; we all know if something isn’t done soon, some of them will try to unload. For a lot less than they paid.”

  “So far, to anticipate your next possible question, Max, we haven’t gone to the local cops,” Gil told him. “Because, frankly, I don’t see any way this could be a prank or vandalism. We could maybe ask some sort of environmental agency to come in and make a study, except this is unlike any contamination I’ve ever investigated. And on Muck I’ve investigated plenty of cases.”

  “Nobody else has gone for outside help?” Max tried his tea again.

  “The Snowdens won’t admit they’re being tormented; the Milmans are away in Europe and have been since before this mess started,” explained Nita. “As for the rest of them, the Steffansons, the Silvas and the Sanhammels, they—”

  “All afraid,” took up Gil. “See, they don’t want to be laughed at or have the circle turn into a damn tourist attraction. Besides which, should word get around this area’s contaminated by spooks or devils or whatever, well, Nita’s right . . . the property values’d plummet, Max. The housing market is lousy enough without adding a supernatural element.”

  “You c
an’t keep something like this quiet forever, though,” said Nita. “Little rumors are already leaking, and if something isn’t done soon, darn soon, it could really turn out terrible for all of us.”

  “When you phoned that you were in New York to supervise the filming of some commercials for . . . what was the product?”

  “Slurp!,” he replied. “Instant soup in a plastic mug. Our slogan is, “I’d rather Slurp! than eat!” Which brings me to an important point, folks. I am, in real everyday life, a full-fledged advertising person. When we were all chums out in San Francisco years back, I worked for someone else. The past four years and more, I’ve been president of Kearny & Associates, with an annual billing of $27,000,000. Jillian and I, along with Stephanie, live a fairly affluent life in the wilds of Marin County, and so. . . . well, I haven’t done any occult detective work for years. Far as that’s concerned, I’m retired.”

  “You did such brilliant work,” said Gil. “I was always writing your exploits up when I was with the Chronicle. That invisible antiporn group and the guy with the haunted TV set and the lycanthrope who turned into an elephant on national holidays and the suburban gnome who—”

  “Decade and more ago,” reminded Max as he stood.

  The black spot was fading, the toilet had grown silent.

  “If this whole area goes under, it’ll be awful,” said Nita. “Not just because of the financial thing, but because of the brave families who’ve settled here, Max, put down roots, fought against all sorts of—”