999

by Al Sarrantonio

  “He does all right.”

  “I’m straight,” said Macleod, drunker than he thought he was, his forehead prickling with sweat, “but I’d fuck that boy like a shot. He was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “He was all right, I suppose.”

  “You wouldn’t fuck him?”

  “Not my cup of tea,” I told him.

  A black cab went down the road behind us; its orange For Hire light was turned off, although there was nobody sitting in the back.

  “So what is your cup of tea, then?” asked Professor Macleod.

  “Little girls,” I told him.

  He swallowed. “How little?”

  “Nine. Ten. Eleven or twelve, maybe. Once they’ve got real tits and pubes I can’t get it up anymore. Just doesn’t do it for me.”

  He looked at me as if I’d told him I liked to fuck dead dogs, and he didn’t say anything for a bit. He drank his Stoli. “You know,” he said, “back where I come from, that sort of thing would be illegal.”

  “Well, they aren’t too keen on it over here.”

  “I think maybe I ought to be getting back to the hotel,” he said.

  A black cab came around the corner, its lights on this time. I waved it down and helped Professor Macleod into the back. It was one of our Particular Cabs. The kind you get into and you don’t get out of.

  “The Savoy, please,” I told the cabbie.

  “Righto, governor,” he said, and took Professor Macleod away.

  Mr. Alice took good care of the Shahinai boy. Whenever I went over for meetings or briefings the boy would be sitting at Mr. Alice’s feet, and Mr. Alice would be twining and stroking and fiddling with his black-black hair. They doted on each other, you could tell. It was soppy and, I have to admit, even for a coldhearted bastard like myself, it was touching.

  Sometimes, at night, I’d have dreams about the Shahinai women—these ghastly, batlike, hag-things, fluttering and roosting through this huge rotting old house, which was, at the same time, both Human History and St. Andrew’s Asylum. Some of them were carrying men between them as they flapped and flew. The men shone like the sun, and their faces were too beautiful to look upon.

  I hated those dreams. One of them, and the next day was a writeoff, and you can take that to the fucking bank.

  The most beautiful man in the world, the Treasure of the Shahinai, lasted for eight months. Then he caught the flu.

  His temperature went up to 106 degrees, and his lungs filled with water and he was drowning on dry land. Mr. Alice brought in some of the best doctors in the world, but the lad just flickered and went out like an old lightbulb, and that was that.

  I suppose they just aren’t very strong. Bred for something else, after all, not strength.

  Mr. Alice took it really hard. He was inconsolable—wept like a baby all the way through the funeral, tears running down his face, like a mother who had just lost her only son. It was pissing with rain, so if you weren’t standing next to him, you’d not have known. I ruined a perfectly good pair of shoes in that graveyard, and it put me in a rotten mood.

  I sat around in the Barbican flat, practiced knife throwing, cooked a spaghetti bolognaise, watched some football on the telly.

  That night I had Alison. It wasn’t pleasant.

  The next day I took a few good men and we went down to the house in Earls Court to see if any of the Shahinai were still about. There had to be more Shahinai young men somewhere. It stood to reason.

  But the plaster on the rotting walls had been covered up with stolen rock posters, and the place smelled of dope, not spice.

  The warren of rooms was filled with Australians and New Zealanders. Squatters, at a guess. We surprised a dozen of them in the kitchen sucking narcotic smoke from the mouth of a broken R. White’s Lemonade bottle.

  We searched the house from cellar to attic, looking for some trace of the Shahinai women, something that they had left behind, some kind of clue, anything that would make Mr. Alice happy.

  We found nothing at all.

  And all I took away from the house in Earls Court was the memory of the breast of a girl, stoned and oblivious, sleeping naked in an upper room. There were no curtains on the window.

  I stood in the doorway, and I looked at her for too long, and it painted itself on my mind: a full, black-nippled breast, which curved disturbingly in the sodium-yellow light of the street.

  T. E. D. Klein

  GROWING THINGS

  Though he might deny it, T. E. D. Klein is something of a legendary—and enigmatic—figure. His legendary status was established in a rush in the 1980s; he was the first editor of the slick newsstand magazine The Twilight Zone even while he was distinguishing himself with such stunning stories as “Children of the Kingdom” and “Petey.” In 1984 came his eagerly awaited novel The Ceremonies, which was virtuosic in its execution and firmly established Klein in the top pantheon of horror writers. The novel was followed in 1985 by Dark Gods, which collected the two stories already mentioned with two other long pieces.

  Since that amazing torrent of work, T. E. D. Klein has been quieter, but not quiet. The following story is both a treat and a pleasure to present.

  “Hey, honey, listen to this one. It’s downright scary.”

  The magazine, drawn from near the middle of the pile, was yellowed, musty-smelling. Herb licked his lips with a fat tongue and squinted at the page with the corner turned down. “ ‘Dear Mr. Fixit: Early this spring a peculiar roundish bulge appeared under the linoleum in my bathroom, and now with the warm weather it’s beginning to get larger, as if something is sprouting under there. My husband, who is not well, almost tripped over it yesterday. What is it, some sort of fungus? How can I get rid of it without having to rip up the linoleum? As we cannot afford expensive new flooring, we are relying on you.’ Signed, ‘Anxious.’ ”

  “I shouldn’t wonder she was anxious,” said Iris from her cloud of lemon oil and beeswax. She’d been giving the old end table a vigorous polishing and was slightly out of breath. “Who wants to share their bathroom with a bunch of toadstools?”

  “Don’t worry, Fixit’s got it under control. ‘Dear Anxious: Sounds as if you have a pocket of moisture trapped between the floorboards and the linoleum. Often a damp basement is the culprit. Simply drill a hole up from the basement to release the moisture buildup, then seal the area with flash patch or creosote.’ “ Herb rubbed his chin. “Sounds simple enough to me.”

  “Not in this house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We don’t have a basement, remember? You’d have to get down on your belly and slither beneath the house, with all that muck down there.”

  “Hah, you’re right! Certainly wouldn’t want to do that!” Herb’s stomach shook as he laughed. “Thank God the damned bathroom’s new.”

  In fact, the bathroom, clean and professionally tiled, was one of the things that had sold them on the house. Herb liked long showers, and Iris—who, unlike Herb’s first wife, had never had to make time for children—was given to leisurely soaks in the tub.

  The rest of the place was in, at best, an indifferent state of repair. The rain gutters sagged, the windows needed caulking, and, if the house were to serve as anything more than a summer retreat from the city, the ancient coal-burning furnace in an alcove behind the kitchen would have to be replaced. Eventually, too, they’d have to add more rooms; at present the house was just a bungalow, a single floor of living space crowned by a not-too-well-insulated attic littered with rolls of cotton wadding, damaged furniture, and other bric-a-brac abandoned by the former owners. Who these owners were was uncertain; clearly the place hadn’t been lived in for years, and—though the real estate lady had denied it—it had probably been on the market for most of that time.

  The two of them, of course, had hoped for something better; they were, in their way, a pair of midlife romantics. But Herb’s alimony payments and an unexpected drubbing from the IRS this April had forced them to be p
ractical. Besides, they had three acres’ worth of woods, and stars they could never have seen from the city, and bullfrogs chanting feverishly in the marsh behind the house. They had an old woodshed, a swaybacked garage that had once been a barn, and a sunken area near the forest’s edge, overgrown with mushrooms and moss, that the real estate lady assured them had been a garden. They had each other. Did the house itself need work? As Herb had said airily when a skeptical friend asked if he knew anything about home repair, “Well, I know how to write a check.”

  Secretly he nourished the ambition of doing the work himself. Though he had barely picked up a hammer since he’d knocked together bookends for his parents in a high school shop class, he felt certain that a few carefully selected repair manuals and a short course of This Old House would see him through. If fate had steered him and Iris toward that creature of jest, the “handyman special,” well, so be it. He would simply learn to be a handyman.

  And fate, for once, had seemed to agree; for, among the artifacts left by the previous owners was a bookshelf stacked high with old magazines.

  Actually, not all that old—from the late 1970s, in fact—but the humidity had aged them, so that they had taken on the fragile, jaundiced look of magazines from decades earlier. Iris had wanted to throw them away—“Those moldy old things,” she’d said, curling her hp, “they smell of mildew. We’ll fill up the shelves with books from local yard sales"—but Herb refused to hear of it. “They’re perfect for a country house,” he had said. “I mean, just look at this. Home Handyman. Practical Gardener. Growing Things Organically. Modem Health. Perfect rainy day reading.”

  Luckily for Herb, there were lots of rainy days in this part of the world, because after three months of homeowning it had become clear that reading do-it-yourself columns such as “Mr. Fixit"—a regular feature in Home Handyman magazine—was a good deal more fun than actually fixing anything. He’d enjoyed shopping for tools and had turned a corner of the garage into a rudimentary workshop; but now that the tools gleamed from their hooks on the wall and the necessary work space had been cleared, his enthusiasm had waned.

  In fact, a certain lassitude had settled upon them both. Maybe it was the dampness. This was, by all accounts, one of the wettest summers on record; each week the local pennysaver sagged in their hands as they pulled it from the mailbox, and a book of stamps that Iris bought had long since stuck together. Dollars had grown limp in Herb’s wallet. Today, with the summer sky once more threatening storms, he lay aside the Handyman and spent the afternoon with his nose buried in a back issue of Country Kitchen, while Iris, unable to transform an end table from the attic into something that passed for an antique, put away her beeswax and retreated to the bedroom for a nap.

  It was growing dark by the time she awoke. Clouds covered the sky, but the rain had not come. Despite the afternoon’s inactivity, they were both too tired to cook; instead they had dinner by candlelight at a roadside inn, along a desolate stretch of highway several miles beyond the town. They toasted one another’s health and wished that they were just a few years younger.

  The house felt chilly when they returned; the air seemed thick with moisture. They’d already had to buy themselves wool mattress pads to keep their sheets from growing clammy. Tonight, to take the dampness off, Herb built a fire, carefully examining the logs he carried inside for spiders and insects that could drop off and infest the house. He remembered a line he’d seen in Practical Gardener, something about being constantly on watch for “the blight on the peach and the worm in the rosebud.”

  This evening, though, it was Home Handyman that drew him back. He’d started weeks before with the older issues at the bottom of the pile and had steadily been working his way up. While on the couch Iris yawned over a contemporary romance, he engrossed himself in articles on wood-stove safety, building a patio, and—something he was glad he’d never have to worry about—pumping out a flooded basement.

  The issue he’d just pulled out, from the top half of the pile, was less yellowed than the ones before. “Here’s a letter,” he announced, “from a man who’s had trouble removing a tree stump next to his house. Mr. Fixit says he’d better get rid of it fast, or it’ll attract termites.” Herb shook his head. “Christ, you can’t let down your guard for a second out here. And here’s one from a man who built a chimney but didn’t seal it properly.” He chuckled. “The damn fool! Filled his attic with smoke.” He eyed their fireplace speculatively, but it looked solid and substantial, the flames merry. He turned back to the magazine. The next page had the corner folded down. “Some guy asks about oil stains on a concrete floor. Mr. Fixit recommends a mixture of cream of tartar and something called ‘oxalic acid.’ How the hell are you supposed to find … Hey, listen to this, here’s another one from that same woman who wrote in before. ‘Dear Mr. Fixit: The advice you gave me previously, on getting rid of bulges under the linoleum in my bathroom by drilling up from the basement, was of little use, as we have no basement, and due to an incapacity my husband and I are unable to make our way beneath the house. The bulges—’ ”

  Iris looked up from her book. “Before it was just one bulge.”

  “Well, hon,” he said, thinking of her in the tub, “you know how it is with bulges.” He made sure he saw her smile before turning back to the column. “ The bulges have grown larger, and there’s a definite odor coming from them. What should we do?’ Signed, ‘Still Anxious.’ ”

  “That poor woman!” said Iris. She stretched and settled back into the cushions. “You don’t suppose it could be radon, do you?”

  “No, he says they may have something called ‘wood bloat.’ “ Herb shuddered, savoring the phrase. “ ‘Forget about preserving the linoleum,’ he says. ‘Drill two holes deep into the center of the bulges and carefully pour in a solution of equal parts baking soda, mineral spirits, and vanilla extract. If that doesn’t do the trick, I’d advise you to seek professional help.’ ”

  “She should have done that in the first place,” said Iris. “I’d love to know how she made out.”

  “Me, too,” said Herb. “Let’s see if the story’s continued.”

  He flipped through the next few months of Home Handyman. There were leaky stovepipes, backed-up drains, and decaying roofs, but no mention of the bulges. From the couch came a soft bump as Iris lay back and let the book drop to the rug. Her eyes closed; her mouth went slack. Watching her stomach rise and fall in the firelight, he felt suddenly and peculiarly alone.

  From outside came the whisper of rain—normally a peaceful sound, but tonight a troubling one; he could picture the land around the house, and beneath it, becoming a place of marsh and stagnant water, where God knows what might grow. The important thing, he knew, was to keep the bottom of the house raised above the ground, or else dampness would rot the timbers. Surely the crawl space under his feet was ample protection from the wetness; still, he wished that the house had a basement.

  Softly, so as not to wake his wife, he tiptoed into the bathroom—still smelling pleasantly of paint and varnish—and stared pensively at the floor. For a moment, alarmed, he thought he noticed a hairline crack between two of the new tiles, where the floor was slightly uneven between the toilet and the shower stall; but the light was bad in here, and the crack had probably been there all along.

  By the time he returned to the front room, the fire was beginning to go out. He’d have liked to add more wood, but he didn’t want to risk waking Iris. Seating himself back on the rug with a pile of magazines beside him, he continued his search through the remaining issues of Home Handyman, right up till the point, more than three years in the past, when the issues stopped. He found no further updates from “Anxious;” he wasn’t sure whether he was disappointed or relieved. The latter, he supposed; things must have come out okay.

  The issues of Handyman were replaced by a pile, only slightly less yellowed and slightly less substantial, of Modem Health, with, predictably, its own advice column, this one conducted by a “Dr. Carewell.�
�� Shingles on roots were succeeded by shingles on faces and legs; the cracked plaster and rotting baseboards gave way to hay fever and thinning hair.

  “I have an enormous bunion on my right foot,” one letter began, with a trace of pride. “I have a hernia that was left untreated,” said another. Readers complained of plantar warts, aching backs, and coughs that wouldn’t quit. It was like owning a home, Herb thought; you had to be constantly vigilant. Sooner or later, something always gave way and the rot seeped in. “Dear Dr. Carewell,” one letter began, where the page corner had been turned down, “My husband and I are both increasingly incapacitated by a rash that has left large rose-red blotches all over our bodies. Could it be some sort of fungus? There is no pain or itching, but odd little bumps have begun to appear in the center.” It was signed “Bedridden.”

  All this talk of breakdown and disease was depressing, and the mention of bed had made him tired. The fire had almost gone out. Glancing at the doctor’s reply—it was cheerily reassuring, something about plenty of exercise and good organic vegetables—he got slowly to his feet. From another room came the creak of wood as the old house settled in for the night.

  Iris snored softly on the couch. She looked so peaceful that he hated to wake her, but he knew she’d fall asleep again soon; the two of them always slept well, out here in the country. “Come on, hon,” he whispered. “Bedtime.” The sound of the rain no longer troubled him as he bent toward her, brushed back her hair, and tenderly planted a kiss on her cheek, rosy in the dying light.

  F. Paul Wilson