Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  There were others, all marked secondary.

  "Horse's hoof," Hunton said thoughtfully. "Funny—"

  "Very common. In fact—"

  "Could these things—any of them—be interpreted loosely?" Hunton interrupted.

  "If lichens picked at night could be substituted for night moss, for instance?"

  "Yes."

  "It's very likely," Jackson said. "Magical formulas are often ambiguous and elastic. The black arts have always allowed plenty of room for creativity."

  "Substitute Jell-0 for horse's hoof," Hunton said. "Very popular in bag lunches. I noticed a little container of it sitting under the ironer's sheet platform on the day the Frawley woman died. Gelatin is made from horses' hooves."

  Jackson nodded. "Anything else?"

  "Bat's blood . . . well, it's a big place. Lots of unlighted nooks and crannies. Bats seem likely, although I doubt if the management would admit to it. One could conceivably have been trapped in the mangier."

  Jackson tipped his head back and knuckled bloodshot eyes. "It fits . . . it all fits."

  "It does?"

  "Yes. We can safely rule out the hand of glory, I think. Certainly no one dropped a hand into the ironer before Mrs. Frawley's death, and belladonna is definitely not indigenous to the area."

  "Graveyard dirt?"

  "What do you think?"

  "It would have to be a hell of a coincidence," Hunton said. "Nearest cemetery is Pleasant Hill, and that's five miles from the Blue Ribbon."

  "Okay," Jackson said. "I got the computer operator—who thought I was getting ready for Halloween—to run a positive breakdown of all the primary and secondary elements on the list. Every possible combination. I threw out some two dozen which were completely meaningless. The others fall into fairly clear-cut categories. The elements we've isolated are in one of those."

  "What is it?"

  Jackson grinned. "An easy one. The mythos centers in South America with branches in the Caribbean. Related to voodoo. The literature I've got looks on the deities as strictly bush league, compared to some of the real heavies, like Saddath or He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named. The thing in that machine is going to slink away like the neighborhood bully."

  "How do we do it?"

  "Holy water and a smidgen of the Holy Eucharist ought to do it. And we can read some of the Leviticus to it. Strictly Christian white magic."

  "You're sure it's not worse?"

  "Don't see how it can be," Jackson said pensively. "I don't mind telling you I was worried about that hand of glory. That's very black juju. Strong magic."

  "Holy water wouldn't stop it?"

  "A demon called up in conjunction with the hand of glory could eat a stack of Bibles for breakfast. We would be in bad trouble messing with something like that at all. Better to pull the goddamn thing apart."

  "Well, are you completely sure—"

  "No, but fairly sure. It all fits too well."

  "When?"

  "The sooner, the better," Jackson said. "How do we get in? Break a window?"

  Hunton smiled, reached into his pocket, and dangled a key in front of Jackson's nose.

  "Where'd you get that? Gartley?"

  "No," Hunton said. "From a state inspector named Martin."

  "He know what we're doing?"

  "I think he suspects. He told me a funny story a couple of weeks ago."

  "About the mangier?"

  "No," Hunton said. "About a refrigerator. Come on."

  Adelle Frawley was dead; sewed together by a patient undertaker, she lay in her coffin. Yet something of her spirit perhaps remained in the machine, and if it did, it cried out. She would have known, could have warned them. She had been prone to indigestion, and for this common ailment she had taken a common stomach tablet call E-Z Gel, purchasable over the counter of any drugstore for seventy-nine cents. The side panel holds a printed warning: People with glaucoma must not take E-Z Gel, because the active ingredients causes an aggravation of that condition. Unfortunately, Adelle Frawley did not have that condition. She might have remembered the day, shortly before Sherry Ouelette cut her hand, that she had dropped a full box of E-Z Gel tablets into the mangier by accident. But she was dead, unaware that the active ingredient which soothed her heartburn was a chemical derivative of belladonna, known quaintly in some European countries as the hand of glory.

  There was a sudden ghastly burping noise in the spectral silence of the Blue Ribbon Laundry—a bat fluttered madly for its hole in the insulation above the dryers where it had roosted, wrapping wings around its blind face.

  It was a noise almost like a chuckle.

  The mangier began to run with a sudden, lurching grind—belts hurrying through the darkness, cogs meeting and meshing and grinding, heavy pulverizing rollers rotating on and on.

  It was ready for them.

  When Hunton pulled into the parking lot it was shortly after midnight and the moon was hidden behind a raft of moving clouds. He jammed on the brakes and switched off the lights in the same motion; Jackson's forehead almost slammed against the padded dash.

  He switched off the ignition and the steady thump-hiss-thump became louder. "It's the mangier," he said slowly. "It's the mangier. Running by itself. In the middle of the night."

  They sat for a moment in silence, feeling the fear crawl up their legs.

  Hunton said, "All right. Let's do it."

  They got out and walked to the building, the sound of the mangier growing louder. As Hunton put the key into the lock of the service door, he thought that the machine did sound alive—as if it were breathing in great hot gasps and speaking to itself in hissing, sardonic whispers.

  "All of a sudden I'm glad I'm with a cop," Jackson said. He shifted the brown bag he held from one arm to the other. Inside was a small jelly jar filled with holy water wrapped in waxed paper, and a Gideon Bible.

  They stepped inside and Hunton snapped up the light switches by the door. The fluorescents flickered into cold life. At the same instant the mangier shut off.

  A membrane of steam hung over its rollers. It waited for them in its new ominous silence.

  "God, it's an ugly thing," Jackson whispered.

  "Come on," Hunton said. "Before we lose our nerve."

  They walked over to it. The safety bar was in its down position over the belt which fed the machine.

  Hunton put out a hand. "Close enough, Mark. Give me the stuff and tell me what to do."

  "But—"

  "No argument."

  Jackson handed him the bag and Hunton put it on the sheet table in front of the machine. He gave Jackson the Bible.

  "I'm going to read," Jackson said. "When I point at you, sprinkle the holy water on the machine with your fingers. You say: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, get thee from this place, thou unclean. Got it?"

  "Yes."

  "The second time I point, break the wafer and repeat the incantation again."

  "How will we know if it's working?"

  "You'll know. The thing is apt to break every window in the place getting out. If it doesn't work the first time, we keep doing it until it does."

  "I'm scared green," Hunton said.

  "As a matter of fact, so am I."

  "If we're wrong about the hand of glory—"

  "We're not," Jackson said. "Here we go."

  He began. His voice filled the empty laundry with spectral echoes. "Turnest not thou aside to idols, nor make molten gods of yourself. I am the Lord thy God . . ." The words fell like stones into a silence that had suddenly become filled with a creeping, tomblike cold. The mangier remained still and silent under the fluorescents, and to Hunton it still seemed to grin.

  ". . . and the land will vomit you out for having defiled it, as it vomited out nations before you." Jackson looked up, his face strained, and pointed.

  Hunton sprinkled holy water across the feeder belt.

  There was a sudden, gnashing scream of tortured metal. Smoke rose from the canvas belts
where the holy water had touched and took on writhing, red-tinged shapes. The mangier suddenly jerked into life.

  "We've got it!" Jackson cried above the rising clamor. "It's on the run!"

  He began to read again, his voice rising over the sound of the machinery. He pointed to Hunton again, and Hunton sprinkled some of the host. As he did so he was suddenly swept with a bone-freezing terror, a sudden vivid feeling that it had gone wrong, that the machine had called their bluff—and was the stronger.

  Jackson's voice was still rising, approaching climax.

  Sparks began to jump across the arc between the main motor and the secondary; the smell of ozone filled the air, like the copper smell of hot blood. Now the main motor was smoking; the mangier was running at an insane, blurred speed: a finger touched to the central belt would have caused the whole body to be hauled in and turned to a bloody rag in the space of five seconds. The concrete beneath their feet trembled and thrummed.

  A main bearing blew with a searing flash of purple light, filling the chill air with the smell of thunderstorms, and still the mangier ran, faster and faster, belts and rollers and cogs moving at a speed that made them seem to blend and merge, change, melt, transmute—

  Hunton, who had been standing almost hypnotized, suddenly took a step backward. "Get away!" he screamed over the blaring racket.

  "We've almost got it!" Jackson yelled back. "Why—"

  There was a sudden indescribable ripping noise and a fissure in the concrete floor suddenly raced toward them and past, widening. Chips of ancient cement flew up in a star burst.

  Jackson looked at the mangier and screamed.

  It was trying to pull itself out of the concrete, like a dinosaur trying to escape a tar pit. And it wasn't precisely an ironer anymore. It was still changing, melting. The 550-volt cable fell, spitting blue fire into the rollers, and was chewed away. For a moment two fireballs glared at them like lambent eyes, eyes filled with a great and cold hunger.

  Another fault line tore open. The mangier leaned toward them, within an ace of being free of the concrete moorings that held it. It leered at them; the safety bar had slammed up and what Hunton saw was a gaping, hungry mouth filled with steam.

  They turned to run and another fissure opened at their feet. Behind them, a great screaming roar as the thing came free. Hunton leaped over, but Jackson stumbled and fell sprawling.

  Hunton turned to help and a huge, amorphous shadow fell over him, blocking the fluorescents.

  It stood over Jackson, who lay on his back, staring up in a silent rictus of terror—the perfect sacrifice. Hunton had only a confused impression of something black and moving that bulked to a tremendous height above them both, something with glaring electric eyes the size of footballs, an open mouth with a moving canvas tongue.

  He ran; Jackson 's dying scream followed him.

  When Roger Martin finally got out of bed to answer the doorbell, he was still only a third awake; but when Hunton reeled in, shock slapped him fully into the world with a rough hand.

  Hunton's eyes bulged madly from his head, and his hands were claws as he scratched at the front of Martin's robe. There was a small oozing cut on his cheek and his face was splashed with dirty gray specks of powdered cement.

  His hair had gone dead white.

  "Help me . . . for Jesus' sake, help me. Mark is dead. Jackson is dead."

  "Slow down," Martin said. "Come in the living room."

  Hunton followed him, making a thick whining noise in his throat, like a dog.

  Martin poured him a two-ounce knock of Jim Beam and Hunton held the glass in both hands, downing the raw liquor in a choked gulp. The glass fell unheeded to the carpet, and his hands, like wandering ghosts, sought Martin's lapels again.

  "The mangier killed Mark Jackson. It . . . it . . . oh God, it might get out! We can't let it out! We can't . . . we . . . oh—" He began to scream, a crazy, whooping sound that rose and fell in jagged cycles.

  Martin tried to hand him another drink but Hunton knocked it aside. "We have to burn it," he said. "Burn it before it can get out. Oh, what if it gets out? Oh Jesus, what if—" His eyes suddenly flickered, glazed, rolled up to show the whites, and he fell to the carpet in a stonelike faint.

  Mrs. Martin was in the doorway, clutching her robe to her throat. "Who is he, Rog? Is he crazy? I thought—" She shuddered.

  "I don't think he's crazy." She was suddenly frightened by the sick shadow of fear on her husband's face. "God, I hope he came quick enough."

  He turned to the telephone, picked up the receiver, froze.

  There was a faint, swelling noise from the east of the house, the way that Hunton had come. A steady, grinding clatter, growing louder. The living-room window stood half open and now Martin caught a dark smell on the breeze. An odor of ozone . . . or blood.

  He stood with his hand on the useless telephone as it grew louder, louder, gnashing and fuming, something in the streets that was hot and steaming. The blood stench filled the room.

  His hand dropped from the telephone.

  It was already out.

  The Cat From Hell, by Stephen King

  Stephen King is without doubt the foremost contemporary practitioner of the modern horror story (a subgenre that he is almost single-handedly responsible for bringing to a widespread public in the 1970's), and one of the most successful writers in the country by any standard. In the last few years, King has gone from triumph to triumph with books such as Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Firestarter, and Cujo, all of which have been made—or are currently in the process of being made—into films or television movies. His short fiction has been collected in Night Shift. His most recent books are the novels The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, Christine and The Pet Sematary.

  King has an uncanny talent for discovering what really scares us, what dark dreams and monsters actually drive the machinery of contemporary society, existing unexamined behind the bland facade of our humdrum everyday lives.

  Here he gives us a chilling little story about a professional killer and a black-and-white cat. After reading this story, you may never feel completely easy again around your own cat—that sleek four-footed killing machine who may even now be purring beside you as you read. . . .

  Halston thought the old man in the wheelchair looked sick, terrified, and ready to die. He had experience in seeing such things. Death was Halston's business; he had brought it to eighteen men and six women in his career as an independent hitter. He knew the death look.

  The house—mansion, actually—was cold and quiet. The only sounds were the low snap of the fire on the big stone hearth and the low whine of the November wind outside.

  "I want you to make a kill," the old man said. His voice was quavery and high, peevish. "I understand that is what you do."

  "Who did you talk to?" Halston asked.

  "With a man named Saul Loggia. He says you know him."

  Halston nodded. If Loggia was the go-between, it was all right. And if there was a bug in the room, anything the old man—Drogan—said was entrapment.

  "Who do you want hit?"

  Drogan pressed a button on the console built into the arm of his wheelchair and it buzzed forward. Close-up, Halston could smell the yellow odors of fear, age, and urine all mixed. They disgusted him, but he made no sign. His face was still and smooth.

  "Your victim is right behind you," Drogan said softly.

  Halston moved quickly. His reflexes were his life and they were always set on a filed pin. He was off the couch, falling to one knee, turning, hand inside his specially tailored sport coat, gripping the handle of the short-barrelled .45 hybrid that hung below his armpit in a spring-loaded holster that laid it in his palm at a touch. A moment later it was out and pointed at . . . a cat.

  For a moment Halston and the cat stared at each other. It was a strange moment for Halston, who was an unimaginative man with no superstitions. For that one moment as he knelt on the floor with the gun pointed, he felt that he knew this cat, although
if he had ever seen one with such unusual markings he surely would have remembered.

  Its face was an even split: half black, half white. The dividing line ran from the top of its flat skull and down its nose to its mouth, straight-arrow. Its eyes were huge in the gloom, and caught in each nearly circular black pupil was a prism of firelight, like a sullen coal of hate.

  And the thought echoed back to Halston: We know each other, you and I.

  Then it passed. He put the gun away and stood up. "I ought to kill you for that, old man. I don't take a joke."

  "And I don't make them," Drogan said. "Sit down. Look in here." He had taken a fat envelope out from beneath the blanket that covered his legs.

  Halston sat. The cat, which had been crouched on the back of the sofa, jumped lightly down into his lap. It looked up at Halston for a moment with those huge dark eyes, the pupils surrounded by thin green-gold rings, and then it settled down and began to purr.

  Halston looked at Drogan questioningly.

  "He's very friendly," Drogan said. "At first. Nice friendly pussy has killed three people in this household. That leaves only me. I am old, I am sick . . . but I prefer to die in my own time."

  "I can't believe this," Halston said. "You hired me to hit a cat?"

  "Look in the envelope, please."

  Halston did. It was filled with hundreds and fifties, all of them old. "How much is it?"

  "Six thousand dollars. There will be another six when you bring me proof that the cat is dead. Mr. Loggia said twelve thousand was your usual fee?"

  Halston nodded, his hand automatically stroking the cat in his lap. It was asleep, still purring. Halston liked cats. They were the only animals he did like, as a matter of fact. They got along on their own. God—if there was one—had made them into perfect, aloof killing machines. Cats were the hitters of the animal world, and Halston gave them his respect.

  "I need not explain anything, but I will," Drogan said. "Forewarned is forearmed, they say, and I would not want you to go into this lightly. And I seem to need to justify myself. So you'll not think I'm insane."

  Halston nodded again. He had already decided to make this peculiar hit, and no further talk was needed. But if Drogan wanted to talk, he would listen.