The Collection

by Bentley Little

  No one deserved this.

  But a wish and a nickel will get you a piece of gum. The redneck was not in jail in South Phoenix. He was tied to a porch at the front of this empty church.

  And the dead men and their women advanced on him.

  The redneck screamed, a high girlish sound which should have been gratifying but somehow was not. At the front of the room the living and the dead separated, women filing to the left, dead men moving to the right. As I watched, the women fell to their knees and began praying. The sound of their mumbling filled the room. I was chilled, but I was sweating. I stood unmoving next to Julio.

  The women sang a hymn, a minor key hymn I did not recognize in a dialect of Spanish which was unfamiliar to me.

  In single file, as if part of a ritual, they left the church through a side door in back of the dais. As one, the dead men stood.

  The church was silent now save for the pitiful whimper­ing of the bound murderer and the amplified beating of my terrified heart. One of the dead men stood apart from the crowd, stepped out of the line, moved forward. I recognized the familiar profile of Trinidad. The blood on the coyote's head had been cleaned off, but his skin was gray, his body anorexically thin. He moved easily, normally, as though still alive, and stepped up to the redneck.

  He unfastened the ropes tying the murderer's hands and feet to the post.

  Another dead man moved forward, handed Trinidad a pistol, and the coyote put the gun into the redneck's hand.

  There was not even a pause. "Die fuckers!" The redneck began shooting the second his fingers touched the trigger, arms twitching in panicked terror, laughing hysterically. Bullets hit the walls, slammed into the dead men. But the re­animated corpses did not fall. The pistol ran out of bullets almost immediately, and the redneck jumped off the dais, trying to escape, using the gun like a blackjack and beating on the heads of the men he had killed. They did not die again, however, and the murderer found himself unable toll penetrate the corpses' defensive line.

  I heard a scream, the bullwhip sound of a bone cracking, I heard the wet, sickening sound of flesh being ripped.

  The dead men were tearing their killer apart.

  I left the building. The sight was too much for me; I could not watch. Julio, and two other men I did not know who were standing at the rear of the church, remained watching not flinching.

  I caught my breath outside. I could still hear the screams, but the other, more gruesome and personal sounds of death were mercifully inaudible. The warm night air felt fresh and good after the dank closeness inside the church.

  The women waited in front of the building with me. We did not speak. There was nothing to say.

  Julio and the two other men emerged ten minutes later. Ten minutes after that, the dead men filed silently out. I had no desire to peek inside the church and see what was left of the redneck.

  Julio stepped next to me. The songbird seemed happier than he had earlier, less tense, more confident. "It is done," he said. "We can go."

  I looked at him. "That's it?"

  He grinned. "What more did you want?"

  I turned toward the dead men, now reunited with their loved ones. Women were hugging their departed husbands, kissing their late lovers, taking the corpses into their arms. I saw Trinidad, saw Father Lopez. The priest looked at me, nodded. A young woman I did not know grasped his hand, held it tightly.

  I turned away.

  What would happen now? I wondered. Where would they go? What would they do? The redneck's victims were still alive, even after their murderer's death, so they had not been resurrected merely for revenge. Would they wander off into the desert, eventually die? Or would they live here -no, exist here- in Bumblebee, set up some sort of dead com­munity, pretend nothing had happened, as though they had not kicked the bucket, as though they were still alive?

  I was going to ask Julio, see if he could tell me, but I sud­denly realized that I didn't really want to know.

  "Let's go," the songbird said. The other two men were al­ready walking back toward the cars. "This part is for the women."

  I didn't know what he meant. I didn't ask. I followed Julio down the empty dirt street. I would talk this over later with Baker. We would sit around his shack, down some beers, and I would tell him what went down. We would get drunker, he would explain to me what this all meant, why the women ran this show, what parallels there were with the past; we would talk it all out, and everything wouldn't seem so goddamn scary, so evil and fucking horri­fying as it did right now. Distance would soften this. Time would turn this into history. I hoped. I prayed.

  I got into my car, started the ignition, looked out the win­dow. I saw the women take the hands of their husbands, lovers, sons, lead them across the street away from the church. Through a crack between the two adobe buildings between which they were walking, I thought I could see a monstrous pile of dried manzanita and sagebrush.

  I started my car, passed Julio without waving, and drove back the way I had come.

  I turned on the radio. I could get nothing but a Mexican voices. I floored the gas pedal.

  It was a half hour later when I reached the highway. I looked once in my rearview mirror, and in the middle of the 1 vast black expanse behind me, in the approximate spot 1 where Bumblebee was located, I thought I saw the low glow f of a faraway fire.

  I turned onto the pavement. I didn't want to think about it. I turned up the radio.

  The next glow I saw was the light from Phoenix as I ap­proached the city perpendicular to the dawn.

  Lethe Dreams

  "Lethe Dreams" was my first major sale. My fiction had been published for years in small press magazines (most notably in David Silva's groundbreaking The Horror Show, which published the early work of so many current writers), but I'd never made it to the big time: The Twilight Zone. I kept trying, though, and fi­nally, in 1987, "Lethe Dreams" was accepted for Twi­light Zone's digest-sized sister publication Night Cry. It was a turning point in my career.

  According to Greek mythology, Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in the underworld. I came up with the title of this piece first and then built the story around it.

  "Babies need their sleep," Cindy said. "Whoever heard of letting an infant stay up as late as her parents?" But that meant she was awake and crying only two hours after they'd gone to bed themselves, Marc argued. That meant they had to get up and feed her and comfort her and then try to fall back asleep before getting up again for her early morning feeding. "Why don't we put her to bed the same time we go to bed ourselves?" he asked. "That way she wouldn't wake up until four or five in the morning. It's a hell of a lot easier to get up at five than one."

  "She is a baby," Cindy said slowly, shaking her head at?

  him as if he were either too dense or too myopic to see her!

  point. "Babies need their sleep."

  "So do adults. Don't you ever get tired of waking up in the middle of the night to feed her? Every night?"

  "That's one of the responsibilities of being a parent," she replied, lips tight. "Try, for once, to think of someone other than yourself."

  "Look, she sleeps all day anyway. What does it matter whether she sleeps during the night or during the day? What harm can it do to move her schedule up a few hours?"

  Cindy turned away from him. "I don't even want to dis­cuss it anymore." She walked into the kitchen and he heard her banging around in the cupboards, loudly letting him know that she was preparing the baby's formula.

  Marc slunk back into his chair, gently massaging his temples with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. His headache had come back, amplified beyond all reasonable measure. The Tylenols he'd taken less than a half hour ago had already worn off. Either they were getting weaker, his headaches were getting stronger, or he was becoming im­mune to the medicine's effect.

  "It's your turn, but I'll take care of her tonight," Cindy called from the kitchen. "How's that?" He did not even bother to answer. Jesus, the head ...


  He was sure the headaches were connected somehow to the unnatural hours he'd been keeping for the past two months. His body simply wasn't used to having its rest inter­rupted each night. His mind, too, was having a difficult time adjusting. For the past week the baby's cries had broken his dreams off in midstream, leaving his waking mind with the vestigial images of a strangely askew reality. He never remembered these dreams in the morning, but in the half-awake feeding interim they played hell with his sensibilities. Squinting, in the vain hope that it would help relieve his pain, he stood up and walked slowly into the kitchen. He crept past Cindy, stirring the Similac in a pot on the stove, and took the bottle of Tylenol from its place in the round condiment holder in the spice cupboard. He popped off the red childproof cap with the ease of an expert and shoved two of the acidic pills into his mouth, swallowing them without the aid of water.

  "You have another headache?" All traces of argument had vanished from Cindy's voice; her tone was gentle and concerned.

  He waved her away as though it were nothing, even as the blood pounded agonizingly in his temples. "I'm all right."

  She stopped stirring the Similac and turned off the stove burner, placing the formula-filled pot on another, colder, section of the stove. She took his arm. "Come on. Let's go to bed."

  "Let's?"

  "You know what I mean." She led him firmly down the hall to the bedroom. "You have to make an appointment. This has gone far enough. You've gone through half a bottle of aspirin in one week."

  "Tylenol," he said.

  "Whatever." She let go of his arm and pointed to the quilt-covered brass bed. "Lie down."

  He grinned. "Now you're talking."

  Her expression remained serious. "I mean it. You have to go to the doctor and find out what this is."

  "I know what it is."

  She was shaking her head before he even finished the sentence. "I'm tired of hearing that. Just go to the doctor. Be practical for once."

  He let it drop. She fussed around the room for a few moments more, regurgitating her mother's sickbed advice, and went back out to the kitchen to finish preparing the formula. He sat up against the headboard after she'd gone. The headache was better already. The Tylenol worked fast.

  He stared at the wall opposite the bed, at the cluster of Impressionist prints Cindy had mounted and framed last winter in a frenzy of decorating madness. She had (or they had, under her direction) also repainted the living room, converting the sterile white-white to a warmer off-white, and had drilled holes into the ceilings of each room in order to accommodate her new menagerie of hanging plants. The entire house had virtually been transformed over the space of a single weekend.

  He heard Cindy's quick step clicking down the hardwood floor of the hall from the kitchen to the nursery, where Anne was busily crawling around her playpen, waiting for her dinner. Or her first dinner, to be more precise. There were two more to come.

  Marc smiled. Babies were a pain. They cut into sleep time and recreation time. But they were worth it. He closed his eyes for a second ...... and opened them in blackness. Cindy was sleeping soundly beside him, her bare back pressed against his chest. She had taken his clothes off somehow, while he was asleep, and they were carefully folded over the back of an antique chair. His headache was gone, but his brain was not still. The demon phantasms of a particularly vivid nightmare were imprinted onto the backs of his pupils. He saw them wildly reeling around the room even as he noted the firm substance of reality about him. There was a woman, not un­like Cindy but with torn ragged hair and misshapen grinning teeth, who was somehow, in some way, trying to kill a low-slung scuttling monster.

  The images frightened him, made him afraid to get out of bed, made him want to fall back asleep, made him unable to fall back asleep. He could see them, or feel them, sneaking around the edges of the room, hiding in shadows just out of range of his peripheral vision. He wanted to wake Cindy up, to have her comfort his nightmare fears the way his sister used to, but something held him back. Instead, he reached over and ran his fingers through the thin part in her silken brown hair, the part which remained perfectly straight and untouched even through the dishevelment of sleep. She stirred under his touch, her back snuggling even closer against him, and he ran his hand down the soft flesh of her thin arm. Deja vu.

  He pulled his arm back quickly; so quickly that Cindy shifted from her side to her stomach, uttering some incom­prehensible moan, before settling back down into deep sleep. He lay there staring at her. The feeling had been so strong, so powerful, so instantaneous, that he had experi­enced a moment of panic, of intuitive fear. He had done this before. He had lain there on this night, in this position, and had stroked her bare arm in exactly the same way. A certain amount of deja vu was inevitable in a married relationship, he knew. There are only a finite number of things two peo­ple can do within the limited space of a bed. But this had been different. This had been ... frightening. But why? What had-? He had dreamed it. The answer came immediately and incontrovertibly. He could feel the beginnings of a headache stirring in the back 1 of his skull. He closed his eyes, thought of nothing, thought of blackness, thought of emptiness. He tried to fall asleep.

  He knew he would remember none of this in the morning.

  Marc awoke with the alarm clock. But the clock did notsay six thirty; it said eight o'clock. Cindy was standing over him smiling, a glass of orange juice in one hand and a half eaten slice of toast in the other. "I decided to let you sleep in," she said. "How's your head?"

  He shook it, to test for pain. There was none. "Fine," he said.

  She sat down next to him on the bed. "She was so good last night, you never would've believed it was her. Didn't I cry or anything. I fed her her food and she went instantly to sleep. Just like a little angel."

  Marc smiled. "Figures. Now that it's my turn, she'll probably be up all night screaming."

  Cindy laughed. "Probably." She leaned over to kiss him; her lips tasted faintly of orange juice and peanut butter. "You going to work today?"

  "Hell no." He leaned back on the pillow, stretching. "It's another 'staff development' day. Last thing I need is to put up with that crap."

  "Good. We'll go on a picnic then. Me, you, and Anne. Our first family outing."

  "We've been to the doctor. We've been to the store."

  "Those aren't family outings."

  "What are they?"

  She socked him playfully on the arm. "Just get dressed."

  They spent the day at the zoo, and although his headache came back around noon, Marc didn't say anything. He kept smiling, ignored it, and in another hour it had almost completely disappeared. There was one bad moment in the rep­tile house-a momentary flashback to a nonexistent dream-time that caused the peach fuzz hairs on the back of his neck to bristle-but it passed as soon as they moved on to the next exhibit.

  They got back in time for Anne's midafternoon feeding. The baby had slept through three-fourths of the zoo trip, had slept in the car on the way there and on the way back, and she fell asleep again almost immediately after her bottle. Cindy put her into the crib in their bedroom, and they made love on the living room floor, with the drapes open, the way they used to.

  After dinner, Marc announced that he was going to go to bed. Cindy asked if he was still sick, if his headache had come back, but he smiled and said no, he just wanted to get enough rest to go to work tomorrow. He did not mention that he wanted to get in at least four or five hours of sleep before waking up to take care of the baby. He did not mention Anne's sleeping schedule at all. He did not want to jeopard­ize the peace they had made.

  Cindy said she would stay up a while longer; there was an old James Bond movie she wanted to see, one of the Connery Bonds. She would wake him when it was time to feed the baby.

  He walked down the hall to the bedroom, left his clothes in a discarded pile on the floor, and crawled into bed. He could hear Anne's thin breathing from the crib at the foot of the bed, whistling low beneath the r
hythmic babble from Cindy's TV. He switched off the lamp on the walnut night-stand next to his head and closed his eyes, letting the baby's breath and the TV's talking lull him to sleep.

  The dream was strange. Something to do with a small dark closeted room and a wide expanse of unbroken plain.

  The room was filled with furtive shadows, its blackness bro­ken periodically by flashing red and blue lights. The plain was completely devoid of all life, and its sandy floor was al­ternately yellow and white. The two were connected some' how, intertwined with the movements and actions of a terrifyingly evil clown.

  Cindy woke him up, as promised, in time for the baby's feeding. Feeling her hands roughly shake him awake, he rolled onto his side and looked at her with half-shut eyes. "You're up already," he said. "You feed her."

  Her voice was as sleepy as his. "I'm not up. And it's your turn."

  "But you woke me up."

  "And the alarm woke me up. It's an even trade."

  His sleep-numbed brain could not grasp the logic, but he got out of bed anyway, slipping into his robe and lurching down the hallway to the kitchen. Once there, he took a baby bottle from the purifier, a nipple from the drawer, and heated the formula over the stove. The simple act of movement, the sheer effort of standing for several minutes on his feet while he stirred the Similac on the stove, caused him to wake up somewhat. And he was conscious, if not fully alert, as he made his way back down the hall to the bedroom.

  Cindy, of course, was fast asleep by the time he returned, and he left the bedroom lights off so as not to disturb her. She had moved the crib from the foot of the bed to a spot right next to her, and he walked around to her side of the bed, holding the warm bottle tightly. He placed the bottle on top of the nightstand and reached into the crib for Anne. He hugged his daughter to him.