‘Wait,’ I said, but the transfer had been made and once again the phone began ringing so many times that I feared no one would answer.
Then the ringing stopped, although no voice came on the line. ‘Hello,’ I said. But all I could hear was an indistinct, though highly reverberant, noise - a low roaring sound that alternately faded and swelled as if it were echoing through vast spaces deep within the caverns of the earth or across a clouded sky. This noise, this low and bestial roaring, affected me with a dread I could not name. I held the telephone receiver away from my ear, but the roaring noise continued to sound within my head. Then I felt the telephone quivering in my hand, pulsing like something that was alive. And when I slammed the telephone receiver back into its cradle, this quivering and pulsing sensation continued to move up my arm, passing through my body and finally reaching my brain where it became synchronized with the low roaring noise that was now growing louder and louder, confusing my thoughts into an echoing insanity and paralyzing my movements so that I could not even scream for help.
I was never sure that I actually had made that telephone call to resign my position at the company. And if in fact I did make such a call, I could never be certain that what I experienced - what I heard and felt in that telephone niche at the end of the hallway outside my apartment - in any way resembled the dreams that recurred every night once I stopped showing up for work at the factory. No amount of medication I took could prevent the nightly onset of these dreams, and no amount of medication could efface their memory from my mind. Soon enough I had taken so much medication that I didn’t have a sufficient amount left to overdose my system, as Blecher had done. And since I was no longer employed, I could not afford to get my prescription refilled and thereby acquire the medication I needed to tolerate my existence. Of course I might have done away with myself in some other manner, should I have been so inclined. But somehow I still retained higher hopes for my life. Accordingly, I returned to see if I could get my job back at the factory. After all, hadn’t the person I spoke with at the regional centre told me that the Quine Organization was not accepting resignations at this time?
Of course I couldn’t be sure what I had been told over the telephone, or even if I had made such a call to resign my position with the company. It wasn’t until I actually walked onto the floor of the factory that realized I still had a job there if I wanted one, for the place where I had stood for such long hours at my assembly block was unoccupied. Already attired in my grey work clothes, I walked over to the assembly block and began fitting together, at a furious pace, those small metal pieces. Without pausing in my task I looked across the assembly block at the person I had once thought of as the ‘new man’.
‘Welcome back,’ he said in a casual voice.
‘Thank you,’ I replied.
‘I told Mr Frowley that you would return any day now.’
For a moment I was overjoyed at the implicit news that the temporary supervisor was gone and Mr Frowley was back managing the factory. But when I looked over at his office in the corner I noticed that behind the heavily frosted glass there were no lights on, although the large-bodied outline of Mr Frowley could be distinguished sitting behind his desk. Nevertheless, he was a changed man, as I discovered soon after returning to work. No one and nothing at the factory would ever again be as it once was. We were working practically around the clock now. Some of us began to stay the night at the factory, sleeping for an hour or so in a corner before going back to work at our assembly blocks.
After returning to work I no longer suffered from the nightmares that had caused me to go running back to the factory in the first place. And yet I continued to feel, if somewhat faintly, the atmosphere of those nightmares, which was so like the atmosphere our temporary supervisor had brought to the factory. I believe that this feeling of the overseeing presence of the temporary supervisor was a calculated measure on the part of the Quine Organization, which is always making adjustments and refinements in the way it does business.
The company retained its policy of not accepting resignations. It even extended this policy at some point and would not allow retirements. We were all prescribed new medications, although I can’t say exactly how many years ago that happened. No one at the factory can remember how long we’ve worked here, or how old we are, yet our pace and productivity continues to increase. It seems as if neither the company nor our temporary supervisor will ever be done with us. Yet we are only human beings, or at least physical beings, and one day we must die. This is the only retirement we can expect, even though none of us is looking forward to that time. For we can’t keep from wondering what might come afterward - what the company could have planned for us, and the part our temporary supervisor might play in that plan. Working at a furious pace, fitting together those small pieces of metal, helps keep our minds off such things.
<
* * * *
CHARLES L. GRANT
Whose Ghosts These Are
Charles l. grant was named grand master at the 2002 World Horror Convention in Chicago. It was a well-deserved accolade for a writer and editor with more than 100 books to his credit and a mantelpiece filled with awards, including the World Fantasy, British Fantasy and Nebula. His pseudonyms include ‘Geoffrey Marsh’ (pulp adventure), ‘Lionel Fenn’ (funny fantasy), ‘Simon Lake’ (Young Adult horror) and ‘Felicia Andrews’ and ‘Deborah Lewis’ (both romantic fantasies).
His 1986 novel The Pet has been optioned by the movies, the story ‘Crowd of Shadows’ was optioned by NBC as a TV film, while ‘Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street’ was adapted for the syndicated series Tales from the Darkside. His short fiction has been collected in Tales from the Nightside, A Glow of Candles, Nightmare Seasons, The Orchard, Dialing the Wind, The Black Carousel and A Quiet Way to Scream, and recent books include When the Cold Wind Blows, the fifth volume in the Black Oak series, and Redmoor: Strange Fruit, a major historical horror novel from Tor, which takes place between 1786 and the 1890s.
‘When I was asked to contribute to another themed anthology, I decided to try another serial-killer piece,’ explains Grant, ‘except this time I made him a cop. The editor made a big deal about using the museum, so I did; as it turned out, though, hardly anyone else did. Go figure.’
* * * *
T
he street does not change, morning to night. Shops open, shops close; pedestrians walk the crooked sidewalks, with or without burden, peering in the store windows, wishing, coveting, moving on; vans and trucks make their deliveries and leave, while automobiles avoid it because it curves so sharply, so often. To walk from one end to the other is like following the dry bed of a long-dead stream that snakes from no place to nowhere.
None of the buildings here are more than four storeys high, though they seem much taller because the street itself is so narrow. They are old, these buildings, but they are not frail. They are well-kept, mostly, almost equally divided between brick and granite facades with occasional wood trim of various colors. Nothing special about them; nothing to draw a camera lens or a sketch pad, a commemorative plaque, a footnote in a tourist guide. Stores, a few offices, at ground level on both ends, apartments and offices above; in the middle, apartment buildings with stone stairs and stoops, aged white medallions of mythical creatures over each lintel. Gateless iron-spear fences, small plots of grass, flower boxes, trees at the curb.
Nothing changes, and Hank Cabot liked it that way.
He walked this tree-lined block and the surrounding neighborhood for close to fifteen years, his uniform so familiar that in his civilian clothes people he saw every day sometimes had to look at him twice just to be sure he was who they thought he was. An almost comical look as well, as if he had shaved off a mustache and they weren’t quite able to make out what was different about him.
It was a partial anonymity and he had never been able to decide whether it was good or bad.
Retirement, on the other hand, was, in the beginning, good.
&
nbsp; He had loved his blue tunic and the brass buttons and the polished belt with its gleaming attachments, refusing promotions once he had reached sergeant because he’d wanted nothing to do with the politics of being an officer, nothing to do with other parts of the city, nothing to do with anything but his job as he had eventually defined and refined it.
He was a beat cop, nothing more, nothing less.
He wrote parking tickets and scolded kids who taunted other kids and old folks; he investigated minor break-ins and petty theft; he had heart-to-hearts with shoplifters and angry spouses; he broke up fights and arrested drunks and gossiped and swapped jokes and had once spent an hour on a damp stoop with a little girl, trying to reattach the head of her doll.
He was a beat cop.
And now, at long last in his mid-fifties, he was something else, and he wasn’t sure yet what that was.
That was the bad part.
In a way, it was kind of funny, that first day away from the Job. He had slept in, a sinful luxury whose guilt he had cheerfully grinned away; he had made a slow breakfast and read the paper and done a little cleaning of his second-floor apartment; and when at last habit grabbed him by the scruff, he had taken out a new denim jacket and had gone for a walk. The street first, of course, then several others north and south. Not too far afield, but far enough. Restraining himself from checking closed shop doors, the timing on parking meters, the alleys between buildings, the empty lots.
It had been an effort.
It had nearly worn him out.
It hadn’t been until that evening, while he ate a sandwich in front of his living-room window and watched the street put itself to bed, that he’d realized no one had greeted him with anything more than a polite nod, complained to him, whined at him about the injustices the city had settled upon their shoulders and why the hell couldn’t he do something about it.
The good part was, he didn’t have to answer them anymore, didn’t have to lie or be a confessor or a teacher or a parent who happened to have a gun on his hip.
The bad part was… nights when he couldn’t sleep because he was supposed to be on shift, nights when he slept and didn’t dream and woke up feeling as if he’d walked a hundred miles with a hundred-pound pack on his back, nights when nightmares of horribly distorted and twisted faces pressing close to his face made him sit up and scream—except the scream was only a hoarse croaking, and the nightmare itself eventually began to lose some of its terror when he figured they were the faces of the angry victims he couldn’t help and the angry culprits he had apprehended over the course of thirty years.
Over a year later, he and the nightmares had become old friends. But his friends on the street still looked at him oddly.
“It’ll take some getting used to, you know,” said Lana Hynes for at least the hundredth time, dropping into the chair opposite him at the Caulberg Luncheonette. She fanned an order pad at her neck as if it were muggy July instead of the cool middle of October. “For them too, I mean. All this time, they don’t know what you look like.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ve lived here forever, right? I didn’t have the uniform on all the time.”
But he thought he knew what she meant. He was, in or out of the Blue, nothing special. Not tall, a slight paunch, a face faintly ruddy, red hair fading much too swiftly to grey. An ordinary voice. Cops hated people like him—no one ever knew what they really looked like.
She grinned then, more like a smirk, and he felt a blush work its way toward his cheeks. This time he knew exactly what she meant. They had been lovers once, before he jilted her for the Job, and now, for better or worse, they were friends. So much so, it seemed, that lately she had taken to ignoring him when he came in, just to tick him off so she could tease him about it later.
“Knock it off,” he muttered at that grin, grabbing his burger quickly, taking a bite.
“Why, Mr. Cabot, I am sure I do not know what you mean.” A laugh soft in her throat, and she leaned forward, crinkling the front of her red-and-white uniform blouse, the one that matched the checkered floor, the tablecloths, the pattern around the edge of the menu. It drove her crazy, and frankly, he was getting a little tired of hearing about it.
“The bill,” was all he said.
She scowled. “Screw you, Cabot.”
His turn to grin: “Been there, done that.”
A close thing, then: would she slap him or laugh?
It startled him to realize that he had, at some imprecise moment on some non-momentous day, stopped caring very much. Startled him, then saddened him, then angered him that she didn’t realize it herself. Maybe it was time to start eating somewhere else.
All this in the space of a second, maybe two.
Damn, he thought; what the hell’s the matter with you, pal?
She neither slapped nor laughed. She tapped a pencil against her pad and said, “So, you been to that museum yet?”
Curtly: “No.”
“Well, why not?” Her own red hair fell in carefully arranged curls over one eye. “I’d’ve thought you’d like something like that. All those bad-guy exhibits. You know, like that Ghost guy.”
“That Ghost guy,” he said, knowing he sounded stuffy, “is a killer, Lana. Nothing interesting about him, not at all. And I had enough of that on the Job, thank you.”
A hand reached out and slapped his arm lightly. “Oh, please, give me a break, okay? No offense, but it’s not like you were a detective. You didn’t work with dead bodies every day, you know?”
“Yeah, maybe, but still…”
An impatient call from the counter brought Lana to her feet. She dropped his bill on the table, leaned over to kiss his cheek. And whispered in his ear: “It’s been over a year, Hank. Do something different for a change, before you turn into an old woman.”
He nodded automatically, gave her an automatic “Yes, dear,” and laughed silently when she slapped him across the back of his head. Not so lightly. Another laugh, and he looked out at the street while he finished his lunch. The trees had turned, and sweaters and lined jackets had been rescued from storage. A puff of autumn cold surged against his ankles each time the door opened. A pleasant shiver, a comfortable reminder of how miserable the previous summer had been and how far away the next one was.
He spent the afternoon at a high-school football game. He didn’t know the teams, didn’t know the schools, just enjoyed the hot dogs and the soda and the cheerleaders who made him feel exceedingly old. A fair-to-middling dinner at a small Italian restaurant took him past nightfall, and he decided to walk off all the wine he had drunk.
With his collar snapped up and his hands deep in his pockets, he moved through the fleeting clouds of his breath, instinctively watching the dark that hid behind all the lights. The shadows he made as he passed under street lamps swung around him, fascinated him for a while. He wondered if, like fingerprints, everyone’s shadow was different. When the angle was right, the light just so, his shadow took to a low brick wall and paced him a few strides, and he decided they weren’t like fingerprints at all. They were like ghosts who gave you an idea what it would be like to be dead.
Damn, he thought, and cast his attention out to the city instead. Where he glowered at a young couple arguing under the canopy of a luxury apartment building, whistled softly at a cat watching him narrow-eyed from a garbage-can lid. A taxi nearly ran him down when it took a corner too tightly; his footsteps sounded too sharp, and for half a block he tried to walk on his toes.
Halloween decorations everywhere, here and there mixed in with cardboard turkeys and cartoon-like Pilgrims. One damn store even had its Christmas lights up.
He felt his temper, so long with him that it was like an old comfortable coat, begin, like that coat, to wear thin at the edges. A shift of his shoulders, a brief massage to the back of his neck, and he quickened his pace, anxious to get to the three rooms that were his. The secondhand furniture, the old-fashioned kitchen, the rust-ring around the tub’s drain that had been there when he
’d moved in. It wasn’t the warmth or the comfort; he just wanted to be away from the streets, the people, the traffic… the city.
Breathing hard. Watching his shadow. Following his shadow until he blinked and found himself at the living-room window, staring down at the trees that smothered most of the night’s artificial light, leaving specks of it on the pavement, shimmering as an autumn wind rose while the moon set unseen.
A deep breath, a sigh for all the wine that had stolen some of his time, and he slept most of the day away. It felt good. It made him smile. Another habit broken, and he treated himself to dinner and a movie, and walked home again. He liked it so much he did it again a few nights later, and again the night after that, and a few nights after that, taking a child-like pleasure in once in a while losing track of the hour. No schedules, no meetings; just him and the street that never changes, morning to night.
A week after Halloween he finally returned to Caulberg’s for an early supper. His usual table was already occupied, so he took a stool at the counter, waiting patiently for Lana to acknowledge him. When at last she did, with a look he knew well—It’s about time, you son of a bitch—he felt a momentary crush of guilt for ignoring her for so long. She was a good friend, after all; probably… no, absolutely his only friend. But his temper came instantly to attention when she slapped a cup and saucer in front of him, poured coffee and said, “Well, look who’s here. The Lone Stranger.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 38
