Tales from the Nightside

by Charles L. Grant

  The explosive roar of a racing engine broke them apart, but not, he knew, before his mother had seen them. She slid gracefully out from behind the wheel, a large bag of groceries cradled in one arm. She was tall and blonde and warmly lovely, and David's eyes hardened when he saw her smile. Snakelike. Luring. Claire muttered something under her breath and was already across the lawn and on the sidewalk before his mother reached the porch.

  "Interesting," she purred as she waited for him to hurry ahead and open the door. "You must come inside and tell me all about it, dear." She was dressed in black, David's favorite color. "You will tell me about her, won't you, Davey?"

  He did.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, his hands moist and pulling nervously at the bottom of his sweater, he recited a detailed account of his passing of the afternoon. He said nothing about missing the last game of the season, however, and nothing about the rug. He tried to keep sight of her eyes, to read them, to anticipate them, but she only smiled and murmured "how nice" every few minutes. Only once did she frown—When he mentioned the temptation to leave the house and wander toward the football stadium. But the moment passed, and all he could do now was wait.

  They dined, and the sun went down. In the comers of the room warmed by the oven the shadows hovered and shrank away from the light. The clouds shredded and vanished. The stars rose on the train of the moon. The refrigerator hummed, slightly out of tune. The clouds returned. The rain returned. A single bulb hung unshaded over the table, and the shadows were warm and loving on David's stiff back.

  Finally, when he thought he was going to have to beg her like a child, his mother rose and stood by the cellar door, a large iron key resting in her palm. He licked at his lips in spite of himself and gripped the edge of the table as tightly as he could to prevent himself from lunging.

  Rain pelted the windows.

  He did not hear it.

  Claire, he thought, would you come if you knew?

  "Well, now, Davey." The voice was soft, sleek, deceptively gentle. "Well, do you think you've done well enough these past few days to deserve it, dear?" He felt himself nodding as though in a trance. "I wonder," she said then, "if we might truthfully call this an addiction. You know, dear, like drugs and things." She pursed her lips, considered, rejected with a toss of her hair. "Oh, well, no matter. Come on, Davey, do you deserve it?"

  He swallowed. "Yes, Mother." His voice was years away, to the first time she had discovered he liked the darkness, preferred it. Her laugh, then, and the snake's glint in her eyes.

  There was a silence. Only the rain.

  Finally she nodded her agreement and opened the door.

  "Davey?"

  He rose, and for a long moment dared not release the table. When he did he moved quickly, brushing past her and taking the first step down, waiting in terror for her to summon him back the way she did when he appeared too anxious, eager, desperate, laughing at him with her eyes closed and the key catching the light and warning him that he would never escape her as the dream-father had done.

  He glanced up at her and was delighted to see her look startled when he grinned suddenly, broadly, completely without mirth.

  "Good-bye, Mother," he said calmly, and he yanked the door from her hand and slammed it shut.

  The furnace was out.

  Below him there was... nothing.

  He made his way down and stood in the center of the floor, perspiration gathering in ice-runs along his spine, his sides, the inner sweep of his thighs.

  For so very long he had waited, prayed, planned, and dreamed—and now, suddenly, he wondered.

  Crazy.

  If I'm wrong, I'm crazy.

  And if I'm right...

  ...no more football or sleigh rides or holding hands; no more gropings on the porch or the urgings of his loins; no more Oxrun; no more tests to fail because he would rather talk to the dark than read a book; no more sunlight; no more...

  Crazy.

  Unless...

  Slowly, not quite fearfully, he stripped off his clothes and shivered in the clammy sheath that rose through him from the soles of his feet.

  No more teachers who yelled...

  He swallowed. He listened. And when he finally understood that he wasn't crazy after all, that he knew he really knew and it wasn't so bad not to be crazy... when he understood it and believed it, he lifted his arms wide to feel the warming black air, smiling, loosening every muscle and nerve and cell and thought and dream and prayer and sight and scream; he believed; and he believed; and felt himself drifting, sailing, floating... felt himself grow and shrink and lift and swirl.

  No... more... Mother.

  And in time, in a very long time that was no time at all, he learned at last how the shadows in attics and cellars and dark empty closets were born and survived. He studied his clothes lying in a pile on the damp concrete floor. He learned the difference between a nightmare and a wish, a death and a dying, November grey and December black.

  He learned that his old friends were true friends indeed.

  He learned that Claire, despite her teaching, was no friend at all.

  So... he waited.

  And in time, in a very long time that was no time at all, the door at the top of the stairs opened. The light still burned in the kitchen, and he saw from every dark angle the dark figure at the threshold.

  "Davey?" A snake-word.

  He felt himself smiling, and wondered if he could.

  “Davey, that little girl is here to see you." The voice was clear, was light, was diamond hard and serpent hissing. “She says you were supposed to pick her up this evening." A breath. "You didn't tell me about that, Davey.” A sigh. "You'll have to come out now, dear." She waited. "Come out, David, you have a visitor."

  Claire, he thought then, it'll only take a minute.

  "David!"

  His mother hesitated a moment longer before following her elongated shadow down the stairs, paused before leaving the path of dim light and hurrying toward the furnace at the far side of the room. Her heels struck the floor like the burr of a rattler.

  "Hey, Davey," Claire whispered from the kitchen.

  “David, you can come out now, dear," his mother said sweetly. “We've had quite enough of your games, your little friend and I."

  No friend at all.

  The silence. Not even the rain.

  "Hello... Mother."

  She spun around just in time to see the darkness gather to blacken the light and bury the stairs.

  “David?"

  To swallow the coal bin, the woodpile, the furnace, the door.

  "David?"

  "Good-bye... Mother."

  Her scream was cut off before it reached her blackening lips; her eyes were closed before she dissolved.

  A pause.

  A... breathing.

  "Davey?" Claire called from the head of the stairs. "Davey, it's spooky down there. Mrs. Hancock? Davey? Come up here, please, Davey? Please?"

  She knew, he thought, and there was always the chance that she might remember.

  The darkness moved, and the kitchen light died.

  A whisper: "Davey?"

  A smile: "Hello, Claire."

  Home

  The fight, if that's what it was, had been vicious, swift, and punctuated with such high shrieking yelps and truncated dying howls that Art wondered if anyone in the neighborhood had gotten back to sleep—or even wanted to sleep while agony clung to the dark long after the sounds had faded.

  He had been yanked out of a softdream, so rare these days, in which he and Felicity were once again enjoying a candlelight dinner on one of the slow-moving bateaux mouche that caressed the Seine after the sun had gone down. He had been leaning over the table to kiss her when the fight began, shattering candles to sparks and Felicity to nightmare. And by the time he was fully awake, it was over.

  “What the...?" He started to rise, staring at the bedroom window.

  “Dogs," Felicity muttered sleepily beside him. "It
was dogs."

  "Jesus!" He wiped a hand over his face, trying to reconcile what he had heard with what he had been seeing.

  "Go back to sleep, love," she said, her voice muffled against the pillow. "You'll find out in the morning."

  He had not argued, but neither had he been able to recapture sleep, not to mention the boat and the dinner and the light in his wife's eyes; and he'd spent the rest of the dark hours alternately dozing and waiting for the window to lighten... and praying that the screams would not be repeated.

  Now he stood on the sidewalk in front of their small Cape Cod and stared up Western Road. There was a small crowd, mostly women, standing near the intersection at Chancellor Avenue two blocks up. A patrol car was angled in toward the curb, behind it a van from the ASPCA in Harley. He moved no closer; he could see through the jeans and skirts and one or two bathrobes infrequent glints of bright, damp red. Saw one of the animal shelter attendants grimace distastefully as he lifted a bundle from the pavement and placed it gingerly in the van.

  "Great way to start the day/' Felicity said from the doorway, arms folded loosely over her chest.

  "From what I can tell it was Kenner's setter," Art told her with a nod toward the people now slowly dispersing. "Looks like he ran into a big one this time, the dope."

  "Y'know, that's right in front of Calvin's house, Art. Why don't you go up and see if he knows what happened?"

  He shook his head without bothering to consider it, and Felicity shrugged before blowing him a kiss and vanishing inside. He stared a few moments longer—until the patrol car drove away—then slipped his hands into his pockets and headed for the bus stop three blocks distant. Later, he thought; maybe I'll see him later.

  Probably not.

  It wasn't that he didn't like Cal Schiller—they really didn't know each other well enough for feelings one way or the other—but the old man was part of a mystery Art did not think he could handle this early in the morning. Just as Felicity found the engine of their station wagon something akin to an alchemist's child, he could not help but puzzle over the territory Schiller had apparently claimed for himself.

  Not that there was anything unusually special about the mock English Tudor on the corner lot. It was like more than one other home in Oxrun Station, yet unlike any others. Its lawn was a carefully tended green, pocked with bee-luring clover in the spring, browning toward the end of September, and shaded by red maples and willows when the sun and rain worked properly. And, like every other lawn on Western Road, it was mowed by one of the high school students who worked the street for spending money during the summer.

  By the broad front stoop, however, was a gleaming blue tricycle, and beside that a silver skateboard elegantly designed for maximum speed. A large striped beach ball was generally set in the middle of the lawn, and down the side by the back corner was a sandbox nearly four by four that was always, as far as he could tell, covered with a bright red square of wet-shining canvas. A swing- and-slide set in the backyard, chrome and polished.

  Nothing at all out of place for Western Road in Oxrun Station in the middle of the summer.

  But Schiller, so far as Art understood, had never been married, had no nieces or nephews who descended on him for the weekend, nor went out of his way to lure the neighborhood children past the redwood picket fence. Yet every morning, as Art walked toward his bus stop, he could see the old man setting out the toys one by one, muttering to himself and smiling. Never looking up. Never waving a greeting.

  For no reason at all it spooked him. And for no reason at all, in the year since Schiller had moved in, he had not once found the courage to ask him straight out what he was doing. No reason at all.

  "I can't stand it," he told Felicity one evening in late August. It was a week after the Kenners' setter had been killed, two days after the boy who mowed Art's lawn was reported missing by his parents.

  "You can't stand what," she said, leaning back against the sink and putting her hands on her hips.

  "Calvin, that's what."

  "What, again?" She shook her head at his folly and pushed off to the stove where she was making enough iced tea to last them several days. As she sliced the lemons and squeezed the juice into a bowl already filled with sugar, orange rinds, and wedges of fresh plums, he sighed and left the table, stood beside her with an arm loosely around her waist.

  “All right," he said, "so it's crazy."

  "No. You are; it isn't."

  "Thanks a lot."

  She licked lemon juice off her fingers and shuddered. "I'm not the one who's nuts about an old man who just happens to like kids, you know. Would you like him better if he were something like a W.C. Fields? You want him, would it make you feel better if he chased the brats with a cane or something?"

  Art had his hand slapped for swiping a plum. He bit into it and wiped his mouth with a sleeve. "I'm not nuts about it, Fel, I'm just curious, that's all. I mean, he does it every day the minute the weather gets warm or it doesn't look like it's going to rain. Every day, like he was some kind of robot. And I never once—never once, I tell you—have seen one single kid playing there with those things."

  "Wrong," she said with a grin, pouring the congealed mixture into a four-gallon pot of'hot dark tea. "You're wrong, Art." She stirred the steaming liquid with a wooden spoon. "There've been some."

  "All right—some," he conceded. "But is it enough to—"

  "Oh, come on, drop it, Art," she said wearily, pushing him away from the stove. "Just drop it, all right? It's too hot and I'm too tired and whatever Cal Schiller wants to do with his own spare time is his own business. Right?"

  Well... maybe, he thought sourly, and spent the rest of the evening in front of the television, watching a ball game that didn't interest him, drinking the iced tea without tasting it, and wondering what in hell had happened to his life that it should be so boring, so empty, that he was forced into uncovering mysteries whose solutions were so obvious he didn't want to know them. Hell. A hundred years ago, when he was single, he would have challenged the heat and the summer and the month and the world. Now he only sat and pouted and didn't give a damn at all that the man who just slid into third base was so safe the umpire should have been lynched on the spot. Hell. And it wasn't until nearly midnight that Felicity finally teased him out of his sulking and into their bed.

  That night, shortly before dawn, old Ellie Nedsworth's Siamese tom died; her daughter found its left hind paw in the gutter, gouts of bloodstained tan fur scattered all over the street.

  Almost without realizing it, Art found himself emerging as the neighborhood's leader. He organized a block search for signs of a dog pack, spurred by reports—though vague and unsubstantiated—that one was in fact roaming through the village. There had been incidents of children being bitten after sunset, and at least two young runaways were thought privately to have been killed by the night-marauding animals. And though they were given every cooperation by Chief Stockton and the police, Art and his neighbors finally decided that Western Road, at least, was not being terrorized by something out of a B-movie's nightmare.

  There were, however, no alternatives given.

  "Great White Hunter," Felicity said when he finally returned home an hour past dark. "The stupid cat was hit by a car and dragged. Lord, Art, you've seen it before." She grinned and pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead. "The story really is that everyone here except Cal wants to be in Ellie's will when she dies."

  He opened his mouth to protest, saw the look on her face and grinned sheepishly. She could very well be right—about the cat. The other rumors were, as rumors tend to be, convenient, especially during a summer as boring as this one had turned out to be. And now that he looked back on it, tramping through gardens and vegetable patches, poking in alleys, and beating the brush around the pond in the park seemed more foolhardy than brave, far more romantic than practical. It was, he thought, almost as though he were actually wishing there was a pack so he could prove his manhood.

&n
bsp; Felicity took care of that, however, when she stripped off his trousers.

  But when they were done, entwined and dozing, he could not help listening to the night and imagining himself fending off a horde of slavering beasts with blood on their fangs and his name in their growls.

  The following day, as though in punishment for his imagination, was the first in a debilitating sequence marked by temperatures that remained well into the nineties. The bus was hot and stifling, the riders and driver cranky, and he and Felicity entered into another of their rounds o£ increasingly harsh bickering.

  About the raise that did not come when they had expected it and had purchased the new station Wagon on the basis of its place in a revised and now utterly useless budget; about their son's having to attend summer sessions in New York because of a failure in biology during his freshman year at Cornell and his refusal to take his credits at Hawksted College in the Station; about his own reluctance to acknowledge his sullen dissatisfaction with his present job, the lack of extra money definitely not included. Felicity had been after him for over a year to take any one of the several offers he had had, to stop being so pigheadedly and unrealistically loyal to a company that clearly did not appreciate his talent for figures as much as it took him smugly for granted; and, she concluded as she always did, if he was going to stay with the firm in spite of everything, then he should stop bitching about not having any money, time, respect, and the dozens of other things that made his coming home during the heat wave something to be dreaded.

  "I see," he said slowly at last, on Thursday night, when the latest skirmish had ended. He reached for the kitchen's screen door. "I suppose you'd rather have me stay in town, is that it? Is that what you're trying to say?"

  She did not look up from the table where her hands were clasped knuckle-white. "When you're like this, Art, day after day after... yes." She took a deep breath. "Yes."

  He slammed the door without satisfaction and shoved his hands into his jean pockets, walked stiff-legged down the driveway to the sidewalk and turned left. He ignored the muted heavy-summer sounds of televisions and radios, stereos and faint laughter, that hung over the street like the humidity that clung to the foliage in a timid fog; he paid no heed to a convertible blaring past that screamed out-of-date acid rock like a calliope in the hands of a madman; and he prayed once, fervently, that the dog—whatever kind of dog it was—that had killed the Irish setter would take hold of Julius Delarenzo's wattled neck and squeeze until Art got himself the raise, and a goddamned new office.