“In Calistoga.”
“Where’s that?”
“Up north.”
“Oh.”
He began to relax. He was glad to be finished with this town.
“I closed out my lease today,” he told her. “Everything’s packed. As soon as I hit the road, I’m out of here.”
“Why did you come back to the park?”
A good question, he thought. He hadn’t planned to stop by. It was a last-minute impulse.
“I’m not sure,” he said. No, that wasn’t true. He might as well admit it. “It sounds crazy, but I guess I wanted to look for my dog. I thought I’d give it one more chance. It doesn’t feel right, leaving him.”
“Do you think he’s still here?”
He felt a tingling in the pit of his stomach. It was not a good feeling. I shouldn’t have come, he thought. Then I wouldn’t have had to face it. It’s dangerous here, too dangerous for there to be much hope.
“At least I’ll know,” he said.
He heard a sudden intake of breath and turned to her. There were tears in her eyes, as clear as diamonds.
“It’s like the end of your book,” she said. “When the little girl is alone, and doesn’t know what’s going to happen next . . .”
My God, he thought, she did read it. He felt flattered, but kept his ego in check. She’s not so tough. She has a heart, after all, under all the bravado. That’s worth something – it’s worth a lot. I hope she makes it, the Elvis script, whatever she really wants. She deserves it.
She composed herself and looked around, blinking. “What is that?”
“What’s what?”
“Don’t you hear it?” She raised her chin and moved her head from side to side, eyes closed.
She meant the music, the glasses, the sound of the party that wasn’t there.
“I don’t know.”
Now there was the scraping of steel somewhere behind them, like a rough blade drawn through metal. He stopped and turned around quickly.
A couple of hundred yards away, at the top of the slope, a man in a uniform opened the gate to the park. Beyond the fence, a second man climbed out of an idling car with a red, white and blue shield on the door. He had a heavy chain in one hand.
“Come on,” said Madding. “It’s time to go.”
“It can’t be.”
“The security guards are here. They close the park at six.”
“Already?”
Madding was surprised, too. He wondered how long they had been walking. He saw the man with the crewcut searching for his Frisbee in the grass, the bull terrier at his side. The group on the bench and the woman in the halter were collecting their things. The bodybuilder marched his two ribboned Pekingese to the slope. The Beverly Hills dentist whistled and stood waiting for his dog to come to him. Madding snapped to, as if waking up. It really was time.
The sun had dropped behind the hills and the grass under his feet was darkening. The car in the parking lot above continued to idle; the rumbling of the engine reverberated in the natural bowl of the park, as though close enough to bulldoze them out of the way. He heard a rhythm in the throbbing, and realized that it was music, after all.
They had wandered close to the edge, where the park ended and the gorge began. Over the gorge, the deck of one of the cantilevered houses beat like a drum.
“Where’s Greta?” she said.
He saw the stark expression, the tendons outlined through the smooth skin of her throat.
“Here, girl! Over here . . .!”
She called out, expecting to see her dog. Then she clapped her hands together. The sound bounced back like the echo of a gunshot from the depths of the canyon. The dog did not come.
In the parking lot, the second security guard let a Dobermann out of the car. It was a sleek, black streak next to him as he carried the heavy chain to his partner, who was waiting for the park to empty before padlocking the gate.
Madding took her arm. Her skin was covered with gooseflesh. She drew away.
“I can’t go,” she said. “I have to find Greta.”
He scanned the grassy slopes with her, avoiding the gorge until there was nowhere left to look. It was blacker than he remembered. Misshapen bushes and stunted shrubs filled the canyon below, extending all the way down to the formal boundaries of the city. He remembered standing here only a few weeks ago, in exactly the same position. He had told himself then that his dog could not have gone over the edge, but now he saw that there was nowhere else to go.
The breeze became a wind in the canyon and the black liquid eye of a swimming pool winked at him from far down the hillside. Above, the sound of the music stopped abruptly.
“You don’t think she went down there, do you?” said Stacey. There was a catch in her voice. “The mountain lions . . .”
“They only come out at night.”
“But it is night!”
They heard a high, broken keening.
“Listen!” she said. “That’s Greta!”
“No, it’s not. Dogs don’t make that sound. It’s –” He stopped himself.
“What?”
“Coyotes.”
He regretted saying it.
Now, without the music, the shuffling of footsteps on the boards was clear and unmistakable. He glanced up. Shadows appeared over the edge of the deck as a line of heads gathered to look down. Ice cubes rattled and someone laughed. Then someone else made a shushing sound and the silhouetted heads bobbed silently, listening and watching.
Can they see us? he wondered.
Madding felt the presence of the Dobermann behind him, at the top of the slope. How long would it take to close the distance, once the guards set it loose to clear the park? Surely they would call out a warning first. He waited for the voice, as the seconds ticked by on his watch.
“I have to go get her,” she said, starting for the gorge.
“No . . .”
“I can’t just leave her.”
“It’s not safe,” he said.
“But she’s down there, I know it! Greta!”
There was a giggling from the deck.
They can hear us, too, he thought. Every sound, every word magnified, like a Greek amphitheatre. Or a Roman one.
Rover, Spot, Towser? No, Cubby. That’s what I was going to call you, if there had been time. I always like the name. Cubby.
He made a decision.
“Stay here,” he said, pushing her aside.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going over.”
You don’t have to. It’s my dog . . .”
“Mine, too.”
Maybe they’re both down there, he thought.
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“No.”
He stood there, thinking, It all comes down to this. There’s no way to avoid it. There never was.
“But you don’t know what’s there . . .!”
“Go,” he said to her, without turning around. “Get out of here while you can. There’s still time.”
Go home, he thought, wherever that is. You have a life ahead of you. It’s not too late, if you go right now, without looking back.
“Wait . . .!”
He disappeared over the edge.
A moment later there was a new sound, something more than the breaking of branches and the thrashing. It was powerful and deep, followed immediately by a high, mournful yipping. Then there was only silence, and the night.
From above the gorge, a series of quick, hard claps fell like rain.
It was the people on the deck.
They were applauding.
GAHAN WILSON
The Marble Boy
GAHAN WILSON is still best known as one of America’s most popular cartoonists, his macabre work appearing regularly in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, National Lampoon, Punch and Paris Match.
His short fiction has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies, includ
ing Best New Horror 2, and his own books include Gahan Wilson’s Graveside Manner, “And Then We’ll Get Him”, Is Nothing Sacred?, I Paint What I See, Nuts, Eddy Deco’s Last Caper, Still Weird, Everybody’s Favorite Duck and the children’s series Harry, The Fat Bear Spy. In 1992 the Horror Writers of America presented him with their Life Achievement Award.
He recently contributed more than thirty full-page illustrations to Roger Zelazny’s comic horror novel, A Night in the Lonesome October, and painted the jacket artwork for Robert M. Price’s Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos and the paperback edition of Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones’s Now We Are Sick.
About the following story, he says: “Like all of the Lakeside Stories, this story is vaguely autobiographical, although this one is more autobiographical than most because there was a graveyard just like the one described. And it was part of a kid’s tradition where I grew up to sneak into it and wander around. There actually was a marble boy – a little statue like that; it was a particularly spooky graveyard. But it was a great place in my childhood and I loved it.”
IT WAS LIKE A huge hole cut into our ordinary world; a great, aching gap sawed right out of the middle of everything that made us and our world seem to make sense, a fatal hollow dug into the very center of the simple, optimistic philosophies our parents were trying to make us live by.
I did by no means realize at the time that I thought of it in those terms, but I know now that is what all of us, all the children, knew the Lakeside Cemetery to be. It wasn’t just a weird place isolated permanently from the day to day pretend reality of the grownups, it was an accessible and explorable proof to us, to their young, that even our adults – so huge and powerful, so full of rights and wrongs from the newspapers – were just as fragile and afraid as we were, after all.
The graveyard spread itself out northward from just this side of the city border for five blocks where it ran into the alley in back of Mulberry Street and living people in houses and was temporarily stopped. To the east, it crowded all the way up to the beach drive so that its grey fence and ominous, high gates could remind us of the eventual certainty of our mortality just when we had bobbed up wet and blinking into the summer air after momentarily convincing ourselves otherwise by holding our breath for a full minute underwater. To the west it was bordered firmly by the train tracks which were the extension of the city’s elevated line, now turned suburban and ground bound. If you were up there on the track in order to put pennies on them so that the copper would be squished flat and spread bigger than a half dollar by the wheels of passing trains, you had a fine, panoramic view of the graveyard spread out beneath you like a verdigris carpet splotched with fuzzy brown stains and sprinkled with a multitude of tiny little stones and statues and tombs.
It was, and is, a fine graveyard, thanks to the prosperity and grief of many Lakesidians from the far and near past, and it boasts as excellent and varied a collection of midwestern funerary art as you could hope to come across. There are any number of elaborate and diverting memorials; rows and rows of mausoleums vie with one another in sustained contests of marble pomposity, and the number of flamboyantly sculptured mourning angels is past counting.
Of course we, like kids of any generation, were perpetually fascinated with death, and of course we had long since learned that grownups were useless in any consultations on the subject since they seriously disliked talking about even the possibility of dying with their children, and, astonishingly, they never seemed to bring the subject up even among themselves unless one or another of them had recently expired, so we had to satisfy ourselves by quizzing one another on the subject in alleys and other dark places where adults wouldn’t hear and disapprove and stop us.
Why, we earnestly asked one another, do pets expire even when we love them so much? How come the universe permits birds to be flattened into gory, smelly messes by cars, one wing still pointing prettily skyward like a sail? Is it fair that a friend as young as ourselves can sicken and die because he or she caught a bug drinking from a public fountain, or from inhaling the wrong stranger’s breath in a movie theater? Does everybody rot the same, or do we all do it differently, and are we in the body when it happens or have we already left it when the eyes melt and fall into the hollow space where the brain was before it shriveled down to the size of a nut? Why does death happen? How can it happen? Must it happen?
So, if we were in the mood for a particularly adventurous and daring sort of day, a visit to the graveyard was always likely to be suggested, if only to widen everybody’s eyes a little, and now and then we actually went ahead and did it.
Naturally, any expedition to the cemetery was always very heavily draped in secrecy, unannounced and unrecounted to any parent, and we made a great business of carefully avoiding the men who gardened its grounds and dug its graves and patched up its tombs because we had a highly detailed, horrifying body of superstition about what these men would do to us if they caught us, most of them involving, one way or another, fiendish misuse of formaldehyde.
When we made our plans we never even considered going in either one of the two huge, lacy iron gates because they each had an attached gatehouse with dark little windows for watchmen smelling of embalming fluid to hide behind and peer out of. Our preferred means of entry was a certain part of the graveyard’s heavy, chain-link fence which faced the alley to its north and was satisfactorily lined with the backs of grimy garages and intriguingly decorated with tilting garbage cans full of spoiled, smelly things.
At some time in the ancient past, no one knew when or by what means, this section of the fence had become detached at its base so that it could be lifted up and crawled under and then carefully replaced so that no patrolling gardener or digger or patcher would ever know a child had snuck into their domain and was available for formaldehyde experiments.
This secret and ancient means of entrance was the one chosen by Andy Hoyle and George Dulane one mild November day when they decided the time had come for another tour of the graveyard with all its tests.
Andy and George were friends of long standing, and they had visited the graveyard once before that year in a group of five and enjoyed it very much. Today was Andy’s twelfth birthday – George had been twelve for three months – and the two of them, after a long and serious discussion, had come to the conclusion that since George had used up sneaking into the school building at night without the superintendent knowing, a graveyard exploration would be a properly scary and solemn way for Andy to mark the occasion.
They looked carefully up and down the alley and when they were sure that the only living thing in sight was a small dog who was totally preoccupied in trying to tug an interesting bone covered with dried blood out of a box, they pulled firmly at the chain links. Of course the fence held firmly for a moment, as it always held, and Andy and George went through the usual, breath-holding moment before it let go and the two of them knew for certain that the fence’s bottom still remained unattached.
They scuttled under it, pressing their fronts against the cold, leafy ground and, once inside, followed the time-honored tradition of pushing its base back down and burying it under the leaves so that no one would know. Then they scuttled a yard or two into the cemetery and paused by the gnarled, mossy side of a concrete log molded into the corner of a sooty rustic tomb.
They brushed chilled, damp bits of sod from the knees of their pants, pretended their hearts were not pounding in their chests, and looked at each other and the tall, bare trees and the endless ranks and files of stones and statues and tombs with an almost convincing casualness, and once they’d managed to get their breathing under control they savored the oldness and moldiness in the air and the way the menace of death all around them ran through their veins and arteries.
Afar off to the east they heard the metal dither of a lawn mower of the old timey, non-powered variety, and began wandering, taking paths which veered from the sound.
Old friends loomed before them as they walked: the tomb with the ston
e clock fixed forever at three thirty over its door, which prompted them once again to speculate whether this signified the exact hour of the occupant’s death; the eight foot high angel with one missing ear and carved tears running down its pitted, grey cheeks; and, one of their particular favorites, the oddly cheerful skull whose jolly grin still beamed out from under the tilting urn pressed against the back of its cranium.
The sound of the mower faded and stopped and they angled back to the east, taking the path pointed toward one of the goals especially selected for this day: a particularly sinister looking mausoleum which you knew contained dead members of a family named Baker because they had carved that name boldly and deeply across its ornate pediment. The Bakers, or at least the Baker who had commissioned the tomb, had been deeply enamored of rococo ornamentation and the little house of death was so heavily burdened with scrollings and floral fantasies that it looked like an ossified wedding cake or the rump of a Spanish galleon turned to stone.
But it wasn’t the gorgeous architectural detail of the Bakers’ tomb which drew Andy and George to it, it was the delicious almost-openness of its heavy, rusting, iron door. Thick chains and a huge padlock insured that the door would go no more than ajar, but ajar it was, and you could peer through the opening at the cobwebby dimness beyond and, even better, you could whisper hoarsely into the tomb and hear the sibilant echoes which your voice had raised.
They glanced at each other and then, because he was the bravest, Andy pressed his body against the door, enjoyed a quick shiver when it gave ever so slightly, and hissed softly into the spooky dark.
“Hello?” he whispered. “Bakers?”
George, standing just behind, felt goosebumps popping out all over his arms.
“Bakers?” Andy persisted relentlessly. “Are there any Bakers lying in there?”
After a fair pause, Andy turned to George and whispered: “I guess there aren’t any Bakers.”
To which George replied on cue: “Or, if there are any Bakers . . .”
Then together, in a ghastly wail: “. . . then they must be dead!”
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