Bill waves a fat finger at me. “Let’s do a few shots now and it’ll hit us just in time to shoot. Trust me. I do this all the time.”
He was right. He does. The whiskey hits us just as we’ve lined up trash on a fence out in some disused field miles away. He’s a good shot. I pretend not to be half bad. Truth is that I’ve spent an untold number of drunken nights getting hillbillies and rednecks to shoot at things that shouldn’t be shot at. It’s not all about college girls, struggling ex-addicts, and cheating husbands. I gotta dig deep to keep on keepin’ on. Some nights it’s getting spanked by a priest, others it’s getting someone to cheat at cards, and yeah, still others are spent shooting cans out in the sticks, talking a drunk idiot into going down on his drunker sister or . . . putting some buckshot in his asshole neighbor.
So, yeah, I’ve done this once or twice.
We shoot until we’ve almost run through his ammo. I get pretty close most of the time, but as the shells start running thin, I start nailing my shots one after another after another.
“Damn, son,” he says. “You’re getting the hang of it.”
“I’m getting sober is what I’m getting.”
“Young man like you can hold his liquor. I’m drunk as hell.”
“Well, I ain’t anymore. Let’s go get some more to drink.”
He looks at his watch. “Bar’s closed. Missed it by ten minutes.”
I make a pained face and look up at the wide dark sea of stars above. We really are out in the middle of nowhere. “There’s a house along the road about a mile back. What do you say we raid their liquor cabinet?” I shoot him a playful smile, but cock my brows just so to tell him I’m serious.
“That’s breaking and entering.”
“Yeah.”
“No way,” he says.
“What? Do you know ’em?”
“No.”
“Well, ain’t you never raised hell before? I thought you were cool.”
That hits him like a fist to the gut. He tries to hide it, but his eyes give him away. He thought he was cool too. For a while there he was feeling like a kid again, just one of the guys.
“We ain’t gonna hurt nothin’,” I say. “Just peek in their liquor cabinet and take some for the road. You never done that?”
He has. But not in a long time.
I can feel it in my bones, smell it on his breath. He hesitates, temptation gnawing a hole so big in his gut you could drive a truck through it.
He smiles. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”
Release. It’s like that moment you stand up after drinking when it hits you all at once, coupled with the tingling opening salvo of a full-force orgasm. The headache vanishes in an orgiastic rush, with even the itch banished to the back of my skull for another hour or so. If he goes through with this, I’ll be good till sundown tomorrow. If not, I’ve got a few hours’ reprieve to figure out my next move and find my next victim.
But this guy’s gonna go through with it. I can tell. I can always tell.
But that ain’t the worst of it, not for him.
This poor son of a bitch has no idea what he’s walking into. You see, there are a couple of things I haven’t told you yet. Firstly, I know exactly where we’re going and I know who lives in that house. I smell ’em every time I end up here. Secondly, I didn’t end up in this town by accident. Not this time. And lastly, we’re not going there for booze. We’re going there for peace.
Who lives in that house?
UHF and the FM Girl.
That’s what we called them anyway, in Midian, behind their back. Their names are Humphrey B and Sylvia, but the first time you see them you can’t think of them as anything but UHF and the FM Girl. UHF is a tall guy, six feet at the shoulder, with an old nineteen-inch black-and-white CRT television for a head. There’s all this sinewy muscle wrapped around cables running up from his chest and neck into the TV, but the back of the set is blown out, like it was hollowed from the inside by a shotgun blast—jagged plastic surrounding a seven-inch hole. Inside there’s nothing, nothing at all. But the TV screen is always lit, a disembodied head in fuzzy black and white, ever floating, reacting, just as you’d expect his head to react.
The FM Girl is different. She’s lithe, willowy, easily five-foot-nothing, her skin wrinkled and desiccated, as if she were mummified, her eyes and mouth sewn shut with ratty black thread. While she can’t speak, she’s always broadcasting her thoughts, and if you’ve got a radio nearby tuned to the right station—89.7! The screaming sounds of Hell!—you can hear her just fine. So she carries around an old beat-up hand-cranked emergency radio that she’ll wind to life if she ever has anything to say.
They’re a fine couple, as married as us monsters can be. FM Girl needs flesh to feed; UHF just needs to watch. He can go a little longer than she can, but neither can go more than a year or two without a good honest-to-God murder. I’ve been keeping track of them for a spell. They’ve been picking off truckers over the years, catching them overnight, murdering them in their cabs before driving their trucks off into oblivion. But it’s been a while. And they must be getting hungry.
So I’m bringing take-out.
The windows of the house are blacked out for obvious reasons, but Bill doesn’t notice. It’s a run-down, single-story ranch-style affair with peeling blue paint and the rusted-out frame of a mid-seventies Oldsmobile oxidizing into nothingness out front. It is, as far as Panhandle homes go, entirely ordinary.
We slip in through the back door into a hallway that splits off to the living room and the kitchen. I point to Bill and then the kitchen, then at myself and the living room. He enters the kitchen completely unaware that there’s an open door to the cellar in there, and that under this house there be monsters.
They hear him come in. He’s about as silent as a raccoon in a trash can.
A pale blue light creeps up the stairs, but Bill’s too busy picking through the cabinets to see it.
Behind him, not six feet away, is the FM Girl, her husband standing silently, ominously, behind her. Watching. The kitchen fills with the blue light of his flickering set, and Bill turns slowly around.
His eyes go wide with fear. He’s paralyzed, unable to process what he’s seeing.
The FM Girl reaches up to her sewn-shut mouth and yanks at the thread, pulling it out in one slow, deliberate motion. Then her cheek splits, splaying her ear to ear, rows of needle-teeth glistening in slobber as her massive jaw unhinges. Her mouth is so wide it looks as if it could swallow Bill’s head whole.
Behind her, UHF’s head vanishes from inside the set, his display showing his view of his wife and her soon-to-be meal.
The FM Girl reaches down and cranks her radio, winding it up furiously. It crackles to life, thick static shrieking murderous thoughts along with the phrase Wrong house, motherfucker.
My machete cuts her in half from behind before UHF can speak up to warn her, his flickering screen showing every horrible second of his wife’s demise. Her body topples to the floor with two wet slaps.
I dive in like a rabid beast, razor claws rending her flesh into fistfuls of meat that I greedily shove into my mouth. Blood coats me in seconds, the floor growing slick with it.
I look up at UHF and smile. He’s feeding. He’s feeding watching his own wife devoured handful by delicious handful. He feels awful about it, can’t decide whether to run for safety or stay a few seconds longer to taste the end of the love of his life. The thrill of his sin is the cream gravy on the chicken-fried steak of my meal.
“You should go, Humphrey,” I say through a mouthful of his wife.
His head reappears on the screen and his voice crackles through his tinny mono speaker. “Are you going to kill me next?”
“Do I have to?”
He shakes his head back and forth, the television remaining perfectly still. “No.”
“Then go. Run. Before I change my mind.”
He thinks for a second, knowing he should probably fight, should stay and defend the l
ast remains of his beloved Sylvia. But he doesn’t. He runs.
And I turn back to my meal, savoring every last bit of murderous sin that remains of the FM Girl.
Bill is slumped on the floor, staring at me slack-jawed, eyes wide, unblinking.
So I turn to him. “You’re not going to say a word about this, are you, Bill?”
He shakes his head, terrified, a few seconds shy of pissing himself right there on the floor.
“Good. Now get the fuck out of here.”
He stands up and scampers out the door without looking back. Frankly, I don’t give a shit if he tells anyone. Who’s going to believe him? He walked out of a bar drunk with a stranger, and the next time anyone sees it, this house is going to be on fire. Telling stories about monsters in the basement will get him branded either a crackpot or an arsonist.
He’ll choose neither. He’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to forget what he saw tonight, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll stop trying to live in the past.
I don’t have anything against humans, really. I don’t ever make anyone do anything they don’t want to do in the first place. Not really. I just give them a nudge. The interesting thing about doing this is seeing what comes after. My gift to them is they get to find out who they really are, deep down. And what they do with that knowledge defines them from that point on. Some folks can’t handle the memories of their night with me, but others come out all right on the other side. They make peace with themselves. They become better people. But it’s their choice. Everything is their choice.
So in case you were wondering, that’s how I sleep at night.
And I’m going to be sleeping a lot better now knowing I won’t have to be that guy for quite some time, that I won’t wake up with an itch in my head that turns into a rumble that turns into a scream. All my drinking I can do for myself now; all my sins will be my own. At least for a while.
But now that my head’s clear and I’ve got the taste of monster on my tongue, I’m wondering. Just how much more time can I buy myself if I run ole Humphrey down as well? I think I might do just that. He smells delicious.
A Clean White Room
Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill
The Lobby
The clack-clack-clack of his wing-tip shoes rings out stark and steady against the polished marble floors, echoing with a tinny din through the cavernous old lobby. At one time this place was the height of luxury, but now the wallpaper is decades old, yellowed with water stains, peeling in places, the mahogany front desk chipped, abused, languishing just this side of total ruin. Yet somehow the browns, yellows, and whites blend together into something homey, comforting. In the right light it might even seem quaint.
But it never quite holds the right light. In fact, it is rare that this building has exactly the right light at all. Quirky. That’s how the Landlord had put it. The wiring is quirky. Damned inconvenient is what it really is.
He’s pacing again, counting his steps again, each stride just shy of covering the breadth of the black-and-white checkerboard pattern splayed from one dingy wall to the other. Eighty-seven and a half steps wide, 112 from door to desk. But it feels bigger. Sounds bigger. It seems to change shape in the night, the walls growing farther apart or contracting inches at a time. But it is always 871/2 steps wide and 112 steps from door to desk. No matter how many times he counts, it is always the same.
He stops. He turns. And there are his groceries. Two large paper bags filled with the same items they held last week. And the week before that. And as many weeks back as he can remember.
He didn’t hear a knock or a key in the tumbler, and the delivery boy made no announcement. He’d always assumed the delivery boy was scared of the place, creeped out by the images on the carved ebony front doors, chased off by the eerie silence that always pervades this place. But he never saw him, never spoke to him, couldn’t say with any certainty that such a delivery boy even existed. Groceries simply appeared, always when he wasn’t looking. So he walks back 112 steps, picks up his groceries, and walks 43 steps back toward a large oak door with a small, slightly corroded brass plate that reads superintendent.
The Superintendent fumbles in his jacket pocket and keys clatter into his hand, several dozen different cuts and shapes and metals all bound together on a single large brass ring. He thumbs through them, finding the right one by touch. The key goes in smooth and silent, the lock clicking only faintly, the knob whispering gently as it turns. It is the quietest door in the building. It has to be, for it hides its greatest secrets.
He opens the door, slides quickly in, and sniffs deeply at the air of the place.
The apartment beyond is opulent, almost ridiculous, both in size and architecture. While all of the rooms in the building are unusually large, the Superintendent’s dwelling is second only to the penthouse in size. In any other building it would sell for millions, but in this one, nothing—a prize instead only for someone willing to hold the building together with spit, baling wire, and moxie alone. The ceilings are vaulted, ebony beams running across them, chandeliered lights dripping from the center of nearly every room. The floors are hardwood, dark, scuffed, the wood soft in places from the tread of a century’s worth of traffic. The walls had once been white but are now a sort of eggshell from the smoke of five previous superintendents. The fireplace is massive, brought stone by stone across the sea from some ancient residence. And the kitchen is large, designed with servants in mind, updated just enough to be modern, but not so recently that everything worked properly.
Despite the opulence, the apartment on the whole is spartan. No art, no photos, no statues or sculptures, just a simple table with a single chair, one red suede couch—well worn—a rocking chair by the fireplace, and a bed, a wardrobe, and a nightstand in the adjoining master bedroom. It is otherwise stone, wood, and wallpaper. Nothing more.
The Superintendent methodically puts his groceries away in the kitchen, each sundry finding its way to a very specific, well-rehearsed location. There is an order to it, almost a ceremony. The flour goes in a perfectly sized clean spot amid a dusting of scattered meal where all of the other bags of flour had rested before; the oil in a spot flush against the cabinet’s back corner; the carton of milk immediately below the refrigerator’s bulb. Each item in its exact place despite there being no lack of room for them to find another home. It is as he wanted and no other way.
THUMP.
He looks up, eyes narrowed, at the room above him. Apartment 202. The one with the ironwood door. Another thump. Then a series of rumbles and rattles like an awkward tap dance by large, clumsy, untrained feet. The Superintendent sighs deeply.
It shouldn’t be time yet, he mutters to himself.
He quickly puts the last remaining groceries away before adjourning to his bedroom to get changed. Strips out of his sweat pants, jacket, and T-shirt, opens the doors on the antique mahogany wardrobe. Inside, a single gray wool suit. Three-piece. Single-breasted. A narrow gray wool tie. And a cotton shirt with bone buttons. The Superintendent dresses quickly, leaving neither a hair nor a fiber out of place.
He opens the bottom drawer, digging through a pile of T-shirts and pants, drawing from beneath them a small fifteen-inch ebony lockbox, carved seemingly from the same wood as the front doors and almost identically decorated. Angels upon demons upon knights and knaves. The Superintendent takes a deep breath, cracks his neck side to side, and leaves his apartment, grabbing his key ring on the way out, locking the door silently behind him, and making his way across the lobby to the elevator.
The Desert
He was swallowed by the moonless black so deep and far-reaching, the only way to tell the difference between the earth and the sky was by where the stars began. The sky was riddled with them. More than he’d ever seen at once. It was the type of sky one expected to see only in the still quiet of an uneventful night. But this was far from that.
There was shouting, screaming. And when a mortar exploded half a football field away
, the BOOM rattled his bones and the landscape lit up with a flash of daylight. But just for a moment, a scant terrifying moment. He scanned the ground for shadows, for bodies, for the things that might be hiding, waiting for him in the black. His breaths were measured, controlled, desperate for calm, and he counted his paces—253 of them in total between the latrine he’d just left and his bunker.
He had to find his way back, had to get back to the concrete bed beneath which he could cower and cry to himself, more afraid of the things that might be lurking just outside the light than the explosives and shrapnel that might shred him into a puff of pink mist. Only fifty more steps to go. Only forty-seven more steps to go. Only forty-three more steps to go. Only forty more steps . . .
202. The Ironwood Door
The lift key turns and the tiny antiquated brass and iron elevator rattles to life. It jerks and sputters in fits on the way up, but it’s better than taking the stairs. You never know how long the stairs will take. The insides are polished to a high shine, and the Superintendent eyes his reflection, nervously adjusting his tie before brushing a bit of stray dandruff from his shoulder. It takes nearly a minute to get to the second floor, and when the doors open, he quickly steps out, staring headlong into a mirror. He looks both ways down the hall, unsure where 202 is today. These halls are tricky. They coil around like snakes twisted up in themselves, the lengths seeming sometimes impossible, other times merely improbable.
To the right the overhead lights shine bright and steady, but to the left they dim ever so slightly every few seconds before brightening back up, an ever-present buzz oscillating along with them. The lights are always stranger near 201, so he turns to the right and begins a winding tour of the second floor. One hundred twenty-four steps. It is always 124 steps. Three turns and a long corridor later he finds it. Just as he remembers, 124 steps in. The ironwood door. Three small brass numbers. Two zero two. And a brass knocker, a small piece of note card slotted into it with the tenant’s name: Mr. Fitzpatrick.
We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories Page 14
