A Host of Shadows

by Harry Shannon

  Quinn stiffens himself. Now he has another, vital piece of the puzzle. He knows that voice, although he cannot place it right away. He tries mightily to concentrate and finally pictures an athlete gone to seed, a tall man wearing a uniform with the garish epaulets of the Secret Police, a Colonel.

  Christ, my cover is blown, I’ve been captured. The patch must have held, so they’re trying to break me this way.

  Dr. Neumann hurries closer. Is this real? The surgeon seems visibly afraid of the officers seated in the darkness as if picturing his own fate should he fail. Perhaps his assignment is to devise a way around implanted suggestions, programs that place a subject’s secrets beyond the reach of physical pain. If that’s true, the frantic surgeon must open the human lockbox prone on the gurney and retrieve the secrets buried there, or take Quinn’s place in a torture chamber.

  Quinn gathers what saliva he can assemble and when Neumann bends closer, he spits in his face. “Fuck you!”

  Dr. Neumann turns away, a little unnerved. “This one is strong.” He searches for more anesthetic. “We must calm him.”

  “No. No more drugs.” The Colonel’s voice again. “We want him to suffer.”

  Someone tightens the clamp on the vice holding Quinn’s head in place. It does not hurt, but he feels something in his skull crack and slide down and sideways a bit. He no longer fears death—just the long, nightmarish journey ahead.

  Quinn hears the raspy scratch of a match and a few seconds later catches the scent of an expensive cigar. Everything is vivid, clear. Something in Neumann’s approach has worked, just not as they’d intended. Panicked, Quinn swims up as if from the bottom off a deep, cold well and remembers that his real name is Neil Cassidy, and the identities and locations of the others in his group, including his lover, Martine. No!

  He is fully present in the torture chamber now, and that stark reality horrifies him. Within moments he will have no defense. Without the patch he is certain to break and give them everything they want.

  He attempts to swallow his tongue. The nurse jams a stick in his mouth.

  “Again.” The eager voice of the Colonel, followed by the wicked touch of that electric probe… Frozen water everywhere and Cassidy stands at the top of a crystal white mound, surrounded by pine trees bowed down, heavily weighted with fresh, sparkling snow. The boy whoops for sheer joy and watches as a long plume of dragon breath pops from his mouth to dissipate in the crisp morning air. He looks down the slope and his small hands, now gloved in blue wool, grip the sides of the sled. He kneels right at the edge of the slope, takes a deep breath and pushes himself over, roars down the chute like a cannonball. Then he becomes afraid of crashing into a tree, being seriously hurt, being crippled or killed. Now he hollers from fear, not excitement. His ears are so cold they hurt and the air screams defiance, a high-pitched wailing sound, or maybe it is not the air, maybe it is someone’s voice, maybe his own voice…?

  “Give the gentleman some time,” the Colonel says, almost pleasantly. “I see no point in being rude.”

  But this time Cassidy/Quinn cannot stop screaming. On and on, the ghastly sound continues unabated, as if wrung from the soul of a tormented Mexican roasting on a wagon wheel under the blistering Texas sun; or perhaps it’s the wail of a proud man rotting in the body of a stranger, or a good man torn from the embrace of his wife forever. No, it is the freezing wind in the ears of a small boy headed for a rendezvous with death. The awful shriek bounces off concrete walls and echoes across two hundred and fifty years before finally coming to rest beneath Cassidy/Quinn’s ragged, labored breathing.

  “No more.” Who said that?

  He will betray his friends, of this there is no doubt; babble and wail incoherently until he has spilled everything and anything to avoid what Neumann has been doing with that probe, those needles and the drugs. It must stop.

  I was really there,

  the prisoner thinks, frantically. I was not here; I was really there, back in that mound of snow. He swallows, forces words: “I’ll talk.”

  A chair squeaks as the Colonel shifts around in the gloom. “But of course you will, Cassidy. Why not? Most of your friends already have.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Give me their names.”

  “Please. I can’t.”

  “No?” The chair again, complaining. “Apparently you need more motivation. Neumann? We may as well give him that last one again.”

  The prisoner suddenly comes to a decision. “Okay, okay” he cringes, “but please not the emptiness again. Not that. I can’t bear it.”

  Dr. Neumann slows for a second, absorbing the content of the sentence. He quickly consults his notes, locates the area now specified as ’emptiness,’ and looks for permission to return to that particular section of exposed brain. Apparently the Colonel nods, for Neumann adjusts position and resumes probing.

  The surgeon actually whispers “I’m sorry” as he presses down…a bronze young woman with long, brown hair and almond eyes is dancing through the cool spray of the backyard sprinkler, it is Martine and she wears a man’s white t-shirt, the wet fabric flatters her body and reveals tantalizingly pert nipples and a wet triangle of her sex…

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  …Martine smiles broadly and she winks and waves. Cassidy looks down to examine his hands and finds them calloused; his arms are strong and roped with a young man’s muscle…

  “Answer me damn it, what’s wrong?”

  …She approaches, her hips swaying, and he walks to meet her, and both space and time are standing still…

  “Did you lose him?”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Look at him. He’s a drooling vegetable, that’s what happened.”

  “Some form of catatonia, perhaps?”

  …The sun beats down on bare skin lathered with sweat and sunscreen and a body loosened by enjoyable physical labor…

  “Idiot! He is of no use to me like this.”

  “Doctor,” the nurse calls, urgently, “the patient is no longer breathing.”

  “What?”

  “Flatline.”

  “Bring him back!”

  “We are trying. Clear. Clear.”

  “Doctor…?”

  …It is a sunny day but not a dry one—Cassidy sees a stretch of damp, sparkling backyard grass and hears the twirling hiss of a lawn sprinkler. And then she is there again, smiling.

  Martine.

  Free. I am free…

  Wait.

  The patient opens his bloodshot eyes. The surgeon is a squat, balding gnome with teeth like chipped piano keys. Quinn is confused and frightened and does not remember anything, anything at all, except for his name.

  The surgeon pats his hand in a macabre parody of bedside manner.

  “This may hurt a bit.”

  _______________

  “The individual has a host of shadows, all of whom resemble him and for the moment have an equal claim to authenticity.”

  —Soren Kierkegaard

  A Few Notes

  Okay, I told Dark Regions that I was somewhat ambivalent about doing this kind of stuff. Commenting on how stories came to be written and published. Not sure why, except I’m a bit leery of sounding pretentious. First, I don’t know how anyone else works, but I generally plan what I’m doing in advance. However, despite that tendency, short stories sometimes just happen to me. And I don’t know how or why. Secondly, I may be a better long distance runner than sprinter. Despite an abiding love for the form, I’m also more confident about the quality of my (recent) novels than any of my short fiction.

  Having said all that, I’m now going to contradict myself and do it anyway. Just figure you guys who’ve laid out hard earned dollars for my work ought to have the option to know what’s behind all these stories if you want it. If you don’t, feel free to skip all this, and thanks for reading...

  1. “Blood and Burning Straw.” Ever since “Apocaly
pse Now,” the Viet Nam War has been accompanied in the zeitgeist by the sound of helicopter blades. A police chopper went over our house one night, with a flood light searching a nearby street. The idea for the opening scene popped into my mind, along with the title. I sent the story to Robert Morrish and Rich Chizmar at Cemetery Dance, along with one called “Araneida.” To my delight, they bought both of them two or three months later.

  2. “The Easy Way.” My good friend and AA sponsor Hal Cornelius, who passed away in 1991, once visited a friend in the hospital, a man in terrible pain. Hal asked me to promise to bring him a gun if that ever happened to him. Hal passed away suddenly from a heart attack. I never had to deliver. One day several years ago I began to wonder how it would feel to have to have kept such a terrible promise. After debating whether or not it would “fit” at Cemetery Dance, Bob Morrish and Rich Chizmar bought this one, too. It remains one of my favorites.

  3. “A Handful of Dust.” Dave Zeltszerman is a solid crime writer. He used to edit the online ezine “Hardluck Stories.” Dave asked me for a tale. I love hitman pieces, though finding any kind of new twist on them is always a challenge. This was just a fun mental puzzle. The first ending seemed too obvious at first, so I went back and added a bit more misdirection.

  4, “Lucky” was written for the great Ed Gorman, who was editing an issue of “Hardluck Stories” for Dave. He said he wanted noir stuff with an Old West setting. I thought the idea was fun, a new take on the trope of the guy with a criminal heart bested by the femme fatale. This one is scheduled to appear in a Cemetery Dance anthology called “On Deadly Ground” sometime in 2011.

  5. “And the Worm Shall Feed.” Who could resist contributing to an anthology of horror stories set in World War II? “A Dark and Deadly Valley” was edited by Mike Heffernan and published by Silverthought Press. My conceit is the cosmogonic cycle, life devouring life, over and over again. I’d recently read a book about some US bomber pilots who’d been killed and eaten by the Japanese. The book explored the horror from both sides. That really disturbed me. Anyway, I wanted to catch something immediate and brutal, and I also got to try out a new writing style.

  6. “Jailbreak.” Horror author and homicide cop (what a wonderful combo that is) Joe McKinney asked me to contribute to a zombie anthology, with proceeds quietly going to charity. I asked my friend Steven W. Booth, who’d been working on his first novel, if he wanted to collaborate. We emailed the story back and forth, with Steven generally doing the first pass on the next section. This one gives away how much I adore Joe R. Lansdale.

  7. “All the Dead Lie Down.” Nanci Kalanta of Horror World was under the gun when someone failed to deliver a story as promised. I’d been somewhat creatively constipated, so I agreed to write one on a day or two’s notice. I wish the writing were a little tighter, but I do kind of like the directness of it.

  8. “Thus Was His Death” was also sold to Horror World, I believe it was their first story published under Nanci, but at my age you forget some things and tend to make others up, so who knows? Anyway, I was just musing on war and some people’s worship of combat, and wondering what the government would do if it heard about an ancient weapon that would flat out drive troops batshit. Needless to say, I have no doubt they’d find it and use it, with disastrous results.

  9. “Violent Delights” was written for a small press collection called “The Fear Within” published several years ago. I also read it at Horrorfind 2003. I’d just read the newspaper accounts of a woman who’d allowed a homeless man to die on the hood of her car because she was afraid of getting into trouble. It sounded to me like a young actress full of narcissism. Bingo. Anyway, I still haven’t seen the movie “Stuck,” which was no doubt inspired by the same article. At least one would hope.

  10. “Mobius Dick.” Novelist Steve Lukac is a great guy. We collaborated on this weird point-of-view story several years ago, and both somehow forgot about it. There’s a twisted sense of humor in here that still entertains me, so we opted to use this anthology as an opportunity to get it into print. The title comes from something one of my clients, an attorney, once said about relationship issues. I used the example of the Mobius strip, something that has no beginning or end, and he abruptly offered his own profane definition of that phenomenon. The guy eventually gave me a baseball cap with a Mobius Dick on it.

  11. “The Fever Called Living.” Kelly Goldberg was a talented author and dedicated Social Worker. She was a delightful human being with a marvelous, dry wit. We became online buddies and eventually met at World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. We wrote this story via email, and it was quickly published by Gothic.net. Sadly, Kelly died of cancer not long afterward. We’ve attempted to reach her husband with no success. I thought this story belonged back in print, as a tribute to Kelly, and we’re going to donate her share of any royalties to the American Cancer Society.

  12. “Another Hell.” This one began as a detective yarn, but didn’t seem to come alive. It became a trunk story, and then one day I pulled it out and pondered a new ongoing character, a sort of Repairman Jack guy of the hardboiled variety. That gave me an angle to complete the telling, though as of this date haven’t done anything about bringing back the hero in another story. I just thought it was kind of fun.

  13. “The Name of the Wicked.” I love a good zombie. I love the Wild West. Joe Lansdale’s stuff plays around with the two together, which happens all too seldom. This is one of those things that wrote itself from the first line, but I never submitted it. I think it was in the Delirium Books ultra-limited hardcover edition of “Night of the Daemon” as a bonus feature, but other than that hasn’t been published.

  14. “Night Nurse.” This is comment on health care in America. In May of 2009, my sorry old Irish ass was hospitalized for severe stomach pains. Naturally the insurance company sent me home, calling it “acute gastritis,” although a friend of mine, a physician’s assistant named Frank Abt, warned me it was my gallbladder. Two weeks later I was back with pancreatitis and 102 degree fever in addition to even more agony from gallstones. They tried to send me home a second time, but I called them on it. I’d had enough, and I also didn’t want my little girl to have to go through seeing Dad in agony again. After a few days on IVs, pain medication and a meager liquid diet, I endured surgery on her 10th birthday. About a month later, Mark Sieber of Horror Drive-In asked me for a story. Gee, I thought, what can I think of that feels topical and scary...? Hmmm… The story won the Black Quill and was nominated for a Stoker, so something good came out of losing my gall bladder.

  15. “Tokens” is just a fun ghost story. I’m addicted to desert settings, because of my boyhood in Nevada. The tale is several years old now, and if memory serves was first published in a little small press magazine called Bare Bones.

  16. “Darkness Comprehended.” Gord Rollo has become a fine young novelist. He hit me up about collaborating a few years ago, and this story was promptly published by City Slab magazine. I seem to remember it being in a zombie anthology but can’t recall any royalty checks, so either the anthology never came out or the usual small press fiasco resulted. Believe me, we all do this more for love than money.

  17. “In Darkness, Screaming.” Jack Fisher was publishing a magazine called “Flesh and Blood.” Jack’s a talented guy. He was working on a story and emailed me with questions about a therapist approaching such a patient, etc. I tried to answer simply at first, but things rapidly got complicated, so I ended up collaborating with him. I honestly love the ending, which is all Jack’s. For me, that last line really works. Anyway, Horror Garage picked it up. This anthology is the only other exposure it’s gotten.

  18. “The Need for Illusion” was first published in an online magazine called Lennox Avenue. It’s another one that wrote itself. I had a vague idea about the atmosphere and setting, and a creepy farmer the kids wanted to torment, but no idea where it was going beyond that. The ending just wouldn’t come, so I went back to the top to polish it and on the t
hird or fourth trip the plot solidified.

  19. “Concrete Gods.” Editor/author Kealan Patrick Burke and I both planned to be at a Horrorfind Convention in Baltimore in the early 2000s, and Kealan wanted us to put together a limited chapbook to sign and give away. There were only 100 printed as I recall. He sent me the first couple of pages. I rewrote them, continued on a ways and fired it back. He did the same, and eventually gave it an ending. It was also published in the volume “In Delirium 2,” as a gift to Shane Staley of Delirium Books.

  20. “Blacktop” was also written for Kealan Patrick Burke, who had volunteered to edit a book for the authors and fans who’d hung out at Gorezone, the precursor to the message board at Shocklines. The book was called “Tales from the Gorezone.” All proceeds went to a charity for the defense of sexually abused children. Once again, my fondness for the desert of my boyhood infects my perspective.

  21. “Some are Born to Endless Night” has a simple conceit, an established trope, but one I’ve always enjoyed if handled delicately. I was sitting at the computer one night and heard some noises outside. Not much more to it; I just let that feeling nag me into finding the first line. The quotation came later, when I was searching for a title. This one is just for the collection.

  22. “The Place of Excrement” is a brand new story written for this collection. Hospitals freak me out and, as stated earlier, so does the current state of our healthcare system. The first line came to me, and I just went with it. About four pages in, the point of the story emerged. It gave me a cornrow of goose bumps, so I made some notes and finished things up.