Cricket-sounding night darkness. CAMERA MOVES IN to an open tennis court in the hills. Two young women, MISH and ELLEN, are playing a vigorous game under the overhead lights. A chain-link fence, covered with green canvas, surrounds the court. They are the only players on the large double court and seem small and fragile in the wide complex of fence and concrete, weirdly-lit by the overhead neons.
The whack-whack-whack of the tennis ball sends lonely echoes through the area as CAMERA MOVES CLOSER.
Ellen winds up the set. “Look, I know I can beat you! Got time for one more?”
“Doubt it,” says Mish. “The lights go out at eleven.”
“Well, let’s play as long as we can.” Ellen whacks the ball, but her serve is too strong—bouncing over the fence into the night bushes.
“Damn! Can you get it?”
Mish frowns. “Hey, you knocked it over, so you go chase it.”
Ellen puts her racquet aside, opens the gate, goes scrambling down the steep hillside to find the lost tennis ball.
CAMERA is with Ellen in the bushes when, suddenly, above her, all the overhead lights go out. The courts are thrown into heavy shadow. Now the only illumination is provided by a row of dim green bulbs spaced at 10-foot intervals along the exit passage between the fenced courts. Their green glow is ominous.
“I can’t see a bloody thing down here,” Ellen yells.
We are now back on the shadowed court with Mish, who is gathering up their tennis gear. She calls down to Ellen: “Just forget that dumb ball. It’s time to head home, okay?”
But there is no reply from the dark mass of tangled brush on the hillside.
“Elly... Ellen!... Answer me, you goon!”
She walks to the fence, peers downward. “You tryin’ to scare me?” No sound. No movement. Just the mournful dirge of night crickets.
Mish is getting nervous. She calls Ellen’s name again—without a reply Mish stands tensely at the cold metal fence, her eyes probing the gray-green dimness.
Then, loud and piercing, a SCREAM OF TERROR from the hill, Ellens scream. The sound is abruptly cut off—and there is only silence again.
Then, a rustle of movement. The soft crackle of brush.
Mish can hardly allow herself to breathe; terror fills her body, shines from her round eyes as she sees:
A pair of rotted, mud-clotted feet, half-bone, half-flesh, visible in the shadows under the stretched green canvas—moving toward her along the fence on the opposite side.
Mish jerks back from the fence and pushes a knuckled hand into her mouth, biting flesh to stifle the sounds in her throat. Her eyes shift to:
The court gate.
It stands open where Ellen left it.
Mish suddenly breaks for the gate—but just as she reaches it the fence canvas in front of her is ripped aside with tremendous force—and we see (CAMERA ZOOMING IN) a demented face that is older than that of any human being. Not 100... not 150... but vastly older.
With a strangled sob, Mish plunges through the gate, runs wildly along the exit passage under the glowing green bulbs, half-falls, drags herself up, plunges forward, gasping, almost out of her senses with fear.
The creature behind her moves fast, closing the space between them. Rotted bits of flesh fall from its body as it pursues her... and it is brandishing what seems to be a club.
She reaches the parking lot. Jumps into her car. Fumbles in her purse for keys. Can’t find them. The creature is almost to the car. She rolls up the window and the creature’s rotted hands scrabble at the glass. He batters the window with his bony club... Mish finally locates the ignition key. Stabs it into the dash. Engine ROARS. She punches the gas. Too much—as her car whips around in a tire-churning circle on the night-damp pavement. The engine dies. The creature continues to batter at the window, smashing the glass. Mish grinds the starter; the engine fires up again. She floors the pedal, blasting away in a spume of gravel.
We see the car fishtailing down the court road.
We hear the soft CRUNCHING of pebbles as the creature moves forward CLOSE INTO FRAME. His back is to us, but his hunched figure FILLS THE SCREEN as he watches the tail lights of the car fade into the darkness.
We hear the wet, bubbly SOUND of the creature’s breathing.
CAMERA SLOWLY PANS DOWN to his hand, in which he still holds the club.
But it is not a club.
It is Ellen’s left arm.
FADE TO BLACK
Beyond knowing how to build terror and suspense, there is another element that must be present.
A strong affection for the genre.
In order to write really well in any field, the author must love the best work in that field. And I’ve had that love—from childhood.
As a boy in Kansas City during the 1940s, I shuddered over Mr. Lovecraft and the works of Clark Ashton Smith—and I listened avidly to radio’s Lights Out and I Love a Mystery. (I can still remember falling from the sky into the horrific blubbery depths of Arch Oboler’s immense chicken heart as it spread over the earth—and I was there, crouching on a high ledge in total blackness with Jack, Doc and Reggie in the “Temple of Vampires”) I shared cinema horrors at the local movie palace with Karloff and Lugosi, and carted home the latest issue of Weird Tales each month, devouring the lurid melodrama in its wood-pulp pages. And one of the highlights of this period was discovering the dark joys of August Derleth’s edited anthology of horror, Sleep No More. At 18, I edited my own collection of favorite terror tales, You Can Never Tell. I even provided a handwritten Introduction. (I never sent this collection to market, but it exists today as part of the Nolan manuscripts at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.)
As a professional, I wrote the Bette Davis shocker, Burnt Offerings, and scripted such fright films for television as The Norliss Tapes, Trilogy of Terror The Turn of the Screw. But the collected horror fiction in this book best reflects my deep commitment to “things beyond midnight.”
I built each story with love.
I hope they scare you out of your socks!
William F. Nolan
Agoura, California
00:01
SATURDAY’S SHADOW
I am a true filmoholic, and must get my “sprocket hole fix” at least twice a week in order to function. Meaning I see over 100 films a year. I love motion pictures as much today—savoring the wondrous thrills of Blade Runner and The Rood Warrior—as I did when I was seven, sitting in the magic dark, enthralled over Devil Dogs of the Air and Tom Mix in The Miracle Rider.
I revered the legendary film stars, those larger-than-life Gods of the Silver Screen. Many of them are in this story: Alan Ladd, Bogart, Fay Wray (pursued by old Kong himself), Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Gable, Errol Flynn, Brando, Wayne, Judy Garland...
Here, too, as in much of my fiction, are strong autobiographical elements. The apartment on Coronado Island where Laurie lives is the exact one I rented for two months in 1977 to draft Logan’s World. In December of that year I returned to Los Angeles and wrote “Saturday’s Shadow.”
I was honored to have it selected as one of the five best horror tales of 1979 by the World Fantasy Convention. I have revised and expanded it somewhat for this collection. Here, then, is the final version of a story that celebrates, in dramatic terms, my lifelong addiction to films.
SATURDAY’S SHADOW
First, before I tell you about Laurie—about what happened to her (in blood) I must tell you about primary shadows. It is vitally important that I tell you about these shadows. Each day has one, and they have entirely different characteristics, variant personalities.
Sunday’s shadow (the one Laurie liked; her friend) is fat and sleepy. Snoozes all day.
Monday’s shadow is thin and pale at the edges. The sun eats it fast.
Tuesdays shadow is silly and random-headed. Lumpy in the middle. Never knows where its been or where it’s going. No sense of purpose to it.
Wednesday’s shadow is pushy. Arrogant. Full of bombast. All it’s a
fter is attention. Ignore it, don’t humor it.
Thursday’s shadow is weepy... lachrymose. Depressing to have it cover you, but no harm to it.
Friday’s shadow is slick and swift. Jumps around a lot. Okay to run with it. Safe to follow it anywhere.
Now, the one I really want to warn you about is the last one.
Saturday’s shadow.
It’s dangerous. Very, very dangerous. The thing to do is keep it at a distance. The edges are sharp and serrated, like teeth in a shark’s jaw. And it’s damned quiet. Comes sliding and slipping toward you along the ground—widening out to form its full deathshape. Killshape.
I really hate that filthy thing! If I could—
Wait. No good. I’m getting all emotional again about it, and I must not do this. I must be cool and logical and precise—to render my full account of what happened to Laurie. I just know you’ll be interested in what happened to her.
Okay?
I’ll give it to you logically. I can be very logical because I work with figures and statistics at a bank here on Coronado Island.
No, that’s not right. She works there, worked there, at a bank, and I’m not Laurie, am I?... I really honest-to-god don’t think I’m Laurie. Me. She. Separate. She. Me.
Sheme.
Meshe.
Identity is a tricky business. We spend most of our lives trying to find out who we are. Who we really are. An endless pursuit.
I’m not going to be Laurie (in blood) when I tell you about all this. If I am then it ruins everything—so I ask you to believe that I was never Laurie.
Am never.
Am not.
Was not.
Can’t be.
If I’m not Laurie, I can be very objective about her. No emotional ties. Separate and cool. That’s how I’ll tell it. (I could be Vivien. Vivien Leigh. She died, too. Ha! Call me Vivien.)
No use your worrying and fretting about who I am. Worry about who you are. That’s the key to life, isn’t it? Knowing your own identity.
Coronado is an island facing San Diego across an expanse of water with a long blue bridge over the water. That’s all you need to know about it, but maybe you’ll learn more as I tell you about Laurie. (Look it up in a California travel guide if you want square miles and length and history and all that boring kind of crap that does no good for anybody.)
It’s a place. And Laurie lived at one end of it and worked at the other. Lived at the Sea Vista Arms. $440 a month. Studio apartment. No pets. No children. (Forbidden: the manager destroys them if he finds you with any.) Small bathroom. Off-white plasterboard walls. Sofa bed. Sliding closet door. Green leather reclining chair. Adjustable book shelves. (Laurie liked black-slave novels.) Two lamps, one standing. Green rug. Dun-colored pull drapes. You could see the bridge from her window. View of water and boats. Cramped little kitchen. With a chipped fridge.
She walked every day to work—to the business end of the island. Two-or three-mile walk every morning to the First National Bank of Coronado. Two- or three-mile walk home every afternoon. Late afternoon. (With the shadows very much alive.)
Ate her lunch in town, usually alone, sometimes with her brother, Ernest, who worked as a cop across the bay in San Diego. (Doesn’t anymore, though. Ha!) He’d drive his patrol car across the long high blue bridge and meet her at the bank. For lunch down the street.
Laurie fixed her own dinner, alone, at her apartment. Worked all week. Stayed home nights and Saturdays. Never left her apartment on Saturdays. (Wise girl. She knew!) On Sundays she’d walk to the park sometimes and tease Sunday’s shadow. You know, joke with it, hassle it about being so fat and snoozing so much. It didn’t mind. They were friends.
Laurie had no other friends. Just Sunday’s shadow and her brother, Ernest. Parents both dead. No sisters. Nobody close to her at the bank or at the apartments. No boyfriends. Kept to herself mostly. Didn’t say more than she had to. (Somebody once told her she talked like a Scotch telegram!) Mousey, I guess. That’s what you’d call her. A quiet, small, logical mousey gray person living on this island in California.
One thing she was passionate about (strange word for Laurie—passion—but I’m trying to be precise about all this):
Movies.
Any kind of movies. On TV or in theaters. The first week she was able to toddle (as a kid in Los Angeles, where her parents raised her), she skittered away from Daddy and wobbled down the aisle of a movie palace. It was Grauman’s Chinese, in Hollywood, and nobody saw her go in. She was just too damned tiny to notice. The picture was Gone With the Wind, and there was Gable on that huge screen (really huge to Laurie) kissing Vivien Leigh and telling her he didn’t give a damn.
She never forgot it. Instant addiction. Sprocket-hole freak! Movies were all she lived for. Spent her weekly allowance on them... staying for hours and hours in those big churchlike theaters. Palaces with gilt-gold dreams inside.
Saturday’s shadow had no strength in those days. It hadn’t grown... amassed its killpower. Laurie would go to Saturday kiddie matinées and it wouldn’t do a thing to her.
But it was growing. As she did. Getting bigger and stronger and gathering power each year. (It got a lot bigger than Laurie ever got.)
Ernest liked movies too. When she didn’t go alone, he took her. It would have been more often, but Ernest wasn’t always such a good boy and sometimes, on Saturdays, when he’d been bad that week (Ernest did things to birds), his parents made him stay home from the matinée and wash dishes. (Got so he hated the sight of a dish.) But when they did go to the movies together, Laurie and Ernest, they’d sit there, side by side in the flickered dark, not speaking or touching. Hardly breathing even. Eyes tight on the screen. On Tracy and Gable and Bogart and Cagney and Cooper and Flynn and Fonda and Hepburn and Ladd and Garland and Brando and Wayne and Crawford and all the others. Thousands. A whole army of shadow giants up there on that big screen, all the people you’d ever need to know or love or fear.
Laurie had no reason to love or fear real people—because she had them. The shadow people.
Maybe you think that I’m rambling, avoiding the thing that happened to her. On the contrary. All this early material on Laurie is necessary if you’re to fully appreciate what I’ll be telling you. (Can’t savor without knowing the flavor!)
So—she grew up, into the person she was destined to become. Her father divorced her mother and went away, and Laurie never saw him again after her eighteenth birthday. But that was all right with her, since she never understood him anyway.
Her mother she didn’t give a damn about. (Ha!)
No playgirl she. Steady. Straight A in high school accounting. Sharp with statistics. Reliable. Orderly. Hard-working. A natural for banks.
Some years went by. Not sure how many. Laurie and Ernest went to college, I know. I’m sure of that. But their mother died before they got their degrees. (Did Laurie kill her? I doubt it. Really doubt anything like that. Ha!) Maybe Ernest killed her. (Secret!)
Afterward, Laurie moved from Los Angeles to Coronado because she’d seen an ad in the paper saying they needed bank accountants on the island. (By then, she’d earned her degree by mail.)
Ernest moved down a year later. Drifted into aircraft work for a while, then got in with a police training program. Ernest is big and tough-fingered and square backed. You don’t mess around with Ernest. He’ll break your frigging neck for you. How’s them apples?
Shortly after, they heard that their Daddy had suffered an attack (stroke, most likely) in Chicago in the middle of winter and froze out on some kind of iron bridge over Lake Michigan. A mean way to die—but it didn’t bother Laurie. Or Ernest. They were both glad it never froze in San Diego. Weather is usually mild and pleasant there. Very pleasant. They really liked the weather.
Well, now you’ve got all the background, starting with Saturday’s shadow—so we can get into precisely what happened to Laurie.
And how Ernest figures into it. With his big arms and shoulders and his big .38 Police
Special. If he stops you for speeding, man, you sign that book! You don’t smart mouth that cop or he puts one-two-three into you so fast you’re spitting teeth before you can say Jack Robinson. (Old saying! Things stay with us, don’t they? Memories.)
Laurie gets out of bed, eats her breakfast in the kitchen, gets dressed, and walks to work. (She’d never owned a car.)
It is Tuesday, this day, and Tuesday’s shadow is silly and harmless. (No reason even to discuss it.) Laurie is “up.” She saw a classic movie on the tube last night—The Grapes of Wrath—so she feels pretty chipper today, all things considered. She’s seen The Grapes of Wrath (good title!) about six times. (The really solid ones never wear thin.)
But her mind was going. It’s as simple as that, and I don’t know how else to put it.
Who the hell knows why a person’s mind goes? Drugs. Booze. Sadness. Pressures. Problems. A million reasons. Laurie wasn’t a head; she didn’t shoot up or even use grass. And I doubt that she had five drinks in her life.
Let me emphasize: she was not depressed on this particular Tuesday. So I’m not prepared to say what caused her to lose that rational precise cool logical mind.
She just didn’t have it anymore. And reality was no longer entirely there for her. Some things were real and some things were not real. And she didn’t know which was which.
Do you, for that matter, know what’s real and what isn’t?
(Digression: woke up from sleep once in middle of day. Window open. Everything bright and clear. And normal. Except that, a few inches away from me, resting half on my pillow and half off, was this young girls severed head. I could see the ragged edges of skin where her neck ended. She was a blonde, hair in ringlets. Very fair skin. Fineboned. Eyes closed. No blood. I couldn’t swallow. I was blinking wildly. Told myself: not real It’ll go away soon. And I was right. Finally, I began to see through it. Could see the wall through the girl’s cheeks. Thing faded right out as I watched. Then I went back to sleep.)
So whats real and what isn’t? Dammit, baby, I don’t even know what’s real in this story.; let alone in the life outside. Your life and my life and what used to be Laurie’s life. Is a shadow real? You better believe it.
Things Beyond Midnight Page 2
