Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  And they all live happily ever after.

  YSTERY ORM

  Dedicated to Thomas Ligotti.

  * * * *

  In his junior year Redfield arranged a schedule that suited his habits. None of his lectures started before eleven, leaving him free to study through the night. Hoping for a dreamless sleep before dawn, he would begin to drink beer after midnight, however; and after his third or fourth can he would forget the text in his lap or the paper in his typewriter and fall into the grip of imaginary dialogues with his parents or his professors; with Mary, whom he had lost, or with the literary world he hoped to win.

  Furious pounding on his walls or floor would often shock him out of these conversations. He would realize that he had been stamping back and forth, shouting and gesticulating at people who had seemed far more real than the strangers behind the stained plaster. He was spared the shame of having revealed his secrets, for few of his neighbors spoke English.

  Tiptoeing laboriously, he would return to his book, but meaningless symbols danced on the page. He would return to the typewriter he had mounted on a cushion to muffle its noise, but the type would bunch together in a skeletal fist when he tried to build up speed. Mumbling resolutions to pull himself together, he would fall across his unmade bed as his window grew gray.

  Despite his schedule, he rarely got to his first lecture on time. He usually had to wait for the mailman.

  “When are you going to fix my mailbox?” he asked the janitor, who had woken him to take measurements and drill holes.

  “Si,” the man said, flashing a gapped grin.

  “Mailbox. Postale... oh, shit ... boxo.”

  “Si, si!” A dialect or speech impediment forced Redfield’s imagination to supply the vowel in these brusque affirmatives.

  Looking beyond green work-clothes and brown skin for the first time, he saw that it wasn’t his janitor, an older man who knew enough English to say, “No possible now, later, maybe.” Except for the grin, this one might have posed for an Aztec idol of the nastier sort: his bald skull narrowed toward the forehead in an obscurely disturbing way. He was a specialist, an electrician perhaps, who couldn’t care less about mailboxes.

  He envied Shelley and Swinburne all the Latin they had learned in childhood. If he’d had a proper education, picking up Spanish or Italian now would be easy. He felt like a decadent Roman in the twilight of the Empire, able to understand neither his glorious ancestors nor the barbarians swarming around him.

  The man went back to work when Redfield turned from his aggressive smile. Gray ashes sifted past the window, as if someone were burning papers in one the tenement’s unsafe fireplaces, but the volume and persistence of the fall convinced him it was snow. Below, the mailman left a glistening black trail in the pale street as he crossed to the opposite side.

  “Lock up?” Redfield said as he stepped through a tangle of thick cables to the door. “When you finish—the door—porta—fermez?”

  “Si.”

  One of his neighbors lurked in the foyer, but perhaps he was no neighbor at all, a Latin androgyne in oily and strangely patterned black leather. He had hastily withdrawn his hand from the row of mailboxes, but Redfield saw no key in his hand, nor any mail. As always, his own box hung open.

  “Do you live here?” Redfield asked.

  The boy’s eyes sparked with black venom, his lip curled in a sneer. He said something, or made a noise, that suggested spitting. Then he spun on his heel and vanished into a blast of snow, slamming the outer door behind him. Even if he was someone Redfield saw but failed to notice every day, his anger seemed disproportionate.

  Perhaps he was one of the neighbors who believed he was a religious maniac. More than once he had been jolted out of imaginary arguments with Mary. He would grumble sotto voce through these monologues, but it was his unhappy habit to shout her name for emphasis. A fat, beige woman who lived down the hall shared his rumored devotion to Our Lady, for she would jabber at him and hold up a fist intertwined with greasy black beads whenever they squeezed past each other on the stairs.

  He unstuck his carelessly wadded mail from the box. He found no check from his mother; perhaps the leather-boy had stolen it. The only thing of importance was a letter from one of the university’s computers. It told him that he was failing a course in anthropology.

  This was nonsense. He was taking no courses in that department. The number of the course, 312, meant nothing to him. He checked the address on the flimsy envelope. It was not impossible that two Thomas Redfields were enrolled in the university, but it was strange that he hadn’t heard of the other one before.

  He supposed he should have been angry, if not worried, but he felt almost grateful. Raising a fuss at the administration offices would be a pleasant change from sitting passively through another lecture on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Overcoming a petty obstacle where success was guaranteed by the justice of his case was preferable to racking his brains for quibbles to raise without contradicting a professor’s prejudices, the secret of success in the English department. He envied people like the electrician, whose straightforward puzzles were answered in some book as valid here as it was in Guatemala.

  About to leave, he noticed a letter that lay on the floor where he had dropped it; unless the mailman had, or the angry stranger. Large and square, it looked like an invitation. Consistent with that was its elegant calligraphy, now bleeding under a wet footprint. He knew of no one who would invite him anywhere. But—he felt a thrill that was not unmixed with dismay—it was from Bob Tourmalign, who didn’t know him, who had surely never heard of him.

  He believed that Robert E. Tourmalign was the greatest living writer of—well, there was no way around it, of horror stories, although that grouped him with the morons who scribbled tripe about gluttonous zombies and libidinous vampires. But it grouped him with Poe and Kafka, too. Tourmalign dived into the abyss of his subconscious and broke the surface holding up objects of questionable nature that were both foul and beautiful: objects that Redfield, to his frequent discomfort, found familiar.

  He had tried to write horror stories. He often wondered why his dreams were frightening while his stories—most anyone’s, really—weren’t. No words on a printed page ever forced him to check the locks on his doors or windows, turn on every light he had, and sit up through the dark hours jumping at noises and shadows. No story had ever bathed him in cold sweat or wrenched screams from the depths of his lungs. But his dreams had.

  Conversely he wondered why such dreams were merely boring if he tried to retell them the next day. “I dreamt a snake swallowed my hand.” He could have described the oily blackness of the snake, he could have described his pain and terror and despair, he could have told how he clutched the hand to his breast when he woke, sobbing and crooning over it, half afraid that the snake might get it again. Such a thorough account might convince his listeners that he was crazy, but it would never scare them.

  The fault, he believed, lay with the language, which was not that of dreams. Shakespeare had known the language of nightmares; he had made Macbeth speak it fluently. But Redfield wasn’t trying to write Elizabethan poetry. More to the point, he wasn’t Shakespeare. To translate dreams into plain prose, into the bald speech of post-literate America, seemed impossible until he read the tales of Robert E. Tourmalign.

  In Tourmalign’s stories, wind-blown leaflets, clinking light-stanchions in empty parking lots, neon signs with missing letters—such banal images assumed, in waking life and in cold print, the horrific significance they so often radiated in nightmares. It had been said of many pathetic hacks that they should never be read at night, but it made no difference when one read Tourmalign: his work was a poison that infiltrated the bloodstream and altered the structure of the brain. It had taken root and grown inside Redfield like a cancer whose existence he could never forget, one that seemed, when he could inspect it with critical disinterest, complex and gorgeous.

  Why should Tourmalign write to him? Redfield had
never published his own feeble efforts. He had never so much as written a letter to the ephemeral magazines that printed the master’s stories or to the unheard-of publisher who had collected them in a pair of slim volumes. He sometimes regretted never having written to the man himself. It was inevitable that Tourmalign should be neglected by the herds who trooped to worship the fatuous, and he surely must know that, but the knowledge might bring no consolation. He might be glad to learn that he wasn’t merely gibbering in a mirror, that his words had been heard and understood by a receptive spirit.

  What had stopped him from writing a fan letter was his suspicion that the man who could create such tales was probably insane and possibly dangerous. He knew that this attitude was downright illiterate, that he was no better than the yahoos who ascribed Poe’s vision to drink and dope. The fact remained that Tourmalign scared him.

  He opened the envelope carefully, conscious that this was not just a letter but a document. It was no invitation: the oversized envelope held only a piece of notepaper with the author’s letterhead. Water from the footprint had seeped through, and already the black ink bled. At least he learned that Tourmalign used a fountain-pen, which seemed appropriately stylish and old-fashioned, but which left him defenseless in a world designed for infinitely replaceable computer-flimsies, where venal landlords wouldn’t fix mailboxes, where mailmen trod on their sacred trust with wet boots.

  He held the note up to the subaqueous snow-glow seeping through grimy windows. Some of the words had dissolved, but it seemed that Redfield was being thanked for an “amusing” letter of his own, one that had expressed—what?—“dismay.” As far as he could make out the sentence, Tourmalign wrote: “Such genuine dismay always evokes empathy. But you—” illegible—“most important that you—” illegible—“dreams—” illegible—“need help, do not hesitate—.”

  The note became even harder to decipher as Redfield’s hand began shaking. What was this? The letter seemed urgent, its contents ominous. He was being warned, and the warning concerned those very dreams that frightened him so much, that the author knew more about than anyone on earth.

  He had to examine the letter in a strong light. He should dry it immediately, blot it dry, but he was reluctant to return to his room while the electrician worked. He wasn’t afraid of him, not exactly, but he was afraid of looking foolish to a plain man with real work to do: a gormless booby of a student who typically didn’t know if he was coming or going.

  And he was going. He hadn’t fallen into the clutch of a Tourmalign story. He hadn’t written a fan-letter while drunk or invoked the magus while dreaming, he had merely misread the first sentence. Like everybody else, the mad genius was out to make a buck. He had found Redfield’s name on a sucker-list of pullulant fantasists and was offering help in the form of a seminar. That explanation matched the invitational envelope. Everything would fit once he had deciphered the message under a decent light.

  He folded the note into the envelope and managed to slip it into an inside pocket of his jacket only by bowing it slightly. It annoyed him that he still treated it with such reverence.

  He prided himself on wearing only a tweed jacket with a scarf and cap, just like his notion of an Oxford student, in the northern winters. Today he would gladly have abandoned that image if he hadn’t pawned his overcoat. His ears began to ache the minute he stepped into the storm, so he wrapped the trailing end of the scarf around them and around the lower half of his face. By the time he was finished his hands had numbed under gale-driven nails of snow. He jammed them into his pockets and curled his shoulders into his chest as he lurched through a white-out of Polar intensity, not unaware of his likeness to a revenant from meretricious films. The few shamblers he glimpsed at distant intersections when the snow caught its breath were a match for him.

  * * * *

  Because it was lunchtime, or because of the snow, the administration offices had been all but abandoned. He wandered through fluorescent halls, poked into empty offices, scrutinized confusing directories, questioned students who knew less than he did. At last he found what he hoped was the right office. An African-American woman sat and stared bemusedly at the vaporous giants attacking her tall window, swirling up like all white hell broke loose, only to fall away, twirling and dividing and reforming to return as new giants for a fresh assault. Redfield grew bemused, too. It seemed to him that one cowled monster had brandished its coils at the window more than once, and he waited for its next materialization, but that never came.

  The woman started and stared with such aggrieved incomprehension that Redfield felt obliged to say, “I’m a student.” When she only glared more suspiciously, he unwound the muffling scarf from his face and repeated the words. He tried to shake the crusted snow out of it, but enough had melted to soak the wool deeply.

  She composed her features into official belligerence and swayed toward him, a huge woman, the silhouette of a galleon under full sail. “I got this letter,” he said, digging it out. He let her examine it while he fussed with his scarf.

  “What you trying to tell me?”

  “No, not that.” He snatched back Tourmalign’s letter. She seemed to be debating whether to call a security guard while he rummaged through his other pockets. The flimsy was now a wet wad, and she blamed him for this, if not for the weather itself. She smoothed it out.

  “So?”

  “I’m not....” A feature of Tourmalign’s envelope, unnoticed before, so gripped him that he forgot her completely.

  “Am I suppose to take your courses for you? So you’re failing, so?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not taking that course. I never enrolled. It’s some kind of mixup.”

  “Sure,” she said, or something like it, as she sat herself heavily at a computer by the counter and jabbed at seemingly random keys.

  A printed sticker, or half of one, was affixed to a lower corner of the invitational envelope. It read, “ystery orm.” He thought at first it must be some scrap from his pocket that had mated with the envelope, for his pockets were full of odd, forgotten bits of paper, but it had clearly been stuck on with intentional firmness. His thumbnail failed to raise an edge.

  “Professor West?”

  “What?” Redfield said.

  “Professor West, Anthro 312, Serpent-Worship in Pre-Columbian Meso-America, is that the course you be flunking?”

  “I’m not flunking anything. Is that the course I’m supposed to be enrolled in?”

  “It say here.”

  “Well, I’m not in it. I’m not taking any courses in that department. Would you take my name off, please?”

  She laughed richly. Her face lit up when she smiled, but not with kindness. “You got to tell Professor West all about it, and then you come back here with the form he fill out.”

  “And where do I find him?”

  Her smile blackened to a scowl. She poked more keys, swearing under her breath, while Redfield examined the sticker. Unlike something that might belong on an envelope, giving additional information to the Post Office or the addressee, it had been placed vertically.

  “Bard Hall, number 215. He have office hours now—” she swiveled to check on the snow—“if he there.”

  “What do you make of this?”

  She turned the envelope this way and that until he stretched a finger beyond the counter and put it trembling on the sticker. She said, “Nothing much. ‘History dorm’?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Thanks very much.”

  “You bring that form back from Professor West, you hear?” She seemed suddenly friendly. “Then we fix you up.”

  Unwilling to brave the snow again, he loitered in the main entrance and puzzled over the sticker. Mystery Worm, or Mystery of the Worm, perhaps? The orm could be anything, but Worm seemed to fit Mystery, if that was indeed the other word. In the curious tongue of the English, a worm was not just an earthworm or a tapeworm, it could be a serpent, a dragon, Satan himself.

  * * * *

  The un
iversity and the city’s slums were krakens that had hopelessly intertangled their tentacles. Bard Hall lay on Market Street, whose shops proclaimed ropas and zapatas, suggesting to Redfield that bandits might here be hanged. These shops were closed, along with the Cuban-Chinese restaurants where joints of pork would normally sizzle temptingly—but never quite enough to tempt him into assault on a double language barrier—in the windows on spits. He had passed through before, but he had never noticed Bard Hall.

  He might have missed it entirely if he hadn’t been arrested by the window of a botanica that displayed a statue of the Virgin, standing on a wreath of hooded serpents. The garish figure was identified as Caridad del Cobre, and he wondered what a cult born in Africa and transplanted to the Caribbean could have to do with cobras, natives of another locale entirely.

  The unexplained events of this day had a common thread of plausibility that especially disturbed him. Writing a fan-letter to Tourmalign and taking a course on Central American serpent-cults were things he might have done, might very well have done. He admired the one and felt curious about the other. But he hadn’t done either. He knew he hadn’t.

  The rear of the shop-window held dim objects that might have been balls, gourds or skulls. He had wondered where he might buy a skull to give his dingy room its decorational coup de grace. The entry to the adjoining building gave him a view into the side of the shop-window. Backing into it, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the fanlight was lettered “Bard Hall.”

  Eager to escape the cold, he abandoned the quest for skulls to lurch into the foyer and puff gently on his reddened hands. The directory he examined had been usurped as a bulletin-board of flyers for weirdly named bands, curled and discolored index-cards soliciting room-mates or offering questionable services. He saw nothing suggesting the office of a Professor West, and the foyer looked like that of an ordinary tenement, its floor tiled with scaly, black-and-white octagons. He wrenched his eyes from their hypnotic spell and ascended the stairs, keeping his hand off the cold metal rail after the first painful trial.