“You’re one hell of a fine-looking girl, Dorie. Vonna’s got more ass, of course, but yours is just shaped so nice—”
“Daddy Corbin, if you’ll tell me where your car keys—”
“Oh, screw the keys and cut the bullshit. Saul Gray did this to me. And when he does you, you are done. What did he make Johnny give him?” The side of his face that still worked twisted into a ghoulish leer as he hit upon the truth: “You?”
My cheeks burned. I wanted to throw the lamp at him. Instead I said, “Yes. That ... and....”
“And what?”
I told him everything. It tumbled out while he lay there with a lopsided smile. Maybe he was amused, or maybe his face had frozen in that smile. Maybe he was dead.
“Daddy Corbin?”
He was only thinking, I guess, because he said, “So he did you first, and then he transferred the power, as he called it, to Johnny’s mouth? Made no difference to that little faggot, I bet, that’s how he must’ve got by in jail. Tell me honestly, how’d you come to marry such an asshole, a great-looking girl like you?”
I told him the truth, and it sounded even stupider than it had seemed on my wedding-night: “I wanted to get away from home. And Johnny—I knew he was wild, but I liked that when I was seventeen.”
“Wild. Calling Johnny that, that’s an insult to wild animals. I should have strangled that vicious brat in his crib. The way he used to strangle cats and puppies when he was little. And did he ever tell you about the little Osborn girl? Him and Saul Gray, they were made for each other. But Johnny, he’ll learn.” He laughed, or at least made a rattling sound. “He’ll learn that Gray don’t let go, not ever. I got money from him, I got the hotel, I got Vonna ... and in return I took him on those little trips to Maine that I won’t even tell you about. I bet the cops would like to know about them. Not that they’d believe it.”
“I’ll try the phone again—”
“So why ain’t I dead?”
“Vonna. That was the deal.” By now I believed thoroughly in that deal. Abner had never doubted it for a moment, because he knew Old Man Gray better than I had suspected. “As soon as Johnny fulfills his obligation by raping his mother....”
“Then I’ll be—”
I cut him short. My nerves were frayed, fizzing wires, and when the room went black, I screamed. I heard slobbering noises from the corner where Abner lay, noises that might just have been human bodily functions, but I doubted it. And screams, weak and thin. I blundered toward him, but somehow I lost my way in a room I knew perfectly well. I had no clue at all where I might be. It was a dark night, but even on the darkest night I should have seen the dim outline of a window. Was it the notorious electrical supply, or had I gone blind?
And if the power had failed, why could I still hear the Red Sox announcers bleating at each other on the television set?
“Daddy Corbin? Where—?”
“Gray!” he screamed.
The lights came back on in the oddest way: first as dimly glowing red points, then as brighter ones that reminded me of those eyes on the road. The red changed to dull orange that seemed unable to push back the darkness. It moved back only reluctantly, like a solid and willful presence. To this day, all light seems feeble, and the darkness like a solid force that constantly pushes and probes.
Abner’s face was black, his eyes bloody and bulging, his tongue a purple plum stuffed in his mouth. Later, Dr. Bishop needed to take only one look at him to declare he had been strangled. A second look revealed the sort of bruises that fingers would have caused.
I knew they would have matched the bruises from cold, bony fingers on my hips.
* * * *
Up to a point, Johnny’s scheme worked just as planned. Vonna had signed an ironclad prenuptial agreement and everything, the house, the money, the hotel went to Abner’s son and heir. Or it would have gone to him if he hadn’t been drooling on his straitjacket at Danvers.
Vonna repeated to the police what I screamed at her before she fled, that Johnny killed his father, and it hadn’t seemed worth the fuss it would raise to contradict her. If he ever regains his sanity, he will have to stand trial for Abner’s murder. That will be time enough for me to tell the truth. Maybe.
So everything went to me. I wanted to sell the hotel with Old Man Gray in it, never setting foot inside again, but he persuaded me to come and talk to him. You may find this hard to believe, considering all I’ve said, but those were my feelings at the time. I learned that he can be a truly charming old gentleman. While we spoke he toyed with a lock of hair he had taken from me on that strange night and treasured as a keepsake, revealing an unexpected, romantic side of his nature. In spite of everything, I couldn’t forget how he had pleased me....
We reached an understanding, and I remain in charge of the Dunwich Inn while Saul stays on as our oldest and most eccentric guest. Out-of-towners often remark that his shadowy presence lends the place a certain indefinable atmosphere.
It’s unlikely, of course, that Johnny will ever recover. I heard him speak his last coherent words at Miskatonic General Hospital, where I had gone with the police and Abner’s body, and where I found Vonna, who had broken her ankle in her wild flight. While she was insisting that she hadn’t been raped and pretending she didn’t think I was nuts for suggesting it, Johnny was hustled into the emergency room in fearful condition by a pair of state troopers.
Naked, bruised and bloody, covered from head to toe with mud and some other, vile-smelling filth, he laughed at me when I told him that the spell was a hoax. His father had died, yes, but it had nothing to do with him, because he hadn’t completed the bargain by raping Vonna.
“You moron,” he giggled—crazy or sane, he was still Johnny—“Vonna is my stepmother. Saul said to screw my mother.”
ANNUNCIATOR
The fog was dark green with blackish-green streaks. Something wavered out of it to loom before Jason. It was not unlike a squid, an enormous squid wearing a ruff and a jeweled robe. Bangles glittered on its tentacles.
Jason wanted to scream. Instead he said, “What’s happening, dude?”
The squid gurgled. Jason knew that it was reciting a sequence of numbers that indicated its social position, home address and personal identification.
Incredibly, he recognized these numbers. Even more incredibly, he recognized the squid itself.
Jason said, “Excellent!” He didn’t know exactly what he did, but he did something that rearranged the area of fog beside him. The squid shimmered forward and passed through it.
“Later, man,” Jason said.
Why was he mouthing such jargon? He wasn’t a trendy teen from a dumb movie, he was a classical pianist. He was doing the Prokofiev tonight at Carnegie Hall. He ought to wake up and start adjusting his mind-set.
He remembered that he hadn’t taken his medication. It was too strong lately; he couldn’t play that way. But he couldn’t play with the pain, either, not anymore. He had to wake up and see....
This was really odd: whenever he took his medication, he didn’t dream. But when he managed to sleep without it, which was very rarely, he was conscious of the pain even in his dreams. He was dreaming now, obviously. But he felt no pain.
He didn’t feel much of anything. A bowl festooned with wires and tubes covered his head, like a space-helmet to keep out the poisonous-looking fog. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. He couldn’t bend his head far enough to see any part of his body.
The fog shifted beside him and the squid reappeared, accompanied by an even grander specimen. He recognized that one, too, and heard himself say, “Hey, Boss, how they hangin’?”
“Like awesome!” Boss gurgled.
The creatures tapped his helmet with the gold thimbles on their tentacle-tips to punctuate a lively discussion about him. Boss said he had been programmed to speak in the colloquial style of the Ancient Ones as he screened callers.
The Ancient Ones? Jason guessed he was dreaming of a distant future when humans wil
l have strangled on the muck they made of the atmosphere, when far-voyaging space-squids will write their history from the rubbish to be found on indestructible disks. His mother’s old warning, that comic books would give him nightmares, had come true with a vengeance.
He wanted to explain that Boss had derived its knowledge of “Ancient Ones” from television trash, but he couldn’t speak. They reminded him of doctors, who would discuss his condition in abstruse terms when they believed he was too deeply drugged to overhear. Or, like some of them, when they just didn’t care what he heard. He could no longer doubt that they really were human doctors, seen through the distorting lens of some nasty new drug.
By a supreme effort of will, he managed to say: “Please—doctors—bring me out of this, okay? I have to play at Carnegie Hall tonight.”
They goggled at him. “Play? You can play your ancient music?”
Boss jerked into a funny pose, and Jason couldn’t help laughing when he realized what he was looking at: a squid in a dazzling vestment the size of a circus-tent playing air-guitar.
“Rock on!” it said and made adjustments to his bowl.
“I can’t—” But he discovered that he could. By thinking about it, he could create the sound of a piano, a piano fit for the angels. He could create an orchestra, too, the way it ought to sound, not groveling to the perverse whim of a nitwit conductor. He launched into the Prokofiev and soon lost himself in its outpouring of barbaric energy as the notes sang in the green fog.
Until they abruptly pulled the plug.
“That sucks,” Boss said.
“Rilly bites it, man,” its guest said.
As never before, Jason wanted to throw one of his world-famous tantrums, but they had pulled his plug, too. He could no longer speak independently.
Doctors ... he remembered a doctor Carol had brought, more like a salesman, really. This doctor wanted to freeze his head when he died. It would be revived when medical science found a cure for his disease and a way to give him a new body. When Carol eventually died, her head would be frozen, too, and they would be together again. Some day.
Moonshine, of course, but he felt he owed her for a life they would never share. They had been married less than a year when his terminal illness was diagnosed. Whatever she wanted, even moonshine, she could have.
A third squid, by far the most magnificent yet, hove into view. It carried an elaborate staff topped with a globe. This contained the severed but living head of an old woman, her face naggingly familiar.
She rattled off her master’s identification, which Jason recognized and approved.
“Greet the Great One,” Boss prompted impatiently.
“What’s happening—” and, with an excruciating effort that might have moved mountains, he wrenched forth a word that hadn’t been programmed “—Carol?”
RUBBER-FACE
How had Lucien and I grown so different? We had romped together as infants, been mistaken for brothers at the lycee, courted the same woman....
Isabel. Three years in hell had changed her, too. She had blossomed with tropical excess into a vision of Venus. With her blonde hair unpinned and her loose garments scarcely masking her sweaty charms, she would have been unwelcome at a staid dinner in Brussels; but no guest would ever have forgotten her.
I had won her, and Lucien applied himself to his work with demonic energy: in fact with all the qualities of a demon.
And now this demon I had once called brother announced that my career with His Majesty’s company and my life were ended.
“You can’t blame me for a poor harvest, my friend. If—”
“Ah, but I do! All along the upper Congo, they ship twenty times more rubber than you. Richard, you are too soft-hearted to drive these devils.”
“I have not stinted to use the cane.”
I looked to Isabel for confirmation. Defying my orders, she never failed to witness punishments. But she lowered her eyes to the table.
“The cane? Richard, you poor fool, there is one cure only for idle hands.”
He tossed something on the table. It was the old Lucien, scaring me with a snake or, in this case, enormous black spiders, and I cried out unmanfully.
Isabel merely stared at the display, her face flushed, her eyes bright. I looked again.
I stood up, kicking my chair over. “You are not merely a criminal, Lucien, you are a ghoul.”
“I do what I must, Richard. Since you cannot—”
“I shall prove to you that my time has not been wasted. I must go to the village.”
“What you must do is pack. My men will escort you downriver in the morning.” After a pause, he added: “And Madame, of course.”
The idiots! Feeding the demand for bicycle tires and raincoats with human blood while ignoring a treasure that might transform the world! I had not planned a demonstration, but I would do more than demonstrate.
I found my way to Malinga’s dark hut, she who had told me of the tree whose sap God used to make the first man. I had seen it work wonders that I will not even hint at until my claims can be supported by more painstaking research.
In the meantime I would use it to rid the world of the demon, and then Lucien “himself” would order his troops back to Leopoldville, leaving me free to do my work until I could present its fruits to His Majesty.
I overrode Malinga’s warnings and ordered her to apply the resin, an uncomfortable process that became far worse as the paste seared through to my skull. And rearranged it. After a time I recovered sufficiently to demand a mirror.
“You stupid hag! That agony for nothing? This is my own face.”
“Monsieur Duroc—”
“You dare mock me?” I sent the witch flying with the back of my fist. “I am who I was, Lucien Civin.”
I trudged through the darkness and hive-like murmuring, using the barrel of my revolver to strike aside any who strayed across my path. Why had I gone among these savages in the first place, wasting my time on Richard’s fantasies? I would pay him back. Thank God, everything is permitted here.
I had meant to send him downriver in irons. Isabel would stay. But when I burst into their bedroom and beheld them embracing, I went mad. I tore him loose and shot him five times.
“No, Richard, please!” she screamed.
What, her, too? I was tempted to use my last round on the sarcastic bitch, but I flung her back and took her as I had dreamed so long of doing.
“Oh, Richard,” she sighed. “If only you had been like this before....”
I was terribly confused, but I knew now that I was Richard Duroc. The body on the floor belonged to the demon, Lucien Civin. But when I stumbled to the mirror, it was the face of Civin, created by Malinga’s magic, that returned my horrified stare.
I tried to tear it off, hooking my fingers into the nostrils. I was a bloody mess by the time Civin’s men restrained me.
Now I am in irons on my way to judgment, but they don’t know I have concealed a spoon.
While they sleep, I will scrape this hateful face down to the bone and set everything right.
HERBERT WEST—REINCARNATED, PART II: THE HORROR FROM THE HOLY LAND
[This story was originally published as part of a round-robin with other writers as a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator.”—B.McN.]
Dedicated to Rodney Heather
* * * *
Even before his death, Herbert West was never a cheerful man. His moods alternated between sullen abstraction and, when some especially complex problem gripped the full force of his intellect, demoniacal energy. In either mood, an innocent sally of wit or even the casual pleasantries of normal human intercourse could provoke him to a scathing response.
These moods were exaggerated by the resurrection of his mortal remains, brought about by the formulae and procedures that were the fruit of his lifelong study. In the re-animated West, sullenness deepened to the gloom of the grave; intensity was heightened to a pitch beyond madness. He could smile, yes
, when skewering some poor fool who had advanced the inoffensive proposition that it was a nice day, but his smile was a sardonic grimace that might have given pause to Satan himself. Anyone seeking warmth or good cheer from Herbert West would have been better advised to seek them from a shark or a squid.
Imagine, then, my consternation when this morose genius positively blossomed in the hothouse atmosphere of wartime Berlin. The barbaric spectacles, the frenzied crowds, the strutting soldiers and posturing politicians spoke to some need in his formerly reclusive nature. He cheered at rallies, he glittered at parties, he waltzed at balls. He was positively transfigured with joy when he awoke me quite late one night with the news that Herr Hitler himself had shaken him by the hand and praised his work.
“A race is nothing without a sense of purpose, don’t you see?” he positively bubbled. “And the Fuhrer has provided one for bona-fide Aryans of every nationality. Can’t you hear it humming all around you, a hive of industry where no worker is idle, no youth is delinquent, no artist or philosopher is alienated, not if they know what’s good for them? Crime, perversion and discontent have been eliminated by the obvious solution of shipping all the criminals, perverts and malcontents to firmly supervised camps. There is food on every table, and the happy workers have splendid roads on which to drive their inexpensive machines. I may have re-animated a few corpses, but that seems contemptible beside the achievement of the Fuhrer, who has re-animated an entire people.”
Thus torn from a sound sleep, I was uncharacteristically candid in my reply to this rhapsody: “A sense of purpose? Their only purpose is war, West. Your fine new friends have plunged the world into an abyss of barbarism from which it may never emerge.”
“An abyss of barbarism?” He laughed wildly. “Barbarism is the natural, unsullied state of the Nordic hero, and war is the breath of life to him. The abyss of civilization, rather, a corrupt pit crawling with oriental decadence, where the standard of morality is that of the usurer and the whoremonger, where the goal of politics is the tyranny of equality, where the desire of an effete population is fixed upon the phantom of pusillanimous peace: it is from this abyss that the Fuhrer has led us into the sunlight of a new Golden Age. The manly clash of arms has once again risen to wake the gods from their long slumber among the cobwebs of Valhalla.”
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