I hurled it to the floor, stamped on it, and it squeezed forth broken springs and rods mingled with animal tissues and fluids. The foul odor it released was more disgusting than its appearance, and the feel of it was worst of all, but I scooped up the wriggling mess and ran to the window, where I hurled it down to the courtyard among my chained hounds. A chorus of delighted roars and growls arose, mingled with a high-pitched shrieking that was not at all like the sound of any cuckoo-clock. This soon fell silent.
I was about to congratulate myself when Coppélia screamed. She flung herself shaking into my arms as I turned. Surprenant stood still at the door, bloody saber in hand.
But that was all he ever did from that day forth: stood still. I had his remains conveyed to a blacksmith for the appropriate obsequies.
* * * *
Phyllis grew subdued and introspective, so much so that she made only a few shrill and ill-tempered observations upon the addition of Coppélia to our household. She moderated her criticism when the wench proved to be as skillful and eager in her play with a woman and a man as with two men.
I thought the loss of that demonic clock had subdued her spirit, and perhaps it had, but she eventually confided that the cause was her pregnancy.
I was delighted by the prospect of an heir, and one evening, in an especially uxorious mood as we sat by the fire, I knelt to press my ear to her belly and heard the heart of the Twelfth Earl of Nether Dunwich ... ticking.
STAR STALKER
“You won’t believe this,” Todd told the cop. “You know Rana Piper?”
Lt. Flowers pulled out a leaf of his desk. It held the calendar she had posed for. “We had her on the wall, but we were told it was politically incorrect.”
“She’s after me,” Todd said.
“Me, too.”
“I’m serious. I had this service station in Malibu. She pulled up in her Excalibur one day. I had her centerfold pinned up in the office so I asked her to autograph it. We got to talking, and she came on to me.”
The detective was drinking coffee when he snorted. It sprayed Todd.
“That’s okay,” Todd said, “I know how it sounds.”
Lt. Flowers wiped his face but didn’t offer to share his tissues. He said, “So what did you do?”
“I told her I was married.”
“You’re killing me. You mind if I tape this?”
“I wish you would. She started sending me gifts—I mean, gifts like a Rolex.”
“You’re not wearing it.”
“I sold it. How could I explain such things to my wife? I couldn’t explain phone calls from a woman who said she was Rana Piper, either, claiming we were lovers. My wife never believed it was really her, but she kicked me out anyway.”
“So then you were free to—”
“No. Who did she think she was, Ms. Big-deal Supermodel, jerking my chain?”
“I got to admire your strength of character.”
“She busted into my apartment and left notes. She called and called. When she finally caught on that I hated her guts, she broke in and trashed the place. I got evicted. The oil company canceled my franchise. She ran up bills with my credit card numbers, and they got canceled. I couldn’t buy a job. She used her money and influence to destroy me.”
“You don’t look destroyed.”
“I am—I was. I got fake ID, came east, got work driving a cab. I’m a good businessman. Now I got two cars and employ three guys—”
“With fake ID?”
“I knew that would get your attention. I’m probably breaking ten different laws, but I don’t care anymore. She found me, and she’s going to kill me. She said, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody can.’”
Lt. Flowers couldn’t take his eyes off Rana’s picture. “Sounds like it’s time to give in.”
“That was my thought.” Todd’s own laugh gave him the chills. “But she’s not buying. It’s too late. I rejected her, she says I made a fool of her, and now she’s mad. I found a note in lipstick—the brand she advertises—on my bathroom mirror when I woke up today: See how easy it would be?”
“If she did it, don’t you think somebody would notice Rana Piper coming to Wickapecko, New Jersey, and climbing up your trellis?”
“I don’t think she did one-tenth of the stuff herself. She can hire people to stalk me. And kill me. You can’t underestimate her power.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Arrest me. Put me in a cell.”
“Good thinking,” Lt. Flowers said, turning to his typewriter and rolling in a form. “Tell me about your fake driver’s license.”
Todd told him, then said as he was taken in handcuffs to a cell, “I figured publicity would protect me, but no newspaper would print my story, not even those supermarket tabloids. But now, if I say all this in open court, the papers won’t have to worry about lawsuits and stuff, right?”
The lieutenant walked into the cell with him while a beefy sergeant stayed at the door.
“What are you doing?” Todd asked.
“Fixing your sheet.”
“Shouldn’t you take off the cuffs now? What do you mean, fixing it? By stuffing it in the toilet?”
“They don’t break so easy when they’re wet.”
“Hey ... you said she climbed up my trellis. How do you know I have a trellis outside my bathroom?”
“Wild guess. Here, sergeant, you know the procedure.”
Without a word, the sergeant tied one end of the wet sheet to the bars of the door, the other to Todd’s neck. Todd struggled desperately to kick or bite, but both men were remarkably agile.
“Nice work, sergeant, now just lean him forward by the shoulders. Gently but firmly, that’s the ticket, so’s not to leave bruises.”
“Why?” Todd managed to squeak through his constricting windpipe.
“Like you yourself said, son, you can’t underestimate her power.”
“So,” the sergeant said as he took the cuffs from the body, “what was that all about?”
“Damn dope-dealer trying to muscle his way in from the Coast. We got to make an example.”
The sergeant giggled. “This is how we just say no in Jersey.”
“You got it,” Lt. Flowers said. “You take your coffee with cream, two sugars, right?”
MARANTHA’S TALE
I’ll never forget the night Findik and I got lost in the swamp. He laughed at Grandma’s stories about bog-losels.
“They’re not real, stupid!” he said just before the bog-losel popped up and grabbed him.
I couldn’t see much, but I heard crunching and sucking. I heard gargling, too, converging on the spot where I stood.
Some saint took pity on me, because I ran straight to the trail where we’d been gathering mushrooms.
Nobody paid much mind to bog-losels. They are nasty, but inept. Their worst trait is the hypnotic power they use to lead people astray. But would you believe it, there are degenerates who sneak down to the swamp to see what temptations the bog-losels can concoct for them?
I don’t know why I was reminded of them when Bargle came to town. They are slimy, ugly things, and he was a grand personage, with a cute little beard and burning black eyes. He evaded questions as he climbed towers and inspected ramparts.
He was so splendid that nobody thought of arresting him as a spy for three days, and then he explained that he was seeing how well prepared we were for Burkle, the ogre, who was headed our way. We were not very well prepared, he said, but for a price he would use his wizardry to fight it. I followed these negotiations, since his price included beautiful maidens. And if you said “beautiful maiden” in those days, everybody would say, “Oh, you mean Marantha?”
He wanted payment in advance, but nobody bought this. The elders agreed to meet his terms if he killed the ogre. He stayed at the Twin Serpents telling Burkle-stories, doing magic tricks, and getting a head start on the maidens. On the barmaids, anyway.
I didn’t trust him, and nobody was m
ore surprised than I when Burkle really showed up. It was market day, everybody was in the main square. We heard a wet thud and looked up to see a big, red stain on the cathedral. I thought someone had flung a basket of tomatoes with a catapult until bones came loose and fell into the street with an appalling clatter. A hat floated down, too, that someone recognized as Timpok’s, the swineherd.
A crowd ran up on the wall, and many of them regretted it when Burkle demonstrated his Timpok-technique. One at a time he chewed them up and spat them out. He was a great spitter, hitting only our finest buildings, occasionally throwing his horrible head way back to get distance. Then he got serious and kicked down the wall. He swallowed the people he scooped up, with blood and spare parts drizzling from his chomping jaws. Arrows, spears and the war-engines in the towers only irritated him.
Bargle arrived and put on his show, elegant posturing, arm-waving, multicolored lightning, splendid rhetoric. He demolished about fifteen buildings. Burkle, not much the worse for it, wandered off to find another way through the walls.
I was young and inexperienced, but I thought it peculiar that two bizarre characters should be fighting each other but doing most of their damage to us. I was the only one who seemed to notice this. When Bargle explained that this was a rougher fight than he’d expected, and would require a bigger payment, the elders agreed before the words were out of his mouth.
I noticed something even funnier: our wizard had a tail. Not like an animal’s, it was a green strand that I mistook for a loose thread of his vestment, but this thread went on forever. While he strode to his next confrontation, I went the other way, following the tail all the way to the ruined city wall. It wandered off into the fields, taking Burkle’s route. I touched it. It didn’t exactly burn, but it tingled painfully.
Meanwhile I heard more toppling masonry, vast groans of dismay, thunderclaps, beastly roars. I don’t know what gave me the idea, but I took the knife Mama had given me to discourage men like Bargle and severed the tail. Infinitely faster than any snake, it whipped away in both directions, leaving me hopping in circles and shaking my stinging hand.
The noise stopped.
It was replaced by a howling chorus that I later learned was one of outrage as the glittering Bargle was transformed into a mewling bog-losel, desperately trying to scramble back to the swamp while the crowd attacked it and stamped it flat. As for Burkle, he just melted into a big pond of muck.
TO MY DEAR FRIEND, HOMMY-BEG
Sunlight stumbled into the room like a drunken blond when Hal Kane undraped the glass doors overlooking the pool. Yeah, that would be great if this were 1940. He rummaged in the fridge under the bar for his morning beer, poured a Rutgers mug of coffee from the pot Stiffen-Me had brewed, and hoisted himself into the marble-and-leather barber’s chair at his Mac. He entered the blond in his QUIPS file: Sunlight stumbled in like a blond coming home from a fraternity bash.
He was communing with the foursquare image of Sam Adams on his second beer when Stiffen-Me, a sober blond, came home from the post office. He had better stop calling her that: the joke would slip out on the day Tippi blew in from Key West. He practiced aloud: “Stephanie.”
“Huh?” Slouching at the bar, she fixed him with a glittery eyeglass behind a willow-cascade of hair. Some idiot had convinced her that she was too tall and must camouflage herself.
She was sorting the mail she had fetched by bicycle. He ought to get a bike so he could follow her and enjoy the view of her tan legs stretching, her cheeks fluidly flexing. He flashed on himself pumping his 200-pounds-plus of surf-’n’-turf up an endless hill on the bicycular Buick he had put away with childish things when he was thirteen, when bike-riding hadn’t fit the James Dean image he’d coveted.
“It’s a beautiful name,” he said.
“Oh, good, I can talk, huh?”
“Yeah, I’m just screwing around here.”
She reviewed the mail for him: bills he would ignore, fan letters she would answer, “and there’s these galleys for Richard Priest’s novel.”
“Shit, I promised him a quote. Make one up.”
“’The scariest writer since H.P. Lovecraft, but only on social issues.’”
That stung. She’d been wearing diapers when he told Dick Cavett that Lovecraft was “an unreadable writer, a bigot, an all-around sicko,” but the loonies remembered. They had paid him back at a hellish convention in Providence, where he’d only been trying to plug his first book. He had dug his grave deeper during a panel discussion by confusing M.R. with P.D. James. Fortunately it was the great American public who bought his books by the millions, not the dipshits who printed fanzines.
“Sheest, I was only making a joke, Hal!”
She had deplored Richard Priest’s novel about bums, he remembered; the needle was meant for Rick, not him. Applying for the summer job, she had praised Hal’s “empathy for the downtrodden.” When she went back to U-Conn he could call “homeless people” bums again.
He ought to level with her, tell her that glamorizing the lowly sold books, or it used to. Maybe Richard Priest, pandering to readers who thought poor people were scary, knew more about America in its decline than he did.
“Or I could say, ‘There’s more than one blockbuster movie in Priest’s novel. If you haven’t seen them, you’ll love it.’”
“You’ve been preparing these.”
“Yeah, bringing home the mail, when I saw what it—yech!” She flipped a manilla envelope from her fingertips.
“What’s that?” He seized the excuse to walk to the bar. He sucked in his gut and belted his white robe more tightly. “It’s what Balzac wore,” he had told Tippi, but she reminded him that Balzac hadn’t dragged his ass out of bed at one in the afternoon and reached for a beer.
“I thought it was a scrunched bug.” Stephanie retrieved the brown envelope from the floor.
Beside the name of the sender, Bill Beckford, and his address in North Adams, Mass., a blackish-green logo with a soapy texture was embossed. It could have represented a bug on a midnight windshield or a toad mashed on the blacktop, but Beckford probably thought of it as a nameless abomination from the nethermost crypt of nightmare. Stephanie’s reaction would have thrilled him.
Hal was thrilled, too, by this reminder that he now had his own corps of dipshits. They had honored him with his very own convention in Omaha, the setting of Devilshine. Now he had his own fanzine.
Trying to be cool, he got the beer and opened it before tearing off the flap of the envelope. His face grinned back at him from the cover, in one of the publicity shots he’d sent Beckford. He was lucky to be the kind of guy you saw swapping yarns at a VFW bar. He could get away with scary bedtime stories as everybody’s goofy Uncle Hal.
“Don’t fall in,” Stephanie said.
He had failed to disguise his fascination, and he blushed. She bent to give him a quick kiss. He was so enthralled with the fanzine that he omitted to grab her. His smile faded when he noted the title.
“Hommy-Beg, what is that? Some southern crap like grits?”
“That was Bram Stoker’s dedication of Dracula, ‘To My Dear Friend, Hommy-Beg.’” She never missed a chance to remind him that the Gothic Tradition was her academic specialty.
“Oh. Yeah. I knew that. But what’s it got to do with me? When did I ever write anything about vampires, fachrissakes?”
“His real name was Hall Caine, get it?” She spelled it. “He was an enormously successful novelist—”
“Son of a bitch!” Hal Kane said, pleased.
“—in his day. Now he’s mostly famous for what a big ego he had. Like he was showing this guy around this humongous mansion he built? So this guy, his friend, goes, ‘What a beautiful sunset!’ and Hall Caine goes, ‘Thank you.’”
“Very nice recitation, A-plus, only your grammar needs work.” A grand sweep of his arm indicated his study with its model trains and toy soldiers and real guns, its carousel horse and Marilyn Monroe poster, and even the rumpled green bai
ze of western New Jersey hills beyond the pool: things he had wanted but never had as a boy in a blurred succession of rented dumps. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Of course not! I bet this bug-scruncher doesn’t know all that about Hommy-Beg, either.” She added: “Nice job on the scenery.”
She was probably right. He flipped through the book, page after page about him. It was illustrated with the jackets of his novels, with candid shots he had sent Beckford of him and Tippi and the kids, Justine and Julian.
“And there’s this.” She handed him a package that he took absently.
Here was an interview he forgot having given:
HB: What do you say to the literary critics who call you a hack?
HK: When I was a kid I dreamed of being a great author like James Joyce. Maybe that kid wouldn’t want to meet me today, but it’s for damn sure he wouldn’t want to meet a bunch of asshole book-reviewers. My stuff is more honest than politicians and less harmful than dope, so what’s the problem?
He must have said that, because it was what he thought, but he had no recollection of speaking to Beckford. Half in the bag, he had probably babbled over the phone late one evening. He dreaded reading further, for God alone knew what else he’d said.
He put the fanzine aside and examined the other package. Bloomingdale’s, it must be for Tippi, but it was addressed to him. Then he remembered his inspiration, or so it had seemed. He stripped the outer wrapping, pocketed the invoice and gave the box to Stephanie. Her simple excitement, so like Justine’s with a surprise gift, warmed him, but only until he recalled that his daughter was six years older than this kid he was sleeping with. He reminded himself that dead was old.
“You gotta be kidding! You want me to wear this?” She held up the red swatches of fabric, not enough for a bow tie, in the way she had held Beckford’s envelope.
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