Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  He’d said nothing about a fanzine. He had been trying to sell a book he’d published himself. The lunatic had destroyed all but three copies in the belief that this would make them valuable rarities, and he insisted that one copy was meant for Hal alone. He wanted five grand for it. Hal had not listened to his whole pitch, and it was only later that he learned more about A Grammarie of Goety.

  Feeling like a hunted felon as he cringed away from shadows that looked like Beckford, he had ducked into the hotel bar while Kelly packed. He was instantly cornered by a misdirected surfer, with a Boris Vallejo T-shirt and a palomino ponytail that hung to his baggy shorts.

  The kid treated him to two cruel views of himself in his mirror sunglasses as he said, “I was told that your epulations had rendered you crapulous.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what I said when Bill Beckford laid that on me. I called the public library. They say it means you have a hangover.”

  That was true, and Hal ordered a beer to cure it. He hoped the surfer would go away if he ignored him, as he had no wish to twitch an autograph.

  Hal was appalled to learn that this was Richard Priest. Though he looked barely old enough to be served, he had written stories Hal envied. He wrote with his own voice at an age when Hal had been regurgitating Lovecraft and filling a shoebox with rejection-slips.

  Maybe Rick had swapped the Devil his sense of smell for his talent, because he’d listened to Beckford’s gabble. The old man believed that one could influence readers by writing to patterns he had worked out. A horror writer who mastered his science of incantation could scare the hell out of people, no matter how badly he wrote.

  Hal signaled for another beer. “Don’t tell me you bought his book.”

  “What, fifty bucks for some screwball’s theory? I think it’s interesting, that’s all.”

  The unconvincing denial amused Hal, but he kept a straight face. It was a relief to learn that a kid with so much talent was more insecure than he was, a sucker for crackpot systems. He was mildly annoyed by the reduced price. He might have paid fifty bucks just to get rid of the pest.

  He next saw Richard Priest at bay on a frenzied hen-party of daytime television. The emcee had worked the audience into a lather over the blowtorch-exorcist, the boy who ate his parents and the other loons who had read Rick. “Why don’t you blame it on a society that teaches every moron to read?” Rick said, coming through the tube as someone who could talk his way into the electric chair for a parking-ticket. “I write for people who can distinguish a novel from a cookbook.” He was not the starry-sunglassed kid Hal remembered, but his intolerable arrogance might be stage-fright. By that time he had forgotten the madman in New Orleans and never thought to connect the impact of Rick’s books with Beckford’s system.

  That, of course, was idiotic. Beckford was nuts, period.

  There was an idea for a plot in this, but he needed another drink before he tried to sort it out. On this trip to the bar, he switched off the overhead lights. He was a rational being. Neither bad dreams nor a crank’s vendetta could unman him.

  He remembered his intention to call Beckford when he returned to his chair, and he punched the number out quickly: peep-peep-peep. Had Isaiah meant that wizards were peeping Toms, or that they used Touch-Tone phones? Could a familiar spirit take the shape of a blob with beckoning tendrils? He took up a magnifying glass to study Kelly’s tattoo, but he was distracted by the illusion of substance the glass gave her figure. Maybe he should be nice to Beckford and try to get her address.

  The phone rang on. He’d always hoped for a supernatural encounter. When he was five or six, an older kid had tried to keep him from messing in a barn by telling him the Bogeyman lived there. He’d crawled through cobwebs and rotten straw, around bales of rusty wire and greasy machinery. No Bogeyman. Crawling around a church on his knees a few years later, he had failed to find God. A fantasy writer with no unreal experience, he’d at last run afoul of a wizard, and he was called Bill. He felt cheated.

  “Hello?” Hal said. He was unsure if the phone had been picked up or if it had merely stopped ringing. “Hey, Beckford, is this you?” he shouted into the tinny void, and he faintly heard: peep-peep. The connection broke; the tone hummed.

  He clenched the phone and restrained himself from tearing it up by the roots and hurling it. The peeping hadn’t been electronic. It could have been the falsetto of a mocking lunatic. The old man might have recognized his voice.

  But why had he peeped? He couldn’t have known about the quote from Isaiah Hal had stored in his computer yesterday. Or had he stored it? If Stephanie was in league with Beckford—he chopped off the paranoid fantasy.

  The music had ended. He was about to get up and put on another disk when a maddeningly inaccessible spot beneath his right shoulder blade began to itch. He tried to force his hand up to it. The itch moved; it was not imaginary. Inside his robe, something crawled on his back.

  Bugs were a common nuisance in these rural hills. Dozens of them whirred and ticked and fluttered at the screens. Although he had no special fear of them, he reacted violently to this one, jerking backward to mash it between his shoulder and the chair. He gasped from the pain of his thoughtlessly twisted arm, then screamed from a far worse pain, like the jab of an icepick in his shoulder blade. Worse yet was his impression of the creature he pinned. It was no insect. Clawing and scrabbling at his skin, it was large and firm as a human hand.

  He leaped from his chair, shedding his robe as if it were on fire, toppling his monitor to the floor with an expensive crash. Halfway across the room, naked and shaking, he turned to stare at the crumpled robe. A bright spot of blood stared back from the pure white of the terrycloth.

  He batted at his back, shivering with loathing, and crying out again when he brushed the wound. A lump had risen, but it was only a lump. He searched himself systematically from the hair of his head to his crotch. Whatever it was, he had escaped it.

  A bat had attacked him, probably, but that was no comfort: rabies was no figment of Stephen King’s imagination. The bat had been on the shelf by the locomotive, the flung book had disturbed it, it had found its way down his back.

  The robe stirred. He had to catch the animal or kill it so it could be tested for the disease. The wriggling neared the edge of the robe. It seemed about to get away. No weapon came to hand, so he leaped forward and stamped hard with his bare foot.

  He screamed again. It was like stamping on a spike. Pain exploded from his heel to his skull. He fell with a crash that rattled the windows. Though dazed, he wrenched himself to a sitting position in time to see the thing whip behind his chair. The sight of it sent him bouncing back on his buttocks in a series of inelegant thumps.

  He was unwilling to admit that the creature was like Beckford’s logo, now the size of a crab. He was tired and upset; the evidence of his eyes was inadmissable. Something among the natural fauna of New Jersey must correspond to this animal.

  He twisted his foot up for inspection, damning the gross unwieldiness of his body. His heel already bore a lump the color of an eggplant, bleeding sluggishly from a central puncture. Standing was painful, but he hobbled to the bar and took a deep swallow of warm gin from the bottle.

  He thought of calling the police, but the phone was too close to the chair, where he believed the thing lurked. “This is Hal Kane, officer—yes, the horror writer. A wizard’s familiar is chasing me around my study.” They would find nothing. It would make for a very funny piece in the local weekly.

  He turned on the fluorescent tubes, wincing at the dance of shadows in their initial flicker. He needed a weapon. The bottle he held was half full, he would not waste it, and there were no empties at the bar. He began to scan the room, then laughed aloud. John Wayne would have wept over him. Here he stood, thinking of weapons in terms of bottles when an arsenal gleamed on the wall at his back.

  He thought twice before taking down the .45 caliber Navy Colt, a revolver like the one Jesse James had favo
red. That newspaper piece would be even funnier if he shot himself.

  It took him a while to remember how to open the cylinder and to find the right cartridges while keeping one eye on his chair, but at last he crept forth with the cocked pistol in one hand and the bottle in the other. He knew what an absurd figure he cut. Once he had killed and identified the goddamn thing, once his wounds had been treated, this would make a great anecdote. But not until then.

  Motion streaked at the corner of his eye. His quarry had fled under the drapes and was now dashing across the wall behind him. He spun and fired, but not, unfortunately, in that order. A Mallet locomotive, pride of his collection, exploded in three whirling pieces. The creature was in sight, but blurred by its speed. The gun hammered his wrist as he drilled Poe between the eyes, it bucked once more as he shot Marilyn in the belly. He led the scurrying thing before he squeezed off his fourth shot with care.

  The lights went out; something like a dizzying weight of wool pressed his ears. He stumbled, and for a moment he was convinced that he had managed to shoot himself, but he was all right. His shot had parted a wire in the wall, probably, killing the overhead tubes. The noise of the shots had deafened and disoriented him. The room reeked of gunpowder.

  The light by his chair still shone. He’d last seen the creature moving toward the bar. That area was dark.

  He would seem an even worse fool now, but he had to call the police. The nearest neighbors were a mile away, and the odd gunshot at night was not unknown in the country, but four shots in rapid succession might stir up a fuss. It would be best to get his call in first.

  The phone was dead. The round that had put out the lights must have damaged a telephone wire. Remembering his last call, he wondered if Beckford were to blame. Hexing a telephone would be child’s play for a man who could send an image through the mail and bring it to life with the incantations hidden in his prose—

  “Bullshit!” he shouted, and he was further enraged by the flat sound of his voice in his ringing ears. It was only a tarantula that Stephanie had brought home with the bananas. Even D.T.’s was preferable to any explanation involving Beckford.

  Unless Stephanie was his accomplice.

  The more he brooded on this, the more plausible it seemed. What could she see in him, a cranky old fart who had driven away every person he ever loved? Not even Justine’s complaint was groundless: he could remember flirting with her friends. No harm had been meant. The girls had probably laughed at him behind his back. As Stephanie was doing.

  But if that was so, what did she see in Beckford? This struck him so funny that he doubled over with laughter and stamped his foot. It was the wounded foot, and his laugh ended in a scream. That was the moment the thing chose to dash for the door to the hallway.

  The door was closed, a pale rectangle in the shadows, but one of the shadows jittered at its base, trying to squeeze through the crack. That crack was too small. He had it cold. He leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the back of the chair and gripping the pistol with both hands as he sighted. He fired, and he missed, but the door swung inward as if wrenched open by a large and violent man. It fanned a breeze that riffled through the papers on his desk and bore with it the ineffable scent of Bill Beckford.

  He found an impressive hole in the door, but how could his shot have pulled the door open, and pulled it violently enough to splinter the wood around the latch? That an animal no bigger than his hand could have opened it with such force seemed impossible, but so did the lingering presence of that stench.

  “Stephanie!” he shouted up the stairs, but shouting seemed futile if gunfire had failed to wake her.

  And what if he did wake her? Stumbling groggily out of bed, she might step on the creature. She would be safer if he let her lie. She, after all, was not its target.

  The kitchen lay at the end of the dark hall. His car keys hung on a hook by the back door. He could drive to the hospital and send help. “How do I know what it was? It was dark. It’s in the house now with my secretary.” She, of course, was in his bed, a circumstance that would set tongues wagging, but that was the least of his worries.

  Halfway down the hall, light from the kitchen lay like spilled water on the bare boards. If he could creep that far he would be safe. Groping for the light-switch would have taken more courage than simply pushing his feet forward into the darkness. He moved the gun in a slow arc before him as he advanced, but it shook so badly that he knew he could never hit anything.

  He hesitated at the threshold. The kitchen was large and full of shadows. He wished he had examined all the junk Tippi had bought to festoon the walls, so he could say that this was a skillet and that a potholder, with no lingering doubt whatever that neither was a nameless abomination from the nethermost crypt of nightmare. Even more dubious, dried herbs and fungi hung from the beams like dismembered gnomes.

  The range was built into a central pedestal of brick. A light in its hood illuminated the switch-panel at his side clearly enough, and he threw all of those switches with one swipe of his forearm. The skillet leaped out as a true skillet, the gnomish head became a string-bag of shallots.

  He limped forward almost confidently, but he gave the central island a wide berth. Nothing lurked behind it. He was safe.

  He raised his eyes from the floor to the hook where the car-keys hung. The creature clung to the wall beside the door, masking the keys.

  Jerking back, he cracked his spine against the range. The gun nearly twitched from his fingers. He set the bottle down and steadied the gun with his left hand as he stared.

  It was no stowaway spider. Its dull gleam suggested a carapace, but it had flattened itself against the wall like putty. Legs or tentacles, or perhaps merely loose strands of its shapeless substance, twitched and curled as if at random; he could detect no rhythmic movement of heartbeat or breath.

  “What the fuck are you?”

  He regretted the question, dreading that he might hear an answer. He recognized the thing from his most recently suppressed nightmare. It was the suspect blob in the toilet, the ruined face in the mirror, the Bogeyman he had failed to find in the barn. It was the vein he had tapped with so much success, but never examined closely, for the tales that had made his name. If all the ingested poisons of a lifetime spent in the Land of Industrial Waste had been concentrated, if that concentration had been animated by his inadmissable urges and secret fears, it might have looked like this. It was his.

  “Sonny-boy!” he giggled, raising the pistol.

  It was no more than ten feet away, and it showed no inclination to flee. He could not miss. But he searched for a vital spot, for some way at least of telling the head from the body. As he sighted, a coral gash ringed with curved teeth like carpet-maker’s needles split the surface that faced him, and he cringed before a stinking exhalation of age and disease.

  The pistol discharged. The bullet shattered the glass in the door beside the thing, and it launched itself toward his face. He couldn’t remember ducking, but he found himself knotted into a quivering ball at the base of the brick pedestal. The creature had missed him. He heard it scrabbling away down the hall.

  His troubles were over. He was free to leave. He lurched to the door with his hand extended for the keys. It hung in midair as he stared at the empty hook. He scanned the floor in vain. The thing had taken his car-keys.

  He had another set, but they were in his bedroom, in a pocket of the overalls he had lately worn whenever forced to stir beyond his home. Having come so far, he raged against the ordeal of retracing his steps, but he couldn’t even face the thought of walking the lonely and unlighted road to a neighbor’s house. He cursed those neighbors with a passion. Did they suppose the gunshots meant his TV was too loud? Nor did Stephanie escape his rage. She must be secretly smoking opium.

  He might barricade the kitchen and hide here until morning, but he didn’t dare leave his wounds untended. His throbbing foot had swollen till the skin shone. Nothing on earth that looked like that creat
ure, or smelled like it, could not be poisonous.

  His grand slam of the switch-panel had lighted the hall and the stairway that doubled back above it. He checked it carefully, even the ceiling, before hobbling forward.

  He paused at the door to his study, where his chair beckoned from its island of light. The bar beckoned, too. But the shadows in the study terrified him. Could he ever feel at home there again? Rage at Beckford dragged a wordless growl from his lungs, ancestor of all curses.

  Climbing the stairs was difficult, carrying the gun in one hand and leaning on the other, but he somehow managed to race up the last few steps when he saw that his bedroom door gaped open. He had left it closed. The light was on; the bed was empty.

  “Stephanie?” he called.

  The bed sat on a chest of drawers, there was no space beneath it, but the room held a wealth of other hiding places for even the most inept imp: his overalls, crumpled over a chair; half-opened drawers, windows with their shades and drapes; and, by far the worst of all, the door of a dark closet that hung ajar. He went straight to the closet. Now he was looking for a terrorized girl. Or her body.

  He opened the door wide with the pistol, used it to stir the hanging clothes. Nothing. He kept calling her name, but only crickets, frogs and God-knew-what-all replied from the darkness pressing the house.

  He lifted his overalls quickly with thumb and forefinger, cast them out to lie flat on the floor: relic of a farmer kidnapped by aliens. He knelt and pressed the pockets with his palm, not daring to reach into them, keeping his spirits up by stammering about Zuzu’s petals, but the pockets were plainly empty.