He crept down the hall to the door of Stephanie’s disused room and found it locked from the inside.
“Stephanie?” He rapped lightly. “It’s okay, honey, it’s me.”
“Go away!” she screamed. “Leave me alone!”
“Don’t worry, it’s only me. Hal.”
“I know who it is. And I know how drunk you are. Now will you please get the fuck out of here and let me sleep?”
“God damn it, Tippi, open this door! There’s something loose in the house....”
He realized what he had called her, perhaps confused by memories of knocking drunkenly at other locked doors. After that slip, it would be useless to argue that he was sober.
“What’s loose in the house is a crazy old man playing cowboys and raving at the top of his lungs.” She paused to compose herself, then called more gently: “Please go to bed, Hal. And put the gun away, okay?”
Maybe he was drunk, drunk enough to pass for psychotic. But if that were so, how could he possibly entertain such a reasonable doubt? He hoisted his foot for another look at his wound. Could he have done that by stamping on a pencil in the pocket of his robe?
“Okay, honey, don’t worry about it, I’m sorry,” he said in a good imitation of calm. “Go back to sleep—but stay in there, okay? Don’t open the door.”
“Put the gun away, Hal. Please?”
“Sure.”
He would try to call the police from his bedroom. That phone had a different number, perhaps it was unaffected by the damage he had done. Starting to back away, he saw the thing laboring vigorously at the top seam of Stephanie’s door. Perhaps she was its true target. Dying might be easier, and certainly quicker, than trying to explain that his mistress had been murdered by a picture sent through the mail. He screamed at it as he raised the gun.
It leaped, hitting him square in the face. He hammered it with the barrel of the pistol, disregarding the pain to his own forehead, but the creature only clung tighter as he fell thrashing to the floor. Its barb bored between his eyes.
Incantation works, he told himself, and he babbled a Hail Mary in desperate haste, but the sting probed deeper as he twisted in convulsions of fear and pain. He heard Stephanie scolding him through the door, convinced that now she had a religious maniac to deal with. Our Father. I pledge allegiance. Jesus Christ! None of it worked, he lacked faith. What did he believe in strongly enough to oppose the magic of Beckford’s hatred?
“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do,” he mumbled through the writhing gag as he clawed at it, “do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device—“
He believed those words, but he could hardly believe their effect: the imp weakened. He was able to peel it from his face and fling it the length of the hall, where it hit the door of the linen-closet like a bag of jelly.
“Shut the fuck up, Stiffen-Me, okay? You’re right, I’m drunk, I’ve gone crazy, so humor me. Just shut up!”
To his surprise, that worked, too. The only sounds in the hall were sobs and whimpers he couldn’t suppress. He stumbled to his feet and staggered toward his antagonist. Its mouth opened, and it hissed its Beckford-breath at him.
“—nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest, thou son of a bitch!”
He pulled the trigger, but the hammer clicked impotently. The creature sprang, and this time it flew to his crotch. Clawing at his captive genitals, forgetting everything as the Lord of Panic gored him at last, he dashed headlong against the closet door, rebounded and tumbled down the stairs.
He was still conscious as he lay at the bottom, he could still move, but he could not pull the creature off, for it clung to his balls like mud, mud with teeth. He shrieked and gibbered for help, for Stephanie, pounding the wall with his fist while he pried at the edges of the foul poultice with a delicacy born of dread.
“He prayeth best that loveth best all creatures great and small,” he sobbed, for he believed that, though he knew he had not lived up to it. His fingers unexpectedly slipped under an edge and lifted the thing. He hurled it awkwardly, and it flew spinning into his study.
He lay still, not daring to rouse more pain from his wounds, unwilling to discover broken bones. He knew now that words worked. But what words? Pain had driven all words away, it was a dazzling sun that filled the center of his mind and left him only the shadowy edges for thought.
His strength lay not just in the words, he was sure, but in the feelings they stirred in him. Beckford’s creature thrived on his own vileness, on the sins and shortcomings catalogued in that demonic fanzine, but they were not the sum of his parts. His better nature still lived, and it responded to the incantations that had nourished it all his life. The Devil was called the Father of Lies. That peeping and muttering wizard was a liar, and his creature could no more live in the presence of truth than a fish in a tank of acid.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty! That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know!” he groaned toward the shadows of the study, trying to keep it off balance, and he heard a hissing that he took for dismay.
“I’m gone! Do you hear me? I’m finished!” Stephanie screamed from upstairs. “You’re nuts!”
“Keep your door locked,” he croaked back.
“No problem!”
What else, what else? He knew great gobbets of Kipling, he knew The Shooting of Dan McGrew by heart, but he doubted they would work. Quoting Poe might only encourage it, so might the passages he knew from Macbeth. Was that why actors feared to quote “the Scottish play” out of context, because Beckford was right? He needed no more proof: Beckford’s theory had damn near killed him.
Would his own books work? Shit, no, there was no truth in them, just a line here and there when he had known he was getting things right. He could make a dash for the Bible, but it would be his luck to open it to all the begats.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” he grunted as he rolled onto his knees, and the rest of it was driven from his mind by pain as he braced himself on his right hand. His palm bore another of those stigmata, previously masked by the agony of his forehead and his genitals.
He dragged himself into the study, awed by the havoc he had wreaked. His monitor, his trains, Poe, Marilyn. At least he had omitted to shoot the stereo. Its green and red lights glowed patiently, a faithful robot awaiting his pleasure. His mind was empty of words. He wished he had Burton’s recording of The Ancient Mariner, but he didn’t.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,” he rasped, his voice all but gone. Even if he found something effective, he could not read for long.
The imp had attacked him when the music stopped. He had hardly been listening, but perhaps Vivaldi had rendered some corner of his mind unreceptive to evil. Baroque be-bop seemed inadequate now. He ran his finger over the shelf of CD’s, aiming for Beethoven but fishing out Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. He put the disc in the drawer of the player and turned up the volume to earthquake force.
He closed his eyes and opened his heart fully to the cathedral of sound that Bruckner built, block by massive block. No one had laughed harder than he at the crackpots who warned of Satanic messages in pop tunes, never mind all the bodies they dragged forth in evidence, but he wondered now if A Grammarie of Goety were not required reading on Tin Pan Alley. No demon could live in Bruckner’s presence, however—or even think straight. He turned the volume down a hair.
It had better work. He could hardly move, much less flee. He sank to the floor, scarcely aware of the darkness as he concentrated on the music. During a quiet passage he heard something else: that vile hissing. The creature was dragging itself across the carpet toward his chair, its mouth twisting as if in silent speech. He couldn’t doubt that it was wounded. He believed it had shrunk.
It crawled into the pocket of the robe that lay where he’d flung it. The lump under the cloth visibly dwindled as the music rolled on with the grandeur of a wheeling galaxy. Before long the pocket lay flat.
He
picked up the robe cautiously, turned it over and shook it. He cried aloud when something fluttered out. By the time it reached the floor he could see what it was: the corner he had torn from Beckford’s envelope, the demonic logo.
He found matches in his desk and returned to the scrap of paper. He touched a lighted match to its edge, unconcerned about the carpet after all the other damage he’d done. When the flame reached the greenish-black blob it began to sizzle and spark. Pinpoint bubbles erupted to release a final, faint whiff of the unspeakable odor.
The tiny fire threw more light than he would have believed possible. Only when he saw his own shadow on the wall did he realize that a larger fire flared behind him. The fanzine was blazing; it was about to ignite the drapes. He kicked it to the center of the room and beat it with his robe, but the fire refused to die until the book had been reduced to ashes.
He flung the drapes back, meaning to air the room, and was startled by the wealth of gray light outside. Lying smooth as a green crystal, the pool lent the only color to a foggy dawn. He slid the door wide and lurched into the cool air. Bruckner’s brass unfurled seraphic wings around him as he collapsed into a damp lawn chair.
* * * *
“A sadder but a wiser man,” Hal groaned, rolling directly from his chair into the cold pool, “he rose the morrow morn.”
He swam, his stiff joints protesting, his skin ready to crack from the sunburn he’d acquired while he slept. Hanging at the edge of the pool, he examined his wounds. They no longer looked purposeful. A doctor would think he’d blundered against furniture, fallen downstairs, wallowed in broken glass, and so he had.
Stephanie was gone, a note stuck to the refrigerator told him. He opened a beer before reading it. He might have felt sorrier if she hadn’t railed at him for “playing that bombast you call music” so loudly; that had been her last straw.
When he felt well enough to clean up the mess, he came across Richard Priest’s galleys. He averted his eyes as he stuffed them into an envelope. Unable to process words until he replaced his monitor, he scribbled a note advising Rick to destroy his copy of Beckford’s book and forget whatever he had learned from it. Not thinking too clearly, he wrote that the only honest words he could provide for Rick’s cover would be: “If you value your life and your sanity, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!”
Rick loved it. So did his publisher, who blazoned Hal’s warning above the title and begged him to submit the novel that Wittol & Ingle had turned down. It took him a while to accept that Hal had become a crank on the subject of horror fiction.
Stephanie later wrote him a chatty letter from U-Conn, thanking him for the chance to see how a real writer works, suggesting he get help for his drinking problem, and asking for a copy of Witchfire inscribed to her dear friend, Scott.
She enclosed a clipping from a supermarket tabloid that, he assumed, she hoped would give him inspiration, but the headline told him that it was one of the paper’s wheezing mainstays, the one about the man unaccountably burned to charcoal in his living room, although his clothing and the chair he sits in are not even singed. Not until he was crumpling it did he notice that the victim in this version had been “an eccentric recluse” called Bill Beckford.
It was of no use as a plot. By that time Hal had turned his hand, with indifferent success, to romance novels set in the English Regency.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian McNaughton was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and attended Harvard. He worked for ten years as a reporter for the Newark Evening News and has since held all sorts of other jobs while publishing some 200 stories in a variety of magazines and books. He recently ended a ten-year stint as night manager at a decrepit seaside hotel, where he once had the honor of helping his hero, Warren Zevon, break into a stubborn soda machine. The Throne of Bones won the World Fantasy and the International Horror Guild awards in 1998 for best collection.
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
ALSO BY BRIAN McNAUGHTON
THE CONVERSION OF ST. MONOCARP
NOTHING BUT THE BEST
DRINK ME
INTERRUPTED PILGRIMAGE
THE HOLE
CHANGES
LOVELOCKS
FANTASIA ON ‘LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD’
YSTERY ORM
WATER AND THE SPIRIT
CONGRATULATIONS!
WHY WE FEAR THE DARK
THE DISPOSAL OF UNCLE DAVE
GETTING IT ALL BACK
UNDYING LOVE
CHILD OF THE NIGHT
THE DUNWICH LODGER
ANNUNCIATOR
RUBBER-FACE
HERBERT WEST—REINCARNATED, PART II: THE HORROR FROM THE HOLY LAND
MANY HAPPY RETURNS
LA FILLE AUX YEUX D’ÉMAIL
STAR STALKER
MARANTHA’S TALE
TO MY DEAR FRIEND, HOMMY-BEG
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nasty Stories Page 20
