The Best of Richard Matheson

by Richard Matheson

  Amelia jerked away from it. Picking up the chair, she slung it toward the doll. It jumped aside, then ran around the fallen chair. Amelia snatched the pan of water off the stove and hurled it down. The pan clanged loudly off the floor, spraying water on the doll.

  She stared at the doll. It wasn’t coming after her. It was trying to climb the sink, leaping up and clutching at the counter side with one hand. It wants the knife, she thought. It has to have its weapon.

  She knew abruptly what to do. Stepping over to the stove, she pulled down the broiler door and twisted the knob on all the way. She heard the puffing detonation of the gas as she turned to grab the doll.

  She cried out as the doll began to kick and twist, its maddened thrashing flinging her from one side of the kitchen to the other. The screaming filled her mind again and suddenly she knew it was the spirit in the doll that screamed. She slid and crashed against the table, wrenched herself around and, dropping to her knees before the stove, flung the doll inside. She slammed the door and fell against it.

  The door was almost driven out. Amelia pressed her shoulder, then her back against it, turning to brace her legs against the wall. She tried to ignore the pounding scrabble of the doll inside the broiler. She watched the red blood pulsing from her heel. The smell of burning wood began to reach her and she closed her eyes. The door was getting hot. She shifted carefully. The kicking and pounding filled her ears. The screaming flooded through her mind. She knew her back would get burned, but she didn’t dare to move. The smell of burning wood grew worse. Her foot ached terribly.

  Amelia looked up at the electric clock on the wall. It was four minutes to seven. She watched the red second hand revolving slowly. A minute passed. The screaming in her mind was fading now. She shifted uncomfortably, gritting her teeth against the burning heat on her back.

  Another minute passed. The kicking and the pounding stopped. The screaming faded more and more. The smell of burning wood had filled the kitchen. There was a pall of gray smoke in the air. That they’ll see, Amelia thought. Now that it’s over, they’ll come and help. That’s the way it always is.

  She started to ease herself away from the broiler door, ready to throw her weight back against it if she had to. She turned around and got on her knees. The reek of charred wood made her nauseated. She had to know, though. Reaching out, she pulled down the door.

  Something dark and stifling rushed across her and she heard the screaming in her mind once more as hotness flooded over her and into her. It was a scream of victory now.

  Amelia stood and turned off the broiler. She took a pair of ice tongs from its drawer and lifted out the blackened twist of wood. She dropped it into the sink and ran water over it until the smoke had stopped. Then she went into the bedroom, picked up the telephone and depressed its cradle. After a moment, she released the cradle and dialed her mother’s number.

  “This is Amelia, Mom,” she said. “I’m sorry I acted the way I did. I want us to spend the evening together. It’s a little late, though. Can you come by my place and we’ll go from here?” She listened. “Good,” she said. “I’ll wait for you.”

  Hanging up, she walked into the kitchen, where she slid the longest carving knife from its place in the rack. She went to the front door and pushed back its bolt, which now moved freely. She carried the knife into the living room, took off her bathrobe and danced a dance of hunting, of the joy of hunting, of the joy of the impending kill.

  Then she sat down, cross-legged, in the corner. He Who Kills sat, cross-legged, in the corner, in the darkness, waiting for the prey to come.

  WITCH WAR

  Seven pretty little girls sitting in a row. Outside, night, pouring rain—war weather. Inside, toasty warm. Seven overalled little girls chatting. Plaque on the wall saying: P.G. CENTER.

  Sky clearing its throat with thunder, picking and dropping lint lightning from immeasurable shoulders. Rain hushing the world, bowing the trees, pocking earth. Square building, low, with one wall plastic.

  Inside, the buzzing talk of seven pretty little girls.

  “So I say to him—‘Don’t give me that, Mr. High and Mighty.’ So he says, ‘Oh yeah?’ And I say, ‘Yeah!’”

  “Honest, will I ever be glad when this thing’s over. I saw the cutest hat on my last furlough. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to wear it!”

  “You too? Don’t I know it! You just can’t get your hair right. Not in this weather. Why don’t they let us get rid of it?”

  “Men! They make me sick.”

  Seven gestures, seven postures, seven laughters ringing thin beneath thunder. Teeth showing in girl giggles. Hands tireless, painting pictures in the air.

  P.G. Center. Girls. Seven of them. Pretty. Not one over sixteen. Curls. Pigtails. Bangs. Pouting little lips—smiling, frowning, shaping emotion on emotion. Sparkling young eyes—glittering, twinkling, narrowing, cold or warm.

  Seven healthy young bodies restive on wooden chairs. Smooth adolescent limbs. Girls—pretty girls—seven of them.

  —

  An army of ugly shapeless men, stumbling in mud, struggling along the pitchblack muddy road.

  Rain a torrent. Buckets of it thrown on each exhausted man. Sucking sound of great boots sinking into oozy yellow-brown mud, pulling loose. Mud dripping from heels and soles.

  Plodding men—hundreds of them—soaked, miserable, depleted. Young men bent over like old men. Jaws hanging loosely, mouth gasping at black wet air, tongues lolling, sunken eyes looking at nothing, betraying nothing.

  Rest.

  Men sink down in the mud, fall on their packs. Heads thrown back, mouths open, rain splashing on yellow teeth. Hands immobile—scrawny heaps of flesh and bone. Legs without motion—khaki lengths of worm-eaten wood. Hundreds of useless limbs fixed to hundreds of useless trunks.

  In back, ahead, beside, rumble trucks and tanks and tiny cars. Thick tires splattering mud. Fat treads sinking, tearing at mucky slime. Rain drumming wet fingers on metal and canvas.

  Lightning flashbulbs without pictures. Momentary burst of light. The face of war seen for a second—made of rusty guns and turning wheels and faces staring.

  Blackness. A night hand blotting out the brief storm glow. Wind-blown rain flitting over fields and road, drenching trees and trucks. Rivulets of bubbly rain tearing scars from the earth. Thunder, lightning.

  A whistle. Dead men resurrected. Boots in sucking mud again—deeper, closer, nearer. Approach to a city that bars the way to a city that bars the way to a . . .

  —

  An officer sat in the communication room of the P.G. Center. He peered at the operator, who sat hunched over the control board, phones over his ears, writing down a message.

  The officer watched the operator. They are coming, he thought. Cold, wet and afraid they are marching at us. He shivered and shut his eyes.

  He opened them quickly. Visions fill his darkened pupils—of curling smoke, flaming men, unimaginable horrors that shape themselves without words or pictures.

  “Sir,” said the operator, “from advance observation post. Enemy forces sighted.”

  The officer got up, walked over to the operator and took the message. He read it, face blank, mouth parenthesized. “Yes,” he said.

  He turned on his heel and went to the door. He opened it and went into the next room. The seven girls stopped talking. Silence breathed on the walls.

  The officer stood with his back to the plastic window. “Enemies,” he said, “two miles away. Right in front of you.”

  He turned and pointed out the window. “Right out there. Two miles away. Any questions?”

  A girl giggled.

  “Any vehicles?” another asked.

  “Yes. Five trucks, five small command cars, two tanks.”

  “That’s too easy,” laughed the girl, slender fingers fussing with her hair.

  “That’s all,” said t
he officer. He started from the room. “Go to it,” he added, and, under his breath, “Monsters!”

  He left.

  “Oh, me,” sighed one of the girls, “here we go again.”

  “What a bore,” said another. She opened her delicate mouth and plucked out chewing gum. She put it under her chair seat.

  “At least it stopped raining,” said a redhead, tying her shoelaces.

  The seven girls looked around at each other. Are you ready? Said their eyes. I’m ready, I suppose. They adjusted themselves on the chairs with girlish grunts and sighs. They hooked their feet around the legs of their chairs. All gum was placed in storage. Mouths were tightened into prudish fixity. The pretty little girls made ready for the game.

  Finally they were silent on their chairs. One of them took a deep breath. So did another. They all tensed their milky flesh and clasped fragile fingers together. One quickly scratched her head to get it over with. Another sneezed prettily.

  “Now,” said a girl on the right end of the row.

  Seven pairs of beady eyes shut. Seven innocent little minds began to picture, to visualize, to transport.

  Lips rolled into thin gashes, faces drained of color, bodies shivered passionately. Their fingers twitching with concentration, seven pretty little girls fought a war.

  —

  The men were coming over the rise of a hill when the attack came. The leading men, feet poised for the next step, burst into flame.

  There was no time to scream. Their rifles slapped down into the muck, their eyes were lost in fire. They stumbled a few steps and fell, hissing and charred, into the soft mud.

  Men yelled. The ranks broke. They began to throw up their weapons and fire at the night. More troops puffed incandescently, flared up, were dead.

  “Spread out!” screamed an officer as his gesturing fingers sprouted flame and his face went up in licking yellow heat.

  The men looked everywhere. Their dumb terrified eyes searched for an enemy. They fired into the fields and woods. They shot each other. They broke into flopping runs over the mud.

  A truck was enveloped in fire. Its driver leaped out, a two-legged torch. The truck went bumping over the road, turned, wove crazily over the field, crashed into a tree, exploded and was eaten up in blazing light. Black shadows flitted in and out of the aura of light around the flames. Screams rent the night.

  Man after man burst into flame, fell crashing on his face in the mud. Spots of searing light lashed the wet darkness—screams—running coals, sputtering, glowing, drying—incendiary ranks—trucks cremated—tanks blowing up.

  A little blonde, her body tense with repressed excitement. Her lips twitch, a giggle hovers in her throat. Her nostrils dilate. She shudders in giddy fright. She imagines, imagines . . .

  A soldier runs headlong across a field, screaming, his eyes insane with horror. A gigantic boulder rushes at him from the black sky.

  His body is driven into the earth, mangled. From the rock edge, fingertips protrude.

  The boulder lifts from the ground, crashes down again, a shapeless trip hammer. A flaming truck is flattened. The boulder flies again to the black sky.

  A pretty brunette, her face a feverish mask. Wild thoughts tumble through her virginal brain. Her scalp grows taut with ecstatic fear. Her lips draw back from clenching teeth. A gasp of terror hisses from her lips. She imagines, imagines . . .

  A soldier falls to his knees. His head jerks back. In the light of burning comrades, he stares dumbly at the white-foamed wave that towers over him.

  It crashes down, sweeps his body over the muddy earth, fills his lungs with salt water. The tidal wave roars over the field, drowns a hundred flaming men, tosses their corpses in the air with thundering whitecaps.

  Suddenly the water stops, flies into a million pieces and disintegrates.

  A lovely little redhead, hands drawn under her chin in tight bloodless fists. Her lips tremble, a throb of delight expands her chest. Her white throat contracts, she gulps in a breath of air. Her nose wrinkles with dreadful joy. She imagines, imagines. . . .

  A running soldier collides with a lion. He cannot see in the darkness. His hands strike wildly at the shaggy mane. He clubs with his rifle butt.

  A scream. His face is torn off with one blow of thick claws. A jungle roar billows in the night.

  A red-eyed elephant tramples wildly through the mud, picking up men in its thick trunk, hurling them through the air, mashing them under driving black columns.

  Wolves bound from the darkness, spring, tear at throats. Gorillas scream and bounce in the mud, leap at falling soldiers.

  A rhinoceros, leather skin glowing in the light of living torches, crashes into a burning tank, wheels, thunders into blackness, is gone.

  Fangs—claws—ripping teeth—shrieks—trumpeting—roars. The sky rains snakes.

  —

  Silence. Vast brooding silence. Not a breeze, not a drop of rain, not a grumble of distant thunder. The battle is ended.

  Motionless trucks—silent tanks, wisps of oily smoke still rising from their shattered hulks. Great death covering the field. Another battle in another war.

  Victory—everyone is dead.

  —

  The girls stretched languidly. They extended their arms and rotated their round shoulders. Pink lips grew wide in pretty little yawns. They looked at each other and tittered in embarrassment. Some of them blushed. A few looked guilty.

  Then they all laughed out loud. They opened more gumpacks, drew compacts from pockets, spoke intimately with schoolgirl whispers, with late-night dormitory whispers.

  Muted giggles rose up fluttering in the warm room.

  “Aren’t we awful?” one of them said, powdering her pert nose.

  Later they all went downstairs and had breakfast.

  SHIPSHAPE HOME

  “That janitor gives me the creeps,” Ruth said when she came in that afternoon.

  I looked up from the typewriter as she put the bags on the table and faced me. I was killing a second draft on a story.

  “He gives you the creeps,” I said.

  “Yes, he does,” she said. “That way he has of slinking around. He’s like Peter Lorre or somebody.”

  “Peter Lorre,” I said. I was still plotting.

  “Babe,” she implored. “I’m serious. The man is a creep.”

  I snapped out of the creative fog with a blink.

  “Hon, what can the poor guy do about his face?” I said. “Heredity. Give him a break.”

  She plopped down in a chair by the table and started to take out groceries, stacking cans on the table.

  “Listen,” she said.

  I could smell it coming. That dead serious tone of hers which she isn’t even aware of anymore. But which comes every time she’s about to make one of her “revelations” to me.

  “Listen,” she repeated. Dramatic emphasis.

  “Yes, dear,” I said. I leaned one elbow on the typewriter cover and gazed at her patiently.

  “You get that look off your face,” she said. “You always look at me as if I were an idiot child or something.”

  I smiled. Wanly.

  “You’ll be sorry,” she said. “Some night when that man creeps in with an axe and dismembers us.”

  “He’s just a poor man earning a living,” I said. “He mops the halls, he stokes the furnaces, he . . .”

  “We have oil heat,” she said.

  “If we had a furnace, the man would stoke it,” I said. “Let us have charity. He labors like ourselves. I write stories. He mops floors. Who can say which is the greater act?”

  She looked dejected.

  “Okay,” she said with a surrendering gesture. “Okay, if you don’t want to face facts.”

  “Which are?” I prodded. I decided it was best to let it out of her before it burned a ho
le in her mind.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You listen to me,” she said. “That man has some design in being here. He’s no janitor. I wouldn’t be surprised if . . .”

  “If this apartment house were just a front for a gambling establishment. A hideout for public enemies one through fifteen. An abortion mill. A counterfeiter’s lair. A murderer’s rendezvous.”

  She was already in the kitchen thumping cans and boxes into the cupboard.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” In that patient if-you-get-murdered-then-don’t-come-to-me-for-sympathy voice. “Don’t say I didn’t try. If I’m married to a wall, I can’t help it.”

  I came in and slid my arms around her waist. I kissed her neck.

  “Stop that,” she said. “You can’t disconcert me. The janitor is . . .”

  She turned. “You’re serious,” I said.

  Her face darkened. “Honey, I am,” she said. “The man looks at me in a funny way.”

  “How?”

  “Oh,” she searched. “In . . . in . . . anticipation.”

  I chuckled. “Can’t blame the man.”

  “Be serious now.”

  “Remember the time you thought the milkman was a knife killer for the Mafia?” I said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You read too many fantasy pulps,” I said.

  “You’ll be sorry.”

  I kissed her neck again. “Let’s eat,” I said.

  She groaned. “Why do I tell you anything?”

  “Because you love me,” I said.

  She closed her eyes. “I give up,” she said quietly, with the patience of a saint under fire.

  I kissed her. “Come on, hon, we have enough troubles.”

  She shrugged. “Oh, all right.”

  “Good,” I said. “When are Phil and Marge coming?”

  “Six,” she said. “I got pork.”

  “Roast?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “I’ll buy that.”