prolong his own life through making human sacrifices. He
did travel around the world as you believe. He is in Chicago
now and is planning to kill. In other words, let us suppose
that everything you claim is gospel truth. So what?’’
“ What do you mean, ‘so what’? ” said Sir Guy.
“ I mean—so what?” I answered him. “ If all this is true,
it still doesn’t prove that by sitting down in a dingy gin-mill
on the South Side, Jack the Ripper is going to walk in here
and let you kill him, or turn him over to the police. And
come to think of it, I don’t even know now just what you
intend to do with him if you ever did find him.
Sir Guy gulped his gin. “ I ’d capture the bloody swine,”
he said. “ Capture him and turn him over to the government,
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Robert Bloch
together with all the papers and documentary evidence I ’ve
collected against him over a period of many years. I ’ve spent
a fortune investigating this affair, I tell you, a fortune! His
capture will mean the solution of hundreds of unsolved
crimes, of that I am convinced.”
In vino veritas. Or was all this babbling the result of too
much gin? It didn’t matter. Sir Guy Hollis had another. I sat
there and wondered what to do with him. The man was rapidly working up to a climax of hysterical drunkenness.
‘‘That’s enough,” I said, putting out my hand as Sir Guy
reached for the half-emptied bottle again. “ Let’s call a cab
and get out of here. It’s getting late and it doesn’t look as
though your elusive friend is going to put in his appearance.
Tomorrow, if I were you, I ’d plan to turn all those papers
and documents over to the FBI. If you’re so convinced of the
truth of your theory, they are competent to make a very thorough investigation, and find your m an.”
“ No.” Sir Guy was drunkenly obstinate. “ No cab.”
“ But let’s get out of here anyway,” I said, glancing at my
watch. “ It’s past midnight.”
He sighed, shrugged, and rose unsteadily. As he started
for the door, he tugged the gun free from his pocket.
“ Here, give me that!” I whispered. “ You can’t walk
around the street brandishing that thing.”
I took the gun and slipped it inside my coat. Then I got
hold of his right arm and steered him out of the door. The
black man didn’t look up as we departed.
We stood shivering in the alleyway. The fog had increased.
I couldn’t see either end of the alley from where we stood.
It was cold. Damp. Dark. Fog or no fog, a little wind was
whispering secrets to the shadows at our backs.
Sir Guy, despite his incapacity, still stared apprehensively
at the alley, as though he expected to see a figure approaching.
Disgust got the better of me.
“ Childish foolishness,” I snorted. “ Jack the Ripper, indeed! I call this carrying a hobby too far.”
Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
407
“ Hobby?” He faced me. Through the fog I could see his
distorted face. “ You call this a hobby?”
“ Well, what is it?” I grumbled. “ Just why else are you
so interested in tracking down this mythical killer?”
My arm held his. But his stare held me.
“ In London,” he whispered. “ In 1888 . . . one of those
nameless drabs the Ripper slew . . . was my mother.”
“ What?”
“ Later I was recognized by my father, and legitimatized.
We swore to give our lives to find the Ripper. My father was
the first to search. He died in Hollywood in 1926—on the
trail of the Ripper. They said he was stabbed by an unknown
assailant in a brawl. But I knew who that assailant was.
“ So I ’ve taken up his work, do you see, John? I ’ve carried
on. And I will carry on until I do find him and kill him with
my own hands.”
I believed him then. He wouldn’t give up. He wasn’t just
a drunken babbler any more. He was as fanatical, as determined, as relentless as the Ripper himself.
Tomorrow he’d be sober. He’d continue the search. Perhaps he’d turn those papers over to the FBI. Sooner or later, with such persistence—and with his motive—he’d be successful. I ’d always known he had a motive.
“ Let’s go,” I said, steering him down the alley.
“ Wait a minute,” said Sir Guy. “ Give me back my gun.”
He lurched a little. “ I ’d feel better with the gun on m e.”
He pressed me into the dark shadows of a little recess.
I tried to shrug him off, but he was insistent.
“ Let me carry the gun, now, John,” he mumbled.
“ All right,” I said.
I reached into my coat, brought my hand out.
“ But that’s not a gun,” he protested. “ That’s a knife.”
“ I know.”
I bore down on him swiftly.
“ John!” he screamed.
“ Never mind the ‘John,’ ” I whispered, raising the knife.
‘ ‘Just call me . . . Jack. ’ ’
Charles L. Grant
If Damon Comes
Charles L. Grant is the most important anthologist of
horror fiction since August Derleth in the U S ., principally for his reprint works and for his original series,
Shadows, annually nominated for the World Fantasy
Award as best collection of the year (and often the winner, or the source of the short fiction winner). Grant is a prolific novelist and short story writer of the company of
Ramsey Campbell and Stephen King and a popular figure among fans of horror fiction for his novels and stories of Oxrun Station, an imaginary Connecticut town (based to a certain extent upon Lovecraft's Dunwich and
Arkham, from the Cthulhu mythos stories). ‘‘If Damon
Comes” is one of the finest Oxrun stories. Grant is at
his best in the short form, as here, and is a salient example of the traditional horror writer of his generation, initially influenced by Bradbury (primarily . . . then Bloch
and Leiber and Matheson— all short fiction writers), then
in the mid-seventies breaking into the novel form during
the great commercial boom in horror.
rog, nightbreath of the river, luring without whispering in
the thick crown of an elm, huddling without creaking
around the base of a chimney; it drifted past porch lights,
and in passing blurred them, dropped over the streetlights,
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I f Damon Comes
409
and in dropping grayed them. It crept in with midnight to
stay until dawn, and there was no wind to bring the light out
of hiding.
Frank shivered and drew his raincoat’s collar closer around
his neck, held it closed with one hand while the other wiped
at the pricks of moisture that clung to his cheeks, his short
dark hair. He whistled once, loudly, but in listening heard
nothing, not even an echo. He stamped his feet against the
November cold and moved to the nearest comer, squinted
and saw nothing. He knew the cat was gone, had known it
from the moment he had seen the saucer still brimming with
milk on the back porch. Damon had been sitting beside it,
hands folded, knees pressed tightly together, elbows tucked
into his sides. He was cold, but refused to acknowledge it,
and Frank had only tousled his son’s softly brown hair,
squeezed his shoulder once and went inside to say good-bye
to his wife.
And now . . . now he walked, through the streets of Oxrun
Station, looking for an animal he had seen only once—a half-
breed Siamese with a milk white face—whistling like a fool
afraid of the dark, searching for the note that would bring the
animal running.
And in walking, he was unpleasantly reminded of a night
the year before, when he had had one drink too many at
someone’s party, made one amorous boast too many in
someone’s ear, and had ended up on a street comer with a
woman he knew only vaguely. They had kissed once and
long, and once broken, he had turned around to see Damon
staring up at him. The boy had turned, had fled, and Frank
had stayed away most of the night, not knowing what Susan
had heard, fearing more what Damon had thought.
It had been worse than horrid facing the boy again, but
Damon had acted as though nothing had happened; and the
guilt passed as the months passed, and the wondering why
his son had been out in the first place.
He whistled. Crouched and snapped his fingers at the dark
of some shrubbery. Then he straightened and blew out a
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Charles L. Grant
deeply held breath. There was no cat, there were no cars,
and he finally gave in to his aching feet and sore back and
headed for home. Quickly. Watching the fog tease the road
before him, cut it sharply off behind.
It wasn’t fair, he thought, his hands shoved in his pockets,
his shoulders hunched as though expecting a blow. Damon,
in his short eight years, had lost two dogs already to speeders, a canary to some disease he couldn’t even pronounce, and two brothers stillborn—it was getting to be a problem.
He was getting to be a problem, fighting each day that he had
to go to school, whining and weeping whenever vacations
came around and trips were planned.
He’d asked Doc Simpson about it when Damon turned
seven. Dependency, he was told; clinging to the only three
things left in his life—his short, short life—that he still believed to be constant: his home, his mother . . . and Frank.
And Frank had kissed a woman on a comer and Damon
had seen him.
Frank shuddered and shook his head quickly, remembering
how the boy had come to the office at least once a day for
the next three weeks, saying nothing, just standing on the
sidewalk looking in through the window. Just for a moment.
Long enough to be sure that his father was still there.
Once home, then, Frank shed his coat and hung it on the
rack by the front door. A call, a muffled reply, and he took
the stairs two at a time and trotted down the hall to Damon’s
room set over the kitchen.
“ Sorry, old pal,’’ he said with a shrug as he made himself
a place on the edge of the mattress. “ I guess he went home.’’
Damon, small beneath the flowered quilt, innocent from
behind long curling lashes, shook his head sharply. “ No,’’
he said. “ This is home. It is, Dad, it really is.’’
Frank scratched at the back of his neck. “ Well, I guess he
didn’t think of it quite that way.”
“ Maybe he got lost, huh? It’s awfully spooky out there.
Maybe he’s afraid to come out of where he’s hiding.”
“ A cat’s never—” He stopped as soon as he saw the ex
I f Damon Comes
411
pression on the boy’s thin face. Then he nodded and broke
out a rueful smile, “ Well, maybe you’re right, pal. Maybe
the fog messed him up a little.” Damon’s hand crept into
his, and he squeezed it while thinking that the boy was too
thin by far; it made his head look ungainly. “ In the morning,” he promised. “ In the morning. If he’s not back by then, I ’ll take the day off and we’ll hunt him together.”
Damon nodded solemnly, withdrew the hand and pulled
the quilt up to his chin. “ When’s mom coming home?”
“ In a while. It’s Friday, you know. She’s always late on
Fridays. And Saturdays.” And, he thought, Wednesdays and
Thursdays, too.
Damon nodded again. And, as Frank reached the door and
switched off the light: “ Dad, does she sing pretty?”
“ Like a bird, pal,” he said, grinning. “ Like a bird.”
The voice was small in the dark: “ I love you, dad.”
Frank swallowed hard, and nodded before he realized the
boy couldn’t see him. “ Well, pal, it seems I love you, too.
Now you’d better get some rest.”
“ I thought you were going to get lost in the fog.”
Frank stopped the move to close the door. He’d better get
some rest himself, he thought; that sounded like a threat.
“ Not m e,” he finally said. “ You’d always come for me,
right?”
“ Right, dad.”
Frank grinned, closed the door, and wandered through the
small house for nearly half an hour before finding himself in
the kitchen, his hands waving at his sides for something to
do. Coffee. No. He’d already had too much of that today. But
the walk had chilled him, made his bones seem brittle. Warm
milk, maybe, and he opened the refrigerator, stared, then
took out a container and poured half its contents into a pot.
He stood by the stove, every few seconds stirring a finger
through the milk to check its progress. Stupid cat, he thought;
there ought to be a law against doing something like that to
a small boy that never hurt anyone, never had anyone to hurt.
He poured himself a glass, smiling when he didn’t spill a
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Charles L. Grant
drop, but he refused to turn around and look up at the clock;
instead, he stared at the flames as he finished the second
glass, wondering what it would be like to stick his finger into
the fires. He read somewhere . . . he thought he’d read somewhere that the blue near the center was the hottest part and it wasn’t so bad elsewhere. His hand wavered, but he changed
his mind, not wanting to risk a bum on something he only
thought he had read; besides, he decided as he headed into
the living room, the way things were going these days, he
probably had it backward.
He sat in an armchair flanking the television, took out a
magazine from the rack at his side and had just found the
table of contents when he heard a car door slam in the drive.
He waited, looked up and smiled when the front door swung
open and Susan rushed in. She blew him a distant kiss,
mouthed I ’ll be back in a second, and ran up the stairs. She
was much shorter than he, her hair waist-long black and left
free to fan in the wind of her own making. She’d been taking
vocal lessons for several years now, and when they’d moved
to the Station when Damon was five, she had landed a job
singing at the Chancellor Inn. Torch songs, love songs, slow
songs, sinner songs; she was liked well enoug
h to be asked
to stay on after the first night, but she began so late that
Damon had never heard her. And for the last six months, the
two-nights-a-week became four, and Frank became adept at
cooking supper.
When she returned, her make-up was gone and she was in
a shimmering green robe. She flopped on the sofa opposite
him and rubbed her knees, her thighs, her upper arms. “ If
that creep drummer tries to pinch me again, so help me I ’ll
castrate him. ’ ’
“ That is hardly the way for a lady to talk,” he said, smiling. “ If you’re not careful, I ’ll have to punish you. Whips at thirty paces.”
In the old days—the very old days, he thought—she would
have laughed and entered a game that would last for nearly
an hour. Lately, however, and tonight, she only frowned at
I f Damon Comes
413
him as though she were dealing with a dense, unlettered child.
He ignored it, and listened politely as she detailed her evening, the customers, the compliments, the raise she was looking for so she could buy her own car.
“ You don’t need a car,’’ he said without thinking.
“ But aren’t you tired of walking home every night?”
He closed the magazine and dropped it on the floor. “ Lawyers, my dear, are a sedentary breed. I could use the exercise.”
“ If you didn’t work so late on those damned briefs,” she
said without looking at him, “ and came to bed on time, I ’d
give you all the exercise you need.”
He looked at his watch. It was going on two.
“ The cat’s gone.”
“ Oh no,” she said. “ No wonder you look so tired. You
go out after him? ”
He nodded, and she rolled herself suddenly into a sitting
position. “ Not with Damon.”
“ No. He was in bed when I came home.”
She said nothing more, only examined her nails. He
watched her closely, the play of her hair falling over her face,
the squint that told him her contact lenses were still on her
dresser. And he knew she meant: did you take Damon with
you? She was asking if Damon had followed him. Like the
night in the fog, with the woman; like the times at the office;
like the dozens of other instances when the boy just happened
to show up at the courthouse, in the park while Frank was
eating lunch under a tree, at a nearby friend’s house late one
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 50
