The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

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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  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

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  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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  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

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  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