Let's start off with a quick and easy classic by Richard Matheson, who was one of the most important figures in 20th Century American horror, science fiction, and fantasy.

https://espritsf.fr/wp-content/uploads/Matheson-Richard-Born-of-Man-and-Woman.pdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46405212)

It had been a gentle bump.

A small jolt.

Surely too small to have been caused by a child.

So many small children were running around on this dark night, though. What if it had been a child and not a pothole or a cardboard box?

It could have been a child. In the darkness, the trick-or-treaters were well camouflaged in their black vampire and witch costumes.

It could have been. What if it was? What if?

This was not the first time Victor thought he might have hitsomeone with his car. Every time—and there were days when it happened on a dozen or more occasions—he had to go back to the scene to convince himself that it had been his imagination.

His compulsion.

Sometimes he spent fifteen or twenty minutes combing through ditches and hedges, adrenaline rushing through his veins, awash in guilt at the possibility that he might have carelessly caused a death. Often he returned a second or third time to reassure himself that he hadn't overlooked something.

Victor stopped the car in the middle of the road. He had never struck anyone. Every time he had gone to look, there had been nothing.

What if it had been real this time? All those other times didn't matter. What if a child cloaked in a dark costume, too preoccupied with tricks and treats to pay attention, had gotten too close to his car? What if—even now—he or she lay in the road behind him, a small body surrounded by candy that had tumbled out of a plastic orange jack-o-lantern?

Bleeding, suffering, dying?

The more Victor thought about it, the more he was sure that it had not been a simple bump in the road. It had felt different.

It must have been a child.

So many of them out tonight, and they weren't paying attention. They never did, but especially not tonight. It made driving nerve-wracking.

He swore under his breath as his heart throbbed in his ears. Why was he out on a night like this? It was crazy. Eleanor knew how he got when he was driving, but she had insisted. They were running low on candy, and it was up to him to get more.

His hands clutched the steering wheel while sinews stood out on either side of his neck. Sweat beaded on his brow, even though it was one of the coldest autumn nights yet. Risk of frost, the forecast had said, and here he was sweating in his car.

Resigned to the inevitable, Victor opened the door and stepped into the brisk night. His flashlight was in a compartment on the driver's door where he always kept it. This was not the first time he had needed to search the roadside in the dark.

It probably wouldn't be the last.

It's just my OCD talking, he chided. His therapist wanted him to stop fighting the obsessive-compulsive disorder and talk back to it to remove its power over him, but it didn't work. "Harming obsession" was the official diagnosis. "Hit 'n' Run" disease. He knew that a chemical imbalance in his brain was responsible for his feelings of guilt over something that hadn't happened.

Probably hadn't happened.

But what if? It was possible, wasn't it?

And the bump had felt ... different.

It could easily have been a small child, crushed beneath his back wheel, now lying mangled on the roadside.

Victor turned on the flashlight and swept its intense beam back and forth across the street. He looked under the car to make sure that the child wasn't trapped beneath, caught in the muffler or the axle.

Nothing.

Nearby, a gaggle of costumed kids trick-or-treated from one house to the next, a jumble of legs, candy sacks and laughter.

No one paid any attention to him as he continued his search, flashing the light over the median strip, obscured by bushes and plants. Many of the shadows could hide a child's crushed figure.

No blood, no body.

He pushed his way through the hedges to the other side of the median for fear that he had struck the child hard enough to throw him or her all the way across the street.

Nothing.

He searched the same places again from the opposite direction, in case he had missed something. Back at the car, he looked underneath again.

Nothing.

His heart rate gradually returned to normal and a chill seeped into his bones. He chuffed a lungful of air and watched his breath vaporize.

Another false alarm. He got back into the car and slipped the flashlight into the door pocket.

An automobile horn beeped gently behind him as lights flashed across his rearview mirror. He was blocking the lane. Victor waved into the mirror, started the engine and continued to the convenience store.

The return trip was excruciating. Children scurried everywhere. Victor drove at a crawl, trying to focus his concentration on the street and his driving, but was continually distracted by the small people milling around on the sidewalks and at street crossings. They were so close to him! The exterior of the car chassis felt huge while at the same time the interior constricted around him.

The convenience store was a little over two miles from Victor's house—not so convenient as all that, he raged—and it had taken him fifteen minutes to cover only half the distance so far. He had stopped four times already to look under his car, to sweep the road behind him after feeling a bump.

His mind raced. Still another mile to go. He was tempted to pull over, leave the car where it was and walk the rest of the way home. Eleanor could come and get the blasted thing herself in the morning. It was her fault he was out here, after all.

Damned candy.

Huge raindrops ricocheted off the windshield, increasing rapidly to a steady drizzle. Victor shivered as he imagined spending the next twenty minutes or more plodding home through the frigid rain.

The windshield wipers scraped and moaned as he reduced his speed even more and continued down the dark street.

Ahead, lights gleamed. In the darkness, compounded by the streaking rain on the windshield, Victor couldn't be sure of their color. They seemed to be flashing. Red and blue. An accident?

The lights came from the opposite lane, across the median. As he drew close, he recognized the surroundings. It was where he had first stopped earlier this evening to search for an accident victim.

He had been right!

Deep inside, he had known that he was right this time. Vindication gave him a perverse feeling of elation. All those times, stopping and checking, searching, crawling under the car, poking in the bushes, were suddenly validated. He hadn't been crazy after all. He pulled up onto the edge of the road and sat behind the wheel with the engine running, his wipers dragging across the windshield.

In addition to two police cars, a fire truck, an ambulance and a tow truck had gathered at the scene. Automobiles were backed up as far as he could see in the opposite direction. It had been over half an hour since he had passed by this spot, so traffic had been tied up for a long time.

Victor wondered what he should do. Part of him wanted to go to the police, turn himself in, proclaim his guilt. He could see himself doing that. He could also see the crowd turning on him.

He had left a small child to die in the cold, dark street, rain pelting off her foam-rubber Halloween mask. He could picture rain puddled around her little body—he was sure that it was a girl—as dissolving candy dyed the water red and purple.

He couldn't see how he had missed the girl's body, though. He had searched thoroughly. Three times, no less. Still, what was done, was done. He had hit and he had run.

Now he had to see if he was going to get caught.

Sitting on the roadside was probably not the best strategy to avoid the attention of the police. He put the car into gear and eased forward again.

As he drew even with the accident scene, he tried to adopt an appropriate mixture of interest and indifference. If he ignored the accident altogether, that would certainly be noticed and marked. If he showed too much interest, that, too, would be suspicious.

Only when the wrecker maneuvered to hook up to a damaged car did Victor realize that this was not a hit-and-run scene but rather a routine traffic mishap. One car had rear-ended another. Quite solidly, by the look of it. The front of the rearmost car was badly crumpled. Firemen worked with rescue gear to try to open the driver's side door.

The scene gripped Victor's attention as his mind raced. No hit and run! He hadn't run anyone down!

He was so obsessed with the accident scene, the scene for which he was not responsible, that he ran his car against the median curb. The front wheel scraped along the prominent concrete ridge, twisting the steering wheel in his hands. He fought against the pressure that tried to drive him across the road and finally straightened the car out. He had probably scraped the hell out of his front hubcap, but he was back in control.

He looked back at the accident scene, watching it as he eased along in the rainy darkness. The lights flashed in his side and rearview mirrors, growing fainter in the gloom.

The car didn't handle well on the rest of the trip home, but at least he did not have any more illusions that he had run someone down. The road was slick but smooth and there were no potholes or speed bumps to induce that gripping, inescapable certainty that he had hit someone.

He had likely done some significant damage to his car, though. Thrown the front end out of alignment, perhaps even ruined something in the undercarriage. His muffler, perhaps, or the oilpan. His eyes flashed to the array of gauges around the speedometer, but no warning lights were illuminated.

Tomorrow would be plenty of time to worry about that. He could take the car to the garage and get it checked out.

He pulled into the driveway, slammed the transmission into park, grabbed the sack of candy from the seat beside him and locked the door as he got out. The cold, unforgiving drizzle made Victor clutch his coat tightly around him as he walked the ten feet to the back door and its protective canopy. Jack-o-lanterns grinned back at him ghoulishly from the railing, the candles within fighting to stay alive against the rain and growing wind.

As he opened the front door, he stripped off his wet jacket and greeted the warmth within the house.

How good to be home after such an excruciating ordeal!

In the driveway, rain gathered in puddles around the wheels of his car.

Although it was dark, a careful observer would notice that the water on the driver's side was slowly turning purple and green as candy spilling from the shredded pumpkin pail caught in the undercarriage dissolved.

On the passenger side, the water slowly turned crimson.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46406861)

It was, IIRC, one of the most popular stories that Weird Tales ran

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46415688)

Man.

Late. Rain.

Road.

Man.

Searching. Starved. Sick.

Driving.

Radio. News. Scanners. Police. Broadcast.

Accident. Town.

Near.

Speeding. Puddles.

Aching.

Minutes.

Arrive. Park. Watch.

Bodies. Blood. Crowd. Sirens.

Wait.

Hour. Sit. Pain. Cigarette. Thermos. Coffee.

Sweat. Nausea.

Streetlights. Eyes. Stretchers. Sheets.

Flesh.

Death.

Shaking. Chills.

Clock. Wait.

More. Wait.

Car. Stink. Cigarette.

Ambulance. Crying. Tow truck. Bodies. Taken.

Crowd. Police. Photographers. Drunks. Leave.

Gone.

Street. Quiet.

Rain. Dark. Humid.

Alone.

Door. Out. Stand. Walk. Pain. Stare. Closer.

Buildings. Silent. Street. Dead.

Blood. Chalk. Outlines. Closer.

Step. Inside. Outlines. Middle.

Inhale. Eyes. Closed.

Think. Inhale. Concentrate. Feel. Breathe.

Flow.

Death. Collision. Woman. Screaming. Windshield. Expression.

Moment. Death.

Energy. Concentrate. Images. Exploding.

Moment.

Woman. Car. Truck. Exploding.

Impact. Moment.

Rush.

Feeling. Feeding.

Metal. Burning. Screams. Blood. Death.

Moment. Collision. Images. Faster.

Strength. Medicien.

Stronger.

Concentrate. Better.

Images. Collision. Stronger. Seeing. Death.

Moment. Healing. Moment.

Addiction.

Drug. Rush. Body. Warmer.

Death. Concentrating. Healing. Addiction. Drug.

Warm. Calm.

Death. Medicien.

Death.

Life.

Medicine.

Addiction. Strong.

Leave.

Car. Engine. Drive. Rain. Streets. Freeway. Map.

Drive. Relax. Safe. Warm. Rush. Good.

Radio. Cigarette. Breeze.

Night.

Searching. Accidents. Death.

Life.

Dash. Clock. Waiting.

Soon.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46418079)

Smith has a disarming voice that can ease you into the most horrific scenarios; this tale though reminds me more of classic Stephen King short stories than anything; it would be right at home, I think, in Skeleton Crew or Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

Old Tom was a very tall man. He was so tall he didn’t even have a nickname for it. Ned Black, who was at least a head shorter, had been ‘Tower Block’ since the sixth grade, and Jack, the owner of the Hog’s Head Bar, had a sign up over the door saying ‘Mind Your Head, Ned’. But Tom was just Tom. It was like he was so tall it didn’t bear mentioning even for a joke: be a bit like ragging someone for breathing.

Course there were other reasons too for not ragging Tom about his height or anything else. The guys you’ll find perched on stools round Jack’s bar watching the ball game and buying beers, they’ve known each other for ever. Gone to Miss Stadler’s school together, got under each other’s Mom’s feet, and double-dated together right up to giving each other’s best man’s speech. Kingstown is a small place, you understand, and the old boys who come regular to Jack’s mostly spent their childhoods in the same tree-house. Course they’d gone their separate ways, up to a point: Pete was an accountant now, had a small office down Union Street just off the square and did pretty good, whereas Ned, well he was still pumping gas and changing oil and after forty years he did that pretty good too. Comes a time when men have known each other so long they forget what they do for a living most of the time because it just don’t matter: when you talk there’s a little bit of skimming stones down the quarry in second grade, a bit of dolling up to go to that first dance, and going to the housewarming when they moved ten years back. There’s all that and more than you can say so none of it’s important ’cept for having happened.

So we’ll stop by and have a couple of beers and talk about the town and the playoffs and rag each other and the pleasure’s just in shooting the breeze and it don’t really matter what’s said, just the fact that we’re all still there to say it.

But Tom, he was different. We all remember the first time we saw him. It was a long hot summer like we haven’t seen in the ten years since and we were lolling under the fans at Jack’s and complaining about the tourists. And believe me, Kingstown gets its share in the summer even though it’s not near the sea and we don’t have a McDonalds and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why folk’ll go out of their way to see what’s just a peaceful little town near some mountains. It was as hot as hell that afternoon and as much as a man could do to sit in his shirt-sleeves and drink the coolest beer he could find, and Jack’s is the coolest for us, and always will be, I guess.

And then Tom walked in. His hair was already pretty white back then, and long, and his face was brown and tough with grey eyes like diamonds set in leather. He was dressed mainly in black with a long coat that made you hot just to look at it, but he looked comfortable like he carried his very own weather around with him and he was just fine. He got a beer and sat down at a table and read the town Bugle and that was that.

It was special because there wasn’t anything special about it. Jack’s Bar isn’t exactly exclusive and we don’t all turn round and stare at anyone new if they come in, but that place is like a monument to shared times and if a tourist couple comes in out of the heat and sits down nobody says anything and maybe nobody even notices at the front of their mind, but it’s like there’s a little island of the alien in the water and the currents don’t just ebb and flow the way they usually do, if you get what I mean. But Tom he just walked in and sat down and it was all right because it was like he was there just like we were, and could’ve been for thirty years. He just sat and read his paper like part of the same river and everyone just carried on downstream the way they were.

Pretty soon he goes up for another beer and a few of us got talking to him. We got his name and what he did. Painting, he said, and after that it was just shooting the breeze. That quick. He came in that summer afternoon and just fell into the conversation like he’d been there all his life, and sometimes it was hard to imagine he hadn’t been. Nobody knew where he came from, or where he’d been, and there was something very quiet about him, a real stillness. Open enough to have the best part of friendship but still somehow a man in a slightly different world. But he showed enough to get along real well with us, and a bunch of old friends don’t often let someone in like that.

Anyway, he stayed that whole summer. Hired himself a place just round the corner from the square. Or so he said: I never saw it, I guess no one did. He was a private man, private like a steel door with four bars and a couple of six-inch padlocks, and when he left the square at the end of the day he could have vanished into thin air as soon as he turned the corner for all we knew. But he always came from that direction in the morning, with his easel on his back and paintbox under his arm. And he always wore that black coat like it was a part of him, but he always looked cool, and the funny thing was when you stood near him you could swear you felt cooler yourself. I remember Pete saying over a beer that it wouldn’t surprise him none if, if it ever rained again, Tom walked round in his own column of dryness. Just foolish talk, but Tom made you think things like that.

Jack’s Bar looks right out onto the square, the kind of square towns don’t have much anymore: big and dusty with old roads out at each corner, tall shops and houses on all the sides and some stone paving in the middle round a fountain that ain’t worked in living memory. Well in the summer that old square is just full of out-of-towners in pink towelling jumpsuits and nasty jackets standing round saying “Wow” and taking pictures of our quaint old hall and our quaint old stores and even our quaint old selves if we stand still too long. And that year Tom would sit out near the fountain and paint and those people would stand and watch for hours.

But he didn’t paint the houses or the square or the old Picture House. He painted animals, and painted them like you’ve never seen. Birds with huge blue speckled wings and cats with cutting green eyes and whatever he painted it looked like it was just coiled up on the canvas ready to fly away. He didn’t do them in their normal colours, they were all reds and purples and deep blues and greens and yet they fair sparkled with life. It was a wonder to watch: he’d put up a fresh paper, sit looking at nothing in particular, then dip his brush into his paint and just draw a line, maybe red, maybe blue. Stroke by stroke you could see the animal build up in front of your eyes and yet when it was finished you couldn’t believe it hadn’t always been there. And when he’d finished he’d spray it with some stuff to fix the paints and put a price on it and you can believe me those paintings were sold before they hit the ground. Spreading businessmen from New Jersey or somesuch and their bored wives would come alive for maybe the first time in years and walk away with one of those paintings and their arms around each other, looking like they’d found a bit of something they’d forgotten they’d lost.

Come about six o’clock Tom would finish up and walk across to Jack’s, looking like a sailing ship amongst rowing boats and saying yes, he’d be back again tomorrow and yes, he’d be happy to do a painting for them. And he’d get a beer and sit with us and watch the game and there’d be no paint on his fingers or his clothes, not a spot. I guess he’d got so much control over that paint it went where it was told and nowhere else.

I asked him once how he could bear to let those paintings go. I know if I’d been able to make anything that right in my whole life I couldn’t let it go. I’d want to keep it to look at sometimes. He thought for a moment and then he said he believed it depends how much of yourself you’ve put into it. If you’ve gone deep down into yourself and pulled up what’s inside and put it down, then you don’t want to let it go: you want to check sometimes that it’s still safely tied down. Comes a time when a painting’s so right and so good that it’s private, and no one’ll understand it except the man who put it down. Only he is going to know what he’s talking about. But the everyday paintings, well they were mainly just because he liked to paint animals and liked for people to have them. He could only put a piece of himself into something he was going to sell, but they paid for the beers and I guess it’s like the old boys in Jack’s Bar: if you just like talking you don’t always have to say something important.

Why animals? Well if you’d seen him with them I guess you wouldn’t have to ask. He loved them all, is all, and they loved him right back. The cats were always his favourites. My old Pa used to say that cats weren’t nothing but sleeping machines put on the earth to do some of the human’s sleeping for them, and whenever he did a chalk drawing he’d always do a cat.

Once in a while, you see, Tom seemed to get tired of painting on paper, and he’d get out some chalks and sit down on the baking flagstones and just do a drawing right there on the dusty rock. Now I’ve told you about his paintings, but these drawings were something else again. It was like because they couldn’t be bought, but would just be washed away, he was putting more of himself into it, doing more than just shooting the breeze. They were just chalk on dusty stone and they were still in these weird colours but I tell you children wouldn’t walk near them because they looked so real, and they weren’t the only ones, either. People would just stand a few feet back and stare and you could see the wonder in their eyes and their open mouths. If they could’ve been bought there were people who would have sold their houses. And it’s a funny thing but a couple of times when I walked over to open the store up in the mornings I saw a dead bird or two on top of those drawings, almost like they had landed on it and been so terrified to find themselves right on top of a cat they’d dropped dead of fright. But they must have been dumped there by some real cat, of course, because some of those birds looked like they’d been mauled a bit. I used to throw them in the bushes to tidy up and some of them were pretty broken up.

Old Tom was a godsend to a lot of mothers that summer who found they could leave their little ones by him, do their shopping in peace and maybe have a soda with their friends and come back to find the kids still sitting quietly watching Tom paint. He didn’t mind them at all and would talk to them and make them laugh, and kids of that age laughing is one of the nicest sounds there is. They’re young and curious and the world just spins round them and when they laugh the world seems a brighter place because it takes you back to the time when you knew no evil and everything was good, or if it wasn’t, it would be over by tomorrow.

And here I guess I’ve finally come down to it, because there was one little boy who didn’t laugh much, but just sat quiet and watchful, and I guess he probably understands more of what happened that summer than any of us, though maybe not in words he could tell.

His name was Billy McNeill, and he was Jim Valentine’s kid. Jim used to be a mechanic, worked with Ned up at the gas station and did a bit of beat-up car racing after hours. Which is why his kid is called McNeill now: one Sunday Jim took a corner a mite too fast and the car rolled and the gas tank caught and they never did find all the wheels. A year later his Mary married again. God alone knows why, her folks warned her, her friends warned her, but I guess love must just have been blind. Sam McNeill’s work schedule was at best pretty empty, and mostly he just drank and hung out with friends who maybe weren’t always this side of the law. And I guess Mary had her own sad little miracle and got her sight back pretty soon because it wasn’t long before Sam got a bit too free with his fists when the evenings got too long and he’d had a lot too many. You didn’t see Mary around much anymore. In these parts people tend to stare at black eyes on a woman, and a deaf man could hear the whisperings of “We Told Her So” on the wind.

One morning Tom was sitting painting as usual and little Billy was sitting watching him. Usually he just wandered off after a while but this morning Mary was at the doctor’s and she came over to collect him, walking quickly with her face lowered. But not low enough. I was watching from the store, it was kind of a slow morning. Tom’s face never showed much, he was a man for a quiet smile and a raised eyebrow, but he looked shocked that morning, just for a moment. Mary’s eyes were puffed and purple and there was a cut on her cheek an inch long. I guess we’d sort of gotten used to seeing her like that and if the truth be known some of the wives thought she’d got remarried a bit on the soon side and I suppose we may all have been a bit cold towards her, Jim Valentine having been so well-liked and all.

Tom looked from the little boy who never laughed as much as the others to his mom with her tired unhappy eyes and her beat-up face and his face went from shocked to stony and I can’t describe any other way than that I seemed to feel a cold chill across my heart from right across the square. But then he smiled and ruffled Billy’s hair and Mary took Billy’s hand and they went off. They looked back once and Tom was still looking after them and he gave Billy a little wave and he waved back and mother and child smiled together.

That night in Jack’s Tom put a quiet question about Mary and we told him the story and as he listened his face seemed to harden from within, his bright eyes becoming flat and dead. We told him that old Lou Lachance who lived next door to the McNeill’s said that sometimes you could hear him shouting and her pleading till three in the morning and on still nights the sound of Billy crying for much longer still. Told him it was a shame, but what could you do? Folks keep themselves out of other people’s faces round here, and I guess Sam and his roughneck drinking buddies didn’t have much to fear from nearly-retireders like us anyhow. Told him it was a terrible thing, and none of us liked it, but these things happened.

Tom listened and didn’t say a word. Just sat there in his black coat and listened to us pass the buck. After a while the talk sort of petered out and we sat and watched the bubbles in our beers. I guess the bottom line was that none of us had really thought about it much except as another chapter of small-town gossip and Jesus Christ did I feel ashamed about that by the time we’d finished telling it. Sitting there with Tom was no laughs at all at that moment. He had a real edge to him, and seemed more unknown than known that night. He just stared at his laced fingers for a long time, and then he began, real slow, to talk.

He’d been married once, he said, a long time ago, and he lived in a place called Stevensburg with his wife Rachel. And when he talked about her the air seemed to go softer and we all sat quiet and supped our beers and remembered how it had been way back when we first loved our own wives. He talked of her smile and the look in her eyes and when we all went home that night I guess there were a few wives who were surprised at how tight they got hugged and who went to sleep in their husband’s arms feeling more loved and contented than they had in a long while.

He’d loved her and she him and for a few years they were the happiest people on earth. Then a third party had got involved. Tom didn’t say his name, and he spoke real neutrally about him but it was a gentleness like silk wrapped around a knife. Anyway his wife, it seems, fell in love with him, or thought she had, or leastways she slept with him. In their bed, the bed they’d come to on their wedding night. And as Tom spoke these words some of us looked up at him, startled, like we’d been slapped across the face with pain. Rachel did what so many do and live to regret till their dying day. She was so mixed up and getting so much pressure from the other guy that she decided to plough on with the one mistake and make it the biggest in the world. She left Tom. He talked with her, pleaded even. It was almost impossible to imagine Tom ever doing that, but I guess the man we knew was a different man from the one he was remembering.

And so Tom had to carry on living in Stevensburg, walking the same tracks, seeing them around, wondering if she was as free and easy with him, if the light in her eyes was shining on him now. And each time the man saw Tom he’d look straight at him and crease a little twisted smile, a grin that said he knew about the pleading and he and his cronies had had a good laugh over the wedding bed and yes I’m going home with your wife tonight and I know just how she likes it, you want to compare notes? And then he’d turn and kiss Rachel on the mouth, his eyes on Tom, smiling. And she let him do it.

It had kept stupid old women in stories for weeks, the way Tom kept losing weight and his temper and the will to live. He took three months of it and then left without bothering to sell the house. Stevensburg was where he’d grown up and courted and loved and now wherever he turned the good times had rotted and hung like fly-blown corpses in all the cherished places. He’d never been back.

It took an hour to tell and then he stopped talking a while and lit a hundredth cigarette and Pete got us all some more beers. We were sitting sad and thoughtful, tired like we’d lived it ourselves. And I guess most of us had, some little bit of it. But had we ever loved anyone the way he’d loved her? I doubt it, not all of us put together. Pete set the beers down and Ned asked Tom why he hadn’t just beaten the living shit out of the guy. Now no one else would have actually asked that, but Ned’s a good guy, and I guess we were all with him in feeling a piece of that oldest and most crushing hatred in the world, the hate of a man who’s lost the woman he loves to another, and we knew what Ned was saying. I’m not saying it’s a good thing and I know you’re not supposed to feel like that these days but show me a man who says he doesn’t and I’ll show you a liar. Love is the only feeling worth a tin shit but you’ve to know that it comes from both sides of a man’s character and the deeper it runs the darker the pool it draws from.

My guess is he just hated the man too much to hit him. Comes a time when that isn’t enough, when nothing is ever going to be enough, and so you can’t do anything at all. And as he talked the pain just flowed out like a river that wasn’t ever going to be stopped, a river that had cut a channel through every corner of his soul. I learnt something that night that you can go your whole life without realising: that there are things that can be done that can mess someone up so badly for so long that they just cannot be allowed, that there are some kinds of pain that you cannot suffer to be brought into the world. And then Tom was done telling and he raised a smile and said that in the end he hadn’t done anything to the man except paint him a picture, which I didn’t understand, but Tom looked like he’d talked all he was going to.

And so we got some more beers and shot some quiet pool before going home. But I guess we all knew what he’d been talking about. Billy McNeill was just a child. He should have been dancing through a world like a big funfair full of sunlight and sounds and instead he went home at night and saw his mom being beaten up by a man with shit for brains who struck out at a good woman because he was too twisted with ignorant stupidity to deal with the world. Most kids go to sleep thinking about bikes and climbing apple trees and skimming stones and he was lying there hearing splitting skin and knowing a brutal face was smiling as his mom got smashed in the stomach and then hit again as she threw up in the sink. Tom didn’t say any of that, but he did. And we knew he was right.

The summer kept up bright and hot, and we all had our businesses to attend to. Jack sold a lot of beer and I sold a lot of ice cream (Sorry ma’am, just the three flavours, and no, Bubblegum Pistachio ain’t one of them) and Ned fixed a whole bunch of cracked radiators. And Tom sat right out there in the square with a couple of cats by his feet and a crowd around him, magicking up animals in the sun.

And I think that after that night Mary maybe got a few more smiles as she did her shopping, and maybe a few more wives stopped to talk to her. She looked a lot better too: Sam had a job by the sound of it and her face healed up pretty soon. You could often see her standing holding Billy’s hand as they watched Tom paint for a while before they went home. I think she realised they had a friend in him. Sometimes Billy was there all afternoon, and he was happy there in the sun by Tom’s feet and oftentimes he’d pick up a piece of chalk and sit scrawling on the pavement. Sometimes I’d see Tom lean over and say something to him and he’d look up and smile a simple child’s smile that beamed in the sunlight and I don’t mind admitting I felt water pricking in these old eyes. The tourists kept coming and the sun kept shining and it was one of those summers that go on for ever and stick in a child’s mind, and tell you what summer should be like for the rest of your life. And I’m damn sure it sticks in Billy’s mind, just like it does in all of ours.

Because one morning Mary didn’t come into the store, which had gotten to being a regular sort of thing, and Billy wasn’t out there in the square. After the way things had been the last few weeks that could only be bad news and so I left the boy John in charge of the store and hurried over to have a word with Tom. I was kind of worried.

I was no more than halfway across to him when I saw Billy come running from the opposite corner of the square, going straight to Tom. He was crying fit to burst and just leapt up at Tom and clung to him, his arms wrapped tight round his neck. Then his mother came across from the same direction, running as best she could. She got to Tom and they just looked at each other. Mary’s a real pretty girl but you wouldn’t have believed it then. It looked like he’d actually broken her nose this time and blood was streaming out of her lip. She started sobbing, saying Sam had lost his job because he was back on the drink and what could she do and then suddenly there was a roar and I was shoved aside and Sam was standing there, still wearing his slippers, weaving back and forth and radiating the frightening aura of violence waiting to happen that keep men like him safe. He started shouting at Mary to take the kid back home and she just flinched and cowered closer to Tom like she was huddling round a fire to keep out the cold. This just got Sam even wilder and he staggered forward and told Tom to get the fuck out of it if he knew what was good for him, and grabbed Mary’s arm and tried to yank her towards him, his face terrible with twisted rage.

Then Tom stood up. Now Tom was a tall man, but he wasn’t a young man, and he was thin. Sam was thirty and built like a brick shithouse. When he did work it usually involved moving heavy things from one place to another, and his strength was supercharged by a whole pile of drunken nastiness. But at that moment the crowd stepped back as one and I suddenly felt very afraid for Sam McNeill. Tom looked like you could take anything you cared to him and it would just break, like a huge spike of granite wrapped in skin with two holes in the face where the rock showed through. And he was mad, not hot and blowing like Sam, but cold as ice.

There was a long pause. Then Sam weaved back a step and shouted, “You just come on home, you hear? Gonna be real trouble if you don’t, Mary. Real trouble,” and then stormed off across the square the way he came, knocking his way through the tourist vultures soaking up some spicy local colour.

Mary turned to Tom, looking so afraid it hurt to look, and said she guessed she’d better be going. Tom just stared at her for a moment and then spoke for the first time. “Do you love him?” Even if you wanted to, you ain’t going to lie to eyes like that for fear something inside you will break. Real quiet she said, “No,” and began crying softly as she took Billy’s hand and walked slowly back across the square.

Tom packed up his stuff and walked over to Jack’s. I went with him and had a beer but I had to get back to the shop and Tom just sat there like a trigger, silent and strung up tight as a drum. And somewhere down near the bottom of those still waters something was stirring. Something I thought I didn’t want to see.

About an hour later it was lunchtime and I’d just left the shop to have a break and suddenly something whacked into the back of my legs and nearly knocked me down. It was Billy. It was Billy and he had a bruise round his eye that was already closing it up.

I knew what the only thing to do was and I did it. I took his hand and led him across to the bar, feeling a hard anger pushing against my throat. When he saw Tom, Billy ran to him again and Tom took him in his arms and looked over Billy’s shoulder at me and I felt my own anger collapse utterly in the face of a fury I could never have generated. I tried to find a word like ‘angry’ to describe it but they all just seemed like they were in the wrong language. All of a sudden I wanted to be somewhere else and it felt real cold standing there facing that stranger in a black coat.

Then the moment passed and Tom was holding the kid close, ruffling his hair and talking to him in a low voice, murmuring the words I thought only mothers knew. He dried Billy’s tears and checked his eye and then he got off his stool, smiled down at him and said:

“And now I think it’s time we did a bit of drawing, isn’t it?” and, taking the kid’s hand, he picked up his chalkbox and walked out into the square.

I don’t know how many times I looked up and watched them that afternoon. They were sitting side by side on the stone, Billy’s little hand wrapped round one of Tom’s fingers, and Tom doing one of his chalk drawings. Every now and then Billy would reach across and add a little bit and Tom would smile and say something and Billy’s gurgling laugh would float across the square. The store was real busy that afternoon and I was chained to that counter but I could tell by the size of the crowd that a lot of Tom was going into that picture, and maybe a bit of Billy too.

It was about four o’clock before I could take a break. I walked across the crowded square in the mid-afternoon heat and shouldered my way through to where they sat with a couple of cold Cokes. And when I saw it my mouth just dropped open and took a five minute vacation while I tried to take it in.

It was a cat all right, but not a normal cat. It was a life-size tiger. I’d never seen Tom do anything anywhere near that big before and as I stood there in the beating sun trying to get my mind round it it almost seemed to stand in three dimensions, a nearly living thing. Its stomach was very lean and thin, its tail seemed to twitch with colour, and as Tom worked on the eyes and jaws, his face set with a rigid concentration quite unlike his usual calm painting face, the snarling mask of the tiger came to life before my eyes. And I could see that he wasn’t just putting a bit of himself in at all. This was a man at full stretch, giving all of himself and reaching down for more, pulling up bloody fistfuls and throwing them down. The tiger was all the rage I’d seen in his eyes and more and like his love for Rachel that rage just seemed bigger than any other man could know or comprehend. He was pouring it out and sculpting it into the lean and ravenous creature coming to pulsating life in front of us on the pavement, and the weird purples and blues and reds just made it seem more vibrant and alive.

I watched him working furiously on it, the boy sometimes helping, adding a tiny bit here and there that strangely seemed to add to it, and thought I understood what he’d meant that evening a few weeks back. He said he’d done a painting for the man who’d given him so much pain. Then, as now, he must have found what I guess you’d call something fancy like catharsis through his skill with chalks, had wrenched the pain up from within him and nailed it down onto something solid that he could walk away from. And now he was helping that little boy do the same, and the boy did look better, his bruised eye hardly showing with the wide smile on his face as he watched the big cat conjured up from nowhere in front of him.

We all just stood and watched, like something out of an old story, the simple folk and the wandering magical stranger. It always feels like you’re giving a bit of yourself away when you praise someone else’s creation, and it’s often done grudgingly, but you could feel the awe that day like a warm wind. Comes a time when you realise something special is happening, something you’re never going to see again, and there isn’t anything you can do but watch.

Well I had to go back to the store after a while. I hated to go but, well, John is a good boy, married now of course, but in those days his head was full of girls and it didn’t do to leave him alone in a busy shop for too long.

And so the long hot day drew slowly to a close. I kept the store open till eight, when the light began to turn and the square emptied out with all the tourists going away to write postcards and see if we didn’t have even just a little McDonalds hidden away someplace. I guess Mary had troubles enough at home, realised where the boy would be and figured he was safer there than anywhere else, and I guess she was right.

Tom and Billy finished up drawing and then Tom sat and talked to him for some time. Then they got up and the kid walked slowly off to the corner of the square, looking back to wave at Tom a couple of times. Tom stood and watched him go and when Billy had gone he stayed there a while, head down, looking like a huge black statue in the gathering dark. He looked kind of creepy out there and I don’t mind telling you I was glad when he finally moved and started walking over towards Jack’s. I ran out to catch up with him and drew level just as we passed the drawing. And then I had to stop. I just couldn’t look at that and move at the same time.

Finished, the drawing was like nothing on earth, and I suppose that’s exactly what it was. I can’t hope to describe it to you, although I’ve seen it in my dreams many times in the last ten years. You had to be there, on that heavy summer night, had to know what was going on. Otherwise it’s going to sound like it was just a drawing. That tiger was out and out terrifying. It looked so mean and hungry. Christ, I don’t know what: it just looked like the darkest parts of your own mind, the pain and the fury and the vengeful hate nailed down in front of you for you to see, and I just stood there and shivered in the humid evening air.

“We did him a picture,” Tom said quietly.

“Yeah,” I said, and nodded. Like I said, I know what catharsis means and I thought I understood what he was saying. But I really didn’t want to look at it much longer. “Let’s go have a beer, yeah?”

The storm in Tom wasn’t past, I could tell, and he still seemed to thrum with crackling emotions looking for an earth, but I thought the clouds might be breaking and I was glad.

And so we walked slowly over to Jack’s and had a few beers and watched some pool being played. Tom seemed pretty tired, but still alert, and I relaxed a little. Come eleven most of the guys started going on their way and I was surprised to see Tom get another beer. Pete, Ned and I stayed on, and Jack of course, though we knew our loving wives would have something to say about that. It just didn’t seem time to go. Outside it had gotten pretty dark, though the moon was keeping the square in a kind of twilight and the lights in the bar threw a pool of warmth out of the front window.

Then, about twelve o’clock, it happened, and I don’t suppose any of us will ever see the same world we grew up in again. I’ve told this whole thing like it was just me who was there, but we all were, and we remember it together.

Because suddenly there was a wailing sound outside, a thin cutting cry, getting closer. Tom immediately snapped to his feet and stared out the window like he’d been waiting for it. As we looked out across the square we saw little Billy come running and we could see the blood on his face from there. Some of us go to get up but Tom snarled at us to stay there and so I guess we just stayed there, sitting back down like we’d been pushed. He strode out the door and into the square and the boy saw him and ran to him and Tom folded him in his cloak and held him close and warm. But he didn’t come back in. he just stood there, and he was waiting for something.

Now there’s a lot of crap talked about silences. I read novels when I’ve the time and you read things like ‘Time stood still’ and so on and you just think bullshit it did. So I’ll just say I don’t think anyone in the world breathed in that next minute. There was no wind, no movement. The stillness and silence were there like you could touch them, but more than that: they were like that’s all there was and all there ever had been.

We felt the slow red throb of violence from right across the square before we could even see the man. Then Sam came staggering into the square waving a bottle like a flag and cursing his head off. At first he couldn’t see Tom and the boy because they were the opposite side of the fountain, and he ground to a wavering halt, but then he started shouting, rough jags of sound that seemed to strike against the silence and die instead of breaking it, and he started charging across the square and if ever there was a man with murder in his thoughts then it was Sam McNeill. He was like a man possessed, a man who’d given his soul the evening off. I wanted to shout to Tom to get the hell out of the way, to come inside, but the words wouldn’t come out of my throat and we all just stood there, knuckles whitening as we clutched the bar and stared, our mouths open like we’d made a pact never to use them again. And Tom just stood there, watching Sam come towards him, getting closer, almost as far as the spot where Tom usually painted. And it felt like we were looking out of the window at a picture of something that happened long ago in another place and time and the closer Sam got the more I began to feel very very afraid for him.

It was at that moment that Sam stopped dead in his tracks, skidding forward like in some kid’s cartoon, his shout dying off in his ragged throat. He was staring at the ground in front of him, his eyes wide and his mouth a stupid circle. And then he began to scream.

It was a high shrill noise like a woman and coming out of that bull of a man it sent fear racking down my spine. He started making thrashing movements like he was trying to move backwards but he just stayed where he was. His movements became unmistakable at about the same time his screams turned from terror to agony. He was trying to get his leg away from something.

Suddenly he seemed to fall forward on one knee, his other leg stuck out behind him and he raised his head and shrieked at the dark skies and we saw his face then and I’m not going to forget that face so long as I live. It was a face from before there were any words, the face behind our oldest fears and earliest nightmares, the face we’re terrified of seeing on ourselves one night when we’re alone in the dark and It finally comes out from under the bed to get us.

Then Sam fell on his face, his leg buckled up and still he thrashed and screamed and clawed at the ground with his hands, blood running from his broken fingernails as he twitched and struggled. Maybe the light was playing tricks, and my eyes were sparkling anyway on account of being too paralysed with fear to even blink, but as he thrashed less and less it became harder and harder to see him at all, and as the breeze whipped up stronger his screams began to sound a lot like the wind. But still he writhed and moaned and then suddenly there was the most godawful crunching sound and then there was no movement or sound anymore.

Like they were on a string our heads turned together and we saw Tom still standing there, his coat flapping in the wind. He had a hand on Billy’s shoulder and as we looked we could see that Mary was there too now and he had one arm round her as she sobbed into his coat.

I don’t know how long we just sat there staring but then with one mind we were ejected off our seats and out of the bar. Pete and Ned ran to Tom but Jack and I went to where Sam had fallen and we stood and stared down and I tell you the rest of my life now seems like a build-up to and a climb-down from that moment.

We were standing in front of a chalk drawing of a tiger. Even now my scalp seems to tighten when I think of it, and my chest feels like someone punched a hole in it and tipped a gallon of iced water inside. I’ll just tell you the facts: Jack was there and he knows what we saw and what we didn’t see.

What we didn’t see was Sam McNeill. He just wasn’t there, you know? We saw a drawing of a tiger in purples and greens, a little bit scuffed, and there was a lot more red around the mouth of that tiger than there had been that afternoon and I’m sure that if either of us could have dreamed of reaching out and touching it it would have been warm too.

And the hardest part to tell is this. I’d seen that drawing in the afternoon, and Jack had too, and we knew that when it was done it was lean and thin. And I swear to God that tiger wasn’t thin anymore. What Jack and I were looking at was one fat tiger.

After a while I looked up and across at Tom. He was still standing with Mary and Billy, but they weren’t crying any more. Mary was hugging Billy so tight he squawked and Tom’s face looked calm and alive and creased with a smile. And as we stood there the skies opened for the first time in months and a cool rain hammered down. At my feet colours began to run and lines became less distinct. Jack and I stood and watched till there was just pools of meaningless colours and then we walked slowly over to the others not even looking at the bottle lying on the ground and we all stood there a long time in the rain, facing each other, not saying a word.

Well that was ten years ago, near enough. After a while Mary took Billy home and they turned to give us a little wave before they turned the corner. The cuts on Billy’s face healed real quick, and he’s a good looking boy now: he looks a lot like his dad and he’s already fooling about in cars. Helps me in the store sometimes. His mom ain’t aged a day and looks wonderful. She never married again, but she looks real happy the way she is.

The rest of us just said a simple goodnight. Goodnight was all we could muster and maybe that’s all there was to say. Then we walked off home in the directions of our wives. Tom gave me a small smile before he turned and walked off alone. I almost followed him, I wanted to say something, but in the end I just stood and watched him go. And that’s how I’ll always remember him best, because for a moment there was a spark in his eyes and I knew that some pain had been lifted deep down inside there somewhere. Then he walked and no one has seen him since, and like I said it’s been about ten years now. He wasn’t there in the square the next morning and he didn’t come in for a beer. Like he’d never been, he just wasn’t there. Except for the hole in our hearts: it’s funny how much you can miss a quiet man.

We’re all still here, of course, Jack, Ned, Pete and the boys, and all the same, if even older and greyer. Pete lost his wife and Ned retired but things go on the same. The tour...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46421059)

I bought it and read it and I thought it was good but not great. It reminded me of a redditor writing some horror story post.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46441296)

To be fair I see your point that it is very Reddit-y

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46441547)

Abel Swift bandaged up his hand as best he could, given that there were no dressings or hydrogen peroxide in the apartment. To buy that kind of stuff from a bodega he would have to hump down six floors of stairs, and Abel hated exerting himself to waste money. He mummied up his hand with one of his wife's halter tops tied in a knot, which gifted him with a bonus twinge of revenge. It served her right.

He reminded himself to ask for more money. After careful consideration, Abel Swift adjudged that he had done no more wrong in his life than the average, basically good man. His flaws were forgivable; his transgressions, minor. He constantly strove to take stock of himself, subjecting his life to microscopic scrutiny, and this bargain-basement therapy spilled over into his prayers, every night.

"Oh Lord, I know you're a kind and tolerant God, so I am hoping that you will understand about Lizbeth. I am not a violent man, Lord, you have seen that, because you see and know everything, but sometimes the Devil tries to get at me through that bottle, and sometimes I have what you'd call that moment of weakness, like I had tonight, and I swear to you that I never meant to hit her, not hard at least, and it was ole Satan himself who raised my hand in anger, because if it had been me I only woulda hit her once. Once is all Lizbeth ever needs. She's slow, Lord, and I get frustrated when she can't track what I am saying. Like how she lets them dishes pile up until they dry and get all crusty and it never occurs to her to scrape 'em or rinse 'em or anything; then she put 'em in the dishwasher and the hot water sort of vulcanized the food onto the plates, then later the chunks broke off and clogged up the dishwasher, and how now neither the dishwasher nor the disposal neither works, and after I came home she was whining about it, you know in that way she does, Lord, and then she can't understand why I get mad, she just stares at me like some sort of befuddled animal, like she's trying to smell what I want, and that makes her face get a ll squinty and puffy and, well, God, it just makes me want to never stop hitting it. Plus I told her to bring back an extra fifth of whiskey, you know, as a kind of backup, because I knew the cabinet was low, and she forgot, so in total I could not possibly have been drunk enough to actually abuse my wife, because thanks to her there was not enough liquor in the house to get drunk on, so I hope you can see your way clear to letting me slide on account of my hitting her just a little bit. Like she probably told you herself, Lord, I only hit her when she deserves it.

"Now, God, as to MaryRose, you have to understand that it was her that sinned and started up all that commotion by getting called to the principal's office at school. Eighth grade girls ought not to wear that much makeup in school anyway; it makes them look cheap and tartish. Well, I figure all the boys were sniffing around and saying lewdness and it all sort of reached some kind of critical mass of sinning, or she would not have been called to the principal's office in the first place. Since everybody's screaming about capital punishment, you know the schools won't do anything anymore, Lord. About all they can do is send her home, and when I found out Lizbeth had thrashed MaryRose without my say-so, well, first I had to wake up Lizbeth — you know, revive her, with water and stuff — and give her a stern talking to about striking our daughter, which is and should be a father's responsibility. So I'm afraid I cracked Lizbeth a couple of more times, but when she fell and hit her head I found some Black Jack I'd forgotten about by the sofa, so I asked her to please forgive me for hitting her the first time.

"So I said, thank you, Lord — you remember that, right? — for the whiskey and by that time I really needed a drink, and I think you could understand and forgive me for just that one drink. Actually it was my own cowardliness, Lord. I think that I was afraid to face my daughter sober, and I took that drink — those drinks — keeping a weather eye out for the Devil, who by now I knew was looking to get a grab on me. MaryRose had been crying a lot and her makeup was all smeared. She looked kind of like a cross between a raccoon and one of those harlots, Lord. So I spanked her naked ass good, first with the hand, then with the belt. If she hadn't been wearing all that tawdry slut's clothing nothing would have jumped off the tracks, I swear it, God. But her little tight ass was all red from me spanking it and she was bawling like a water fountain, and she just kind of, well, grabbed onto me is a good way to put it, Lord. It wasn't the Devil of liquor but the Demon of lust that snuck in and took control. Preachers say you do this kind of thing as a test, Lord, and I admit that in this test I failed you in every way. I know you lay down the law, and I know what a sin is, and you probably think I'm a sodomite, but let me say in my own defense that I ain't that much of one, and besides, the Bible doesn't say anything about all that other stuff MaryRose committed on my weak flesh, but she sure didn't learn those moves in no junior high school, and if there's a sinner in this house, I think that she might be a bigger one than me.

"Now, Lord, about the farting ... "

#

Bill Gray considered the jolt of heroin within the sterile syringe, all waiting for his go-ahead, and in a supreme act of discipline, left it where it was. The cacophony inside his head was threatening to push out the walls of his skull, and the drug would calm the storm ... but not tonight.

The pain was like throbbing, necrotic pulp in every tooth, plus a needle driven through each eye, combined with a spiking cluster migraine, in addition to his sinuses being filled with hydrochloric acid. Heated. It caused him to twitch and jolt involuntarily, making him appear in the throes of some minor spastic fit or major brain anomaly. Pedestrians dismissed him as just another weirdo and strolled on.

With bloodshot eyes, Bill consulted a matchbook, and his sleep-deprived mind processed the address scribbled there. He leaned on the buzzer until a voice answered.

"Is this Abel Swift?"

"Yeah, who the hell is this at this hour of the night?" It was late enough that people felt compelled to say things like do you know what time it is?—Bill detested rote.

"My name is Bill Gray and I need to see you."

"I don't need to see you; it's the middle of the night."

"Open the front door."

"Fuck you, wino, go sleep it off."

It was a heartbeat before that intercom click that terminates further discussion. Bill was able to slide right into the gap.

"I have money for you, Mr. Swift." The pain in his head ebbed and offered him a small caesura in which to draw a single calm breath.

Among all the psychos and street flotsam that wander New York City in the dead of night, amidst all the incoherent ramblings and fever-dream monologues of the disenfranchised, within the unending stream of mad pronunciamentos issuing from the wild-eyed and lost, the average citizen may discern two select words that seem to be a part of every speech, by every grimy hostile one is likely to encounter. Those two words are bitch and money. Bill Gray had just used the second of those two potent words on the speaker grille that represented Abel Swift. Mr. Swift was now processing this information and would not cut him off.

"What? Did you say money?"

"Yes." Bill hoped he would not have to explain the concept of money to this ape. "Quite a lot of money. You need a lot of money, am I correct?"

"I don't know you."

"I know you. You work for Luther Paxson down in the meat-packing district. You and your friends call Luther the Grinch because he doesn't give bonuses at Christmas. You steal all the cuts you bring home and you sell cuts on the side to ten delis in Hell's Kitchen."

"Hey, who is this really?"

"I'm just telling you this to assure you that none of your secrets are out. Remember the basketball pool, two weeks ago?"

"Nobody's supposed to know about that!"

"What I know is that your pal Freddie took cash from the office safe, bet on the game based on inside information about the point spread, then sneaked the money back in after he'd won, and you knew about it."

"Jesus Christ, man, you trying to get me burgered?!"

"Freddie parlayed the win into more cash and I'm here to give you a bonus. Freddie sent a stranger so nobody could trace it. And he said to keep this strictly between you and him, with me as the messenger. After tonight you won't see or hear from me again, I promise."

Pause. Abel was praying that this score was for real.

"How much money?"

"Five large."

"I'll be right down."

Bill expected a sleepy guy in a grimy robe; Abel had actually donned pants and a muscle tee, and ventured down to the closet-sized foyer in person rather than permitting blind entry to a stranger. He kept his bandaged hand behind him for strategic reasons.

Abel microscoped Bill through shatterproof glass, first with one eye, then the other, tilting his head like a lizard. He did not like what he saw. If Bill had bothered to glance in a mirror, he would have seen a dazed and dishevelled man. He looked like car wreck victims look on the news — stunned, banged-up, flesh scuffed, grimacing into the too-revealing lights of news cameras the way shined deer stare down gun barrels. To Abel, the guy looked wobbly. To Abel, the guy was not right.

"You look like a junkie," said Abel. "Where the hell did Freddie dig you up?"

"You want the cash or don't you?" Bill palmed an envelope he had prepared. Exhibit A.

"Shove it through the slot."

"If I do that, you won't sign the note for it. Freddie said you have to sign the note."

"Show me."

Bill dutifully splayed the envelope. Inside was a wad of singles bracketed by two one-hundred dollar notes which had cost Bill $2.50 to Xerox. The whole package passed muster better than a prop in a movie. Abel's eyes went weirdly flat, his vision excluding everything but the money. He began to unlock the building's front door.

Bill felt an almost orgasmic rush, unadulterated by the pistol which had appeared in Abel's free hand. His trigger finger stuck out from a bloodied wad of cloth. A cooler lobe of Bill's brain registered the gun as a sleazy little revolver. No worries.

When Abel reached out for the envelope, Bill shot him in the hand with his own gun, a sleek polymer automatic, firing left-handed from inside his jacket pocket, smooth as thumbtacking a bug to a board. Abel jerked back and dropped his piece. The decoy money sprayed across the sidewalk, forgotten. Bill kicked the bottom of the door, sending the aluminum security frame straight back into Abel's cheek and sprawl-assing him on the dirty tilework. Bill was in.

"Get a gun from this century, moron," he said, lofting Abel's gang-banger into the lobby trashcan. Abel was trying to crab backward while holding his perforated hand to his bosom like a diva. He obviously did not enjoy the sight of his own blood. He screamed a torrent of invective.

No matter; Bill was inside.

Bill kicked him, and kicked him, helping to propel Abel back into the recesses of the lobby. No matter how much noise they made, no one would bother them. Not in this neighborhood; not at this time of night.

No matter; now they were, for all practical purposes, alone.

"I never seen you before, I don't know you, what the fuck you wanna do this to me for?!" This was more coherent than most of the floodtide spilling from Abel's face just now.

"Shut up!" Bill kicked Abel hard enough to snap two ribs. It did not help Bill's condition much, except to make him angrier. "I spend all day and all night waiting for you to shut up, and even when your mouth is shut you keep talking!"

"What're you talking about?!"

"I tried to stay away, Abel. I really tried. But you're too goddamn much for anybody to bear. Oh, God, please forgive me, oh, God, I'm sorry I hit my wife, oh, God, I didn't mean to butt-fuck my little girl, oh, Lord, I drink too much, oh, God, cut me slack for gambling, please, Lord, I'm not really stealing meat, oh, fucking Jesus I humbly beseech Thee, my life isn't my fault ... holy shit, you asshole, you pray constantly, when you're not mouthing prayers, you're thinking them, and there's no God to hear you, there's just me, and you're driving me crazy!"

Bill's face was scarlet. Saliva had foamed up in the corners of his mouth. Was it really just a few months ago he had enjoyed a fairly normal life managing a mailbox and packaging storefront on West 54th? He had had a girlfriend named Sally and plans to open a branch store uptown ... all dashed the first time the voice of Abel Swift, petitioning his Lord with prayer, popped into his head like a traffic cop in a rearview mirror. The stench of the slaughterhouse invaded Bill's head, promptly filling it with every detail of every transgression Abel Swift had ever wreaked upon the world, and Abel never stopped fucking up. The only thing worse than his ceaseless menu of sins was his constant whining for forgiveness — pleas that nested in Bill Gray's head, because they had no place else to go.

He knew Abel's hand had been gashed by Lizbeth's teeth, hence, the bloody bandage. Abel never left anything out of his prayers.

It had taken Bill a month to turn to drugs to obliterate the noise; another month to realize he was not insane, and a third month to gather enough details about Abel's life and job to actually locate him in the city. By then, the mailbox business had been attached, Sally had fled and Bill had spent most of his savings on scoring.

There was no God who cared to spare Bill Gray, so Bill had assumed control.

He emptied his gun into Abel, who spasmed with each hit. Five large. The sudden silence nearly caused Bill to swoon. He wiped his face down slowly, savoring the quiet. He could actually recognize his own voice when he spoke.

"Taste my wrath, you son of a bitch." ... Where the hell had a slope-brow like Abel learned a big word like vulcanized?

He could kick; he wasn't in that deep. He could call Sally and patch things up. He could roll up his sleeves and excavate his business. He could work hard and try to forget he had become a murderer. He could fight to win his life back.

He was almost home when he experienced a stab of pain in his left ear, and the voice of a woman named Arabella, earnestly praying that her next baby would be born healthy, eight months from now.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46430333)

A deceptively nasty little story that starts off like a standard ghost story set up and ends up like something out of Charles Birkin.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46434024)

The only point which they do not make clear is the identity of the writer. He signs with initials only, and as none of the envelopes of the letters are preserved, the surname of his correspondent—obviously a married brother—is as obscure as his own. No further preliminary explanation is needed, I think. Luckily the first letter supplies all that could be expected.

LETTER I

GREAT CHRISHALL, Dec. 22, 1837.

MY DEAR ROBERT,—It is with great regret for the enjoyment I am losing, and for a reason which you will deplore equally with myself, that I write to inform you that I am unable to join your circle for this Christmas: but you will agree with me that it is unavoidable when I say that I have within these few hours received a letter from Mrs. Hunt at B——, to the effect that our Uncle Henry has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, and begging me to go down there immediately and join the search that is being made for him. Little as I, or you either, I think, have ever seen of Uncle, I naturally feel that this is not a request that can be regarded lightly, and accordingly I propose to go to B——by this afternoon’s mail, reaching it late in the evening. I shall not go to the Rectory, but put up at the King’s Head, and to which you may address letters. I enclose a small draft, which you will please make use of for the benefit of the young people. I shall write you daily (supposing me to be detained more than a single day) what goes on, and you may be sure, should the business be cleared up in time to permit of my coming to the Manor after all, I shall present myself. I have but a few minutes at disposal. With cordial greetings to you all, and many regrets, believe me, your affectionate Bro.,

W. R.

LETTER II

KING’S HEAD, Dec. 23, ‘37.

MY DEAR ROBERT,—In the first place, there is as yet no news of Uncle H., and I think you may finally dismiss any idea—I won’t say hope—that I might after all ‘turn up’ for Xmas. However, my thoughts will be with you, and you have my best wishes for a really festive day. Mind that none of my nephews or nieces expend any fraction of their guineas on presents for me.

Since I got here I have been blaming myself for taking this affair of Uncle H. too easily. From what people here say, I gather that there is very little hope that he can still be alive; but whether it is accident or design that carried him off I cannot judge. The facts are these. On Friday the 19th, he went as usual shortly before five o’clock to read evening prayers at the Church; and when they were over the clerk brought him a message, in response to which he set off to pay a visit to a sick person at an outlying cottage the better part of two miles away. He paid the visit, and started on his return journey at about half-past six. This is the last that is known of him. The people here are very much grieved at his loss; he had been here many years, as you know, and though, as you also know, he was not the most genial of men, and had more than a little of the martinet in his composition, he seems to have been active in good works, and unsparing of trouble to himself.

Poor Mrs. Hunt, who has been his housekeeper ever since she left Woodley, is quite overcome: it seems like the end of the world to her. I am glad that I did not entertain the idea of taking quarters at the Rectory; and I have declined several kindly offers of hospitality from people in the place, preferring as I do to be independent, and finding myself very comfortable here.

You will, of course, wish to know what has been done in the way of inquiry and search. First, nothing was to be expected from investigation at the Rectory; and to be brief, nothing has transpired. I asked Mrs. Hunt—as others had done before—whether there was either any unfavourable symptom in her master such as might portend a sudden stroke, or attack of illness, or whether he had ever had reason to apprehend any such thing: but both she, and also his medical man, were clear that this was not the case. He was quite in his usual health. In the second place, naturally, ponds and streams have been dragged, and fields in the neighbourhood which he is known to have visited last, have been searched—without result. I have myself talked to the parish clerk and—more important—have been to the house where he paid his visit.

There can be no question of any foul play on these people’s part. The one man in the house is ill in bed and very weak: the wife and the children of course could do nothing themselves, nor is there the shadow of a probability that they or any of them should have agreed to decoy poor Uncle H. out in order that he might be attacked on the way back. They had told what they knew to several other inquirers already, but the woman repeated it to me. The Rector was looking just as usual: he wasn’t very long with the sick man—’He ain’t,’ she said, ‘like some what has a gift in prayer; but there, if we was all that way, ‘owever would the chapel people get their living?’ He left some money when he went away, and one of the children saw him cross the stile into the next field. He was dressed as he always was: wore his bands—I gather he is nearly the last man remaining who does so—at any rate in this district.

You see I am putting down everything. The fact is that I have nothing else to do, having brought no business papers with me; and, moreover, it serves to clear my own mind, and may suggest points which have been overlooked. So I shall continue to write all that passes, even to conversations if need be—you may read or not as you please, but pray keep the letters. I have another reason for writing so fully, but it is not a very tangible one.

You may ask if I have myself made any search in the fields near the cottage. Something—a good deal—has been done by others, as I mentioned; but I hope to go over the ground tomorrow. Bow Street has now been informed, and will send down by to-night’s coach, but I do not think they will make much of the job. There is no snow, which might have helped us. The fields are all grass. Of course I was on the qui vive for any indication today both going and returning; but there was a thick mist on the way back, and I was not in trim for wandering about unknown pastures, especially on an evening when bushes looked like men, and a cow lowing in the distance might have been the last trump. I assure you, if Uncle Henry had stepped out from among the trees in a little copse which borders the path at one place, carrying his head under his arm, I should have been very little more uncomfortable than I was. To tell you the truth, I was rather expecting something of the kind. But I must drop my pen for the moment: Mr. Lucas, the curate, is announced.

Later. Mr. Lucas has been, and gone, and there is not much beyond the decencies of ordinary sentiment to be got from him. I can see that he has given up any idea that the Rector can be alive, and that, so far as he can be, he is truly sorry. I can also discern that even in a more emotional person than Mr. Lucas, Uncle Henry was not likely to inspire strong attachment.

Besides Mr. Lucas, I have had another visitor in the shape of my Boniface—mine host of the ‘King’s Head’—who came to see whether I had everything I wished, and who really requires the pen of a Boz to do him justice. He was very solemn and weighty at first. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘I suppose we must bow our ‘ead beneath the blow, as my poor wife had used to say. So far as I can gather there’s been neither hide nor yet hair of our late respected incumbent scented out as yet; not that he was what the Scripture terms a hairy man in any sense of the word.’

I said—as well as I could—that I supposed not, but could not help adding that I had heard he was sometimes a little difficult to deal with. Mr. Bowman looked at me sharply for a moment, and then passed in a flash from solemn sympathy to impassioned declamation. ‘When I think,’ he said, ‘of the language that man see fit to employ to me in this here parlour over no more a matter than a cask of beer—such a thing as I told him might happen any day of the week to a man with a family—though as it turned out he was quite under a mistake, and that I knew at the time, only I was that shocked to hear him I couldn’t lay my tongue to the right expression.’

He stopped abruptly and eyed me with some embarrassment. I only said, ‘Dear me, I’m sorry to hear you had any little differences; I suppose my uncle will be a good deal missed in the parish?’ Mr. Bowman drew a long breath. ‘Ah, yes!’ he said; ‘your uncle! You’ll understand me when I say that for the moment it had slipped my remembrance that he was a relative; and natural enough, I must say, as it should, for as to you bearing any resemblance to—to him, the notion of any such a thing is clean ridiculous. All the same, ‘ad I ‘ave bore it in my mind, you’ll be among the first to feel, I’m sure, as I should have abstained my lips, or rather I should not have abstained my lips with no such reflections.’

I assured him that I quite understood, and was going to have asked him some further questions, but he was called away to see after some business. By the way, you need not take it into your head that he has anything to fear from the inquiry into poor Uncle Henry’s disappearance—though, no doubt, in the watches of the night it will occur to him that I think he has, and I may expect explanations tomorrow.

I must close this letter: it has to go by the late coach.

LETTER III

Dec. 25, ‘37.

MY DEAR ROBERT,—This is a curious letter to be writing on Christmas Day, and yet after all there is nothing much in it. Or there may be—you shall be the judge. At least, nothing decisive. The Bow Street men practically say that they have no clue. The length of time and the weather conditions have made all tracks so faint as to be quite useless: nothing that belonged to the dead man—I’m afraid no other word will do—has been picked up.

As I expected, Mr. Bowman was uneasy in his mind this morning; quite early I heard him holding forth in a very distinct voice—purposely so, I thought—to the Bow Street officers in the bar, as to the loss that the town had sustained in their Rector, and as to the necessity of leaving no stone unturned (he was very great on this phrase) in order to come at the truth. I suspect him of being an orator of repute at convivial meetings.

When I was at breakfast he came to wait on me, and took an opportunity when handing a muffin to say in a low tone, ‘I ‘ope, sir, you reconize as my feelings towards your relative is not actuated by any taint of what you may call melignity—you can leave the room, Eliza, I will see the gentleman ‘as all he requires with my own hands—I ask your pardon, sir, but you must be well aware a man is not always master of himself: and when that man has been ‘urt in his mind by the application of expressions which I will go so far as to say ‘ad not ought to have been made use of (his voice was rising all this time and his face growing redder); no, sir; and ’ere, if you will permit of it, I should like to explain to you in a very few words the exact state of the bone of contention. This cask—I might more truly call it a firkin—of beer—’

I felt it was time to interpose, and said that I did not see that it would help us very much to go into that matter in detail. Mr. Bowman acquiesced, and resumed more calmly:

‘Well, sir, I bow to your ruling, and as you say, be that here or be it there, it don’t contribute a great deal, perhaps, to the present question. All I wish you to understand is that I am prepared as you are yourself to lend every hand to the business we have afore us, and—as I took the opportunity to say as much to the Orficers not three-quarters of an hour ago—to leave no stone unturned as may throw even a spark of light on this painful matter.’

In fact, Mr. Bowman did accompany us on our exploration, but though I am sure his genuine wish was to be helpful, I am afraid he did not contribute to the serious side of it. He appeared to be under the impression that we were likely to meet either Uncle Henry or the person responsible for his disappearance, walking about the fields—and did a great deal of shading his eyes with his hand and calling our attention, by pointing with his stick, to distant cattle and labourers. He held several long conversations with old women whom we met, and was very strict and severe in his manner—but on each occasion returned to our party saying, ‘Well, I find she don’t seem to ‘ave no connexion with this sad affair. I think you may take it from me, sir, as there’s little or no light to be looked for from that quarter; not without she’s keeping somethink back intentional.’

We gained no appreciable result, as I told you at starting; the Bow Street men have left the town, whether for London or not, I am not sure.

This evening I had company in the shape of a bagman, a smartish fellow. He knew what was going forward, but though he has been on the roads for some days about here, he had nothing to tell of suspicious characters—tramps, wandering sailors or gipsies. He was very full of a capital Punch and Judy Show he had seen this same day at W——, and asked if it had been here yet, and advised me by no means to miss it if it does come. The best Punch and the best Toby dog, he said, he had ever come across. Toby dogs, you know, are the last new thing in the shows. I have only seen one myself, but before long all the men will have them.

Now why, you will want to know, do I trouble to write all this to you? I am obliged to do it, because it has something to do with another absurd trifle (as you will inevitably say), which in my present state of rather unquiet fancy—nothing more, perhaps—I have to put down. It is a dream, sir, which I am going to record, and I must say it is one of the oddest I have had. Is there anything in it beyond what the bagman’s talk and Uncle Henry’s disappearance could have suggested? You, I repeat, shall judge: I am not in a sufficiently cool and judicial frame to do so.

It began with what I can only describe as a pulling aside of curtains: and I found myself seated in a place—I don’t know whether in doors or out. There were people—only a few—on either side of me, but I did not recognize them, or indeed think much about them. They never spoke, but, so far as I remember, were all grave and pale-faced and looked fixedly before them. Facing me there was a Punch and Judy Show, perhaps rather larger than the ordinary ones, painted with black figures on a reddish-yellow ground. Behind it and on each side was only darkness, but in front there was a sufficiency of light. I was ‘strung up’ to a high degree of expectation and listened every moment to hear the panpipes and the Roo-too-too-it. Instead of that there came suddenly an enormous—I can use no other word—an enormous single toll of a bell, I don’t know from how far off—somewhere behind. The little curtain flew up and the drama began.

I believe someone once tried to re-write Punch as a serious tragedy; but whoever he may have been, this performance would have suited him exactly. There was something Satanic about the hero. He varied his methods of attack: for some of his victims he lay in wait, and to see his horrible face—it was yellowish white, I may remark—peering round the wings made me think of the Vampyre in Fuseli’s foul sketch. To others he was polite and carneying—particularly to the unfortunate alien who can only say Shallabalah—though what Punch said I never could catch. But with all of them I came to dread the moment of death. The crack of the stick on their skulls, which in the ordinary way delights me, had here a crushing sound as if the bone was giving way, and the victims quivered and kicked as they lay. The baby—it sounds more ridiculous as I go on—the baby, I am sure, was alive. Punch wrung its neck, and if the choke or squeak which it gave were not real, I know nothing of reality.

The stage got perceptibly darker as each crime was consummated, and at last there was one murder which was done quite in the dark, so that I could see nothing of the victim, and took some time to effect. It was accompanied by hard breathing and horrid muffled sounds, and after it Punch came and sat on the foot-board and fanned himself and looked at his shoes, which were bloody, and hung his head on one side, and sniggered in so deadly a fashion that I saw some of those beside me cover their faces, and I would gladly have done the same. But in the meantime the scene behind Punch was clearing, and showed, not the usual house front, but something more ambitious—a grove of trees and the gentle slope of a hill, with a very natural—in fact, I should say a real—moon shining on it. Over this there rose slowly an object which I soon perceived to be a human figure with something peculiar about the head—what, I was unable at first to see. It did not stand on its feet, but began creeping or dragging itself across the middle distance towards Punch, who still sat back to it; and by this time, I may remark (though it did not occur to me at the moment) that all pretence of this being a puppet show had vanished. Punch was still Punch, it is true, but, like the others, was in some sense a live creature, and both moved themselves at their own will.

When I next glanced at him he was sitting in malignant reflection; but in another instant something seemed to attract his attention, and he first sat up sharply and then turned round, and evidently caught sight of the person that was approaching him and was in fact now very near. Then, indeed, did he show unmistakable signs of terror: catching up his stick, he rushed towards the wood, only just eluding the arm of his pursuer, which was suddenly flung out to intercept him. It was with a revulsion which I cannot easily express that I now saw more or less clearly what this pursuer was like. He was a sturdy figure clad in black, and, as I thought, wearing bands: his head was covered with a whitish bag.

The chase which now began lasted I do not know how long, now among the trees, now along the slope of the field, sometimes both figures disappearing wholly for a few seconds, and only some uncertain sounds letting one know that they were still afoot. At length there came a moment when Punch, evidently exhausted, staggered in from the left and threw himself down among the trees. His pursuer was not long after him, and came looking uncertainly from side to side. Then, catching sight of the figure on the ground, he too threw himself down—his back was turned to the audience—with a swift motion twitched the covering from his head, and thrust his face into that of Punch. Everything on the instant grew dark.

There was one long, loud, shuddering scream, and I awoke to find myself looking straight into the face of—what in all the world do you think?—but a large owl, which was seated on my window-sill immediately opposite my bed-foot, holding up its wings like two shrouded arms. I caught the fierce glance of its yellow eyes, and then it was gone. I heard the single enormous bell again—very likely, as you are saying to yourself, the church clock; but I do not think so—and then I was broad awake.

All this, I may say, happened within the last half-hour. There was no probability of my getting to sleep again, so I got up, put on clothes enough to keep me warm, and am writing this rigmarole in the first hours of Christmas Day. Have I left out anything? Yes, there was no Toby dog, and the names over the front of the Punch and Judy booth were Kidman and Gallop, which were certainly not what the bagman told me to look out for.

By this time, I feel a little more as if I could sleep, so this shall be sealed and wafered.

LETTER IV

Dec. 26, ‘37.

MY DEAR ROBERT,—All is over. The body has been found. I do not make excuses for not having sent off my news by last night’s mail, for the simple reason that I was incapable of putting pen to paper. The events that attended the discovery bewildered me so completely that I needed what I could get of a night’s rest to enable me to face the situation at all. Now I can give you my journal of the day, certainly the strangest Christmas Day that ever I spent or am likely to spend.

The first incident was not very serious. Mr. Bowman had, I think, been keeping Christmas Eve, and was a little inclined to be captious: at least, he was not on foot very early, and to judge from what I could hear, neither men or maids could do anything to please him. The latter were certainly reduced to tears; nor am I sure that Mr. Bowman succeeded in preserving a manly composure. At any rate, when I came downstairs, it was in a broken voice that he wished me the compliments of the season, and a little later on, when he paid his visit of ceremony at breakfast, he was far from cheerful: even Byronic, I might almost say, in his outlook on life.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘if you think with me, sir; but every Christmas as comes round the world seems a hollerer thing to me. Why, take an example now from what lays under my own eye. There’s my servant Eliza—been with me now for going on fifteen years. I thought I could have placed my confidence in Elizar, and yet this very morning—Christmas morning too, of all the blessed days in the year—with the bells a ringing and—and—all like that—I say, this very morning, had it not have been for Providence watching over us all, that girl would have put—indeed I may go so far to say, ‘ad put the cheese on your breakfast table——’ He saw I was about to speak, and waved his hand at me. ‘It’s all very well for you to say, ‘Yes, Mr. Bowman, but you took away the cheese and locked it up in the cupboard,’ which I did, and have the key here, or if not the actual key one very much about the same size. That’s true enough, sir, but what do you think is the effect of that action on me? Why it’s no exaggeration for me to say that the ground is cut from under my feet. And yet when I said as much to Eliza, not nasty, mind you, but just firm like, what was my return? ‘Oh,’ she says: ‘Well,’ she says, ‘there wasn’t no bones broke, I suppose.’ Well, sir, it ‘urt me, that’s all I can say: it ‘urt me, and I don’t like to think of it now.’

There was an ominous pause here, in which I ventured to say something like, ‘Yes, very trying,’ and then asked at what hour the church service was to be. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ Mr. Bowman said with a heavy sigh. ‘Ah, you won’t have no such discourse from poor Mr. Lucas as what you would have done from our late Rector. Him and me may have had our little differences, and did do, more’s the pity.’

I could see that a powerful effort was needed to keep him off the vexed question of the cask of beer, but he made it. ‘But I will say this, that a better preacher, nor yet one to stand faster by his rights, or what he considered to be his rights—however, that’s not the question now—I for one, never set under. Some might say, ‘Was he a eloquent man?’ and to that my answer would be: ‘Well, there you’ve a better right per’aps to speak of your own uncle than what I have.’ Others might ask, ‘Did he keep a hold of his congregation?’ and there again I should reply, ‘That depends.’ But as I say—Yes, Eliza, my girl, I’m coming—eleven o’clock, sir, and you inquire for the King’s Head pew.’ I believe Eliza had been very near the door, and shall consider it in my vail.

The next episode was church: I felt Mr. Lucas had a difficult task in doing justice to Christmas sentiments, and also to the feeling of disquiet and regret which, whatever Mr. Bowman might say, was clearly prevalent. I do not think he rose to the occasion. I was uncomfortable. The organ wolved—you know what I mean: the wind died—twice in the Christmas Hymn, and the tenor bell, I suppose owing to some negligence on the part of the ringers, kept sounding faintly about once in a minute during the sermon. The clerk sent up a man to see to it, but he seemed unable to do much. I was glad when it was over. There was an odd incident, too, before the service. I went in rather early, and came upon two men carrying the parish bier back to its place under the tower. From what I overheard them saying, it appeared that it had been put out by mistake, by some one who was not there. I also saw the clerk busy folding up a moth-eaten velvet pall—not a sight for Christmas Day.

I dined soon after this, and then, feeling disinclined to go out, took my seat by the fire in the parlour, with the last number of Pickwick, which I had been saving up for some days. I thought I could be sure of keeping awake over this, but I turned out as bad as our friend Smith. I suppose it was half-past two when I was roused by a piercing whistle and laughing and talking voices outside in the market-place. It was a Punch and Judy—I had no doubt the one that my bagman had seen at W——. I was half delighted, half not—the latter because my unpleasant dream came back to me so vividly; but, anyhow, I determined to see it through, and I sent Eliza out with a crown-piece to the performers and a request that they would face my window if they could manage it.

The show was a very smart new one; the names of the proprietors, I need hardly tell you, were Italian, Foresta and Calpigi. The Toby dog was there, as I had been led to expect. All B——turned out, but did not obstruct my view, for I was at the large first-floor window and not ten yards away.

The play began on the stroke of a quarter to three by the church clock. Certainly it was very good; and I was soon relieved to find that the disgust my dream had given me for Punch’s onslaughts on his ill-starred visitors was only transient. I laughed at the demise of the Turncock, the Foreigner, the Beadle, and even the baby. The only drawback was the Toby dog’s developing a tendency to howl in the wrong place. Something had occurred, I suppose, to upset him, and something considerable: for, I forget exactly at what point, he gave a most lamentable cry, leapt off the foot board, and shot away across the market-place and down a side street. There was a stage-wait, but only a brief one. I suppose the men decided that it was no good going after him, and that he was likely to turn up again at night.

We went on. Punch dealt faithfully with Judy, and in fact with all comers; and then came the moment when the gallows was erected, and the great scene with Mr. Ketch was to be enacted. It was now that something happened of which I can certainly not yet see the import fully. You have witnessed an execution, and know what the criminal’s head looks like with the cap on. If you are like me, you never wish to think of it again, and I do not willingly remind you of it. It was just such a head as that, that I, from my somewhat higher post, saw in the inside of the show-box; but at first the audience did not see it. I expected it to emerge into their view, but instead of that there slowly rose for a few seconds an uncovered face, with an expression of terror upon it, of which I have never imagined the like. It seemed as if the man, whoever he was, was being forcibly lifted, with his arms somehow pinioned or held back, towards the little gibbet on the stage. I could just see the nightcapped head behind him. Then there was a cry and a crash. The whole show-box fell over backwards; kicking legs were seen among the ruins, and then two figures—as some said; I can only answer for one—were visible running at top speed across the square and disappearing in a lane which leads to the fields.

Of course everybody gave chase. I followed; but the pace was killing, and very few were in, literally, at the death. It happened in a chalk pit: the man went over the edge quite blindly and broke his neck. They searched everywhere for the other, until it occurred to me to ask whether he had ever left the market-place. At first everyone was sure that he had; but when we came to look, he was there, under the show-box, dead too.

But in the chalk pit it was that poor Uncle Henry’s body was found, with a sack over the head, the throat horribly mangled. It was a peaked corner of the sack sticking out of the soil that attracted attention. I cannot bring myself to write in greater detail.

I forgot to say the men’s real names were Kidman and Gallop. I feel sure I have heard them, but no one here seems to know anything about them.

I am coming to you as soon as I can after the funeral. I must tell you when we meet what I think of it all.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46439156)

Lansdale is 180 and this story may be the high water mark of splatterpunk short fiction. It’s probably at least a little overrated but it made a huge splash and holds up pretty well. It is proudly non PC which should soften the blow that its anti-racist elements may hold for autoadmit. Happy Juneteenth!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46441576)

https://www.rulit.me/books/hot-blood-tales-of-erotic-horror-antologiya-read-214306-65.html

Ray Garton is another of the splatterpunk-affiliated authors from the 'new horror' time period of about 1984-1994 that I love so much. Of particular interest to AutoAdmit is the fact that he wrote a horror novel called Lot Lizards about, I believe, vampire truckstop prostitutes.

For the moment, we're concerning ourselves with "Punishments," a tale inspired by Garton's upbringing within the 7th Day Adventist community. This one packs a wallop.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46444742)

180557975224689086324609547900

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46446644)

Charles L. Grant was often positioned as the opposite of the 'splatterpunks' I've shown enthusiasm for--a "shadowpunk." Grant was the major proponent, both through his own prolific work and his editorship of the Shadows anthology series, of 'quiet horror'--generally more restrained and traditional supernatural horror. Which is not to say that it's any less, well, horrifying. The following story got made into a Tales from the Darkside episode, which I haven't seen. But this is a well-done execution of a classic horror theme.

The half-moon porch was partially masked by untrimmed arms of fully green forsythia and juniper dying at the tips. What breeze there was in pressing heat only caused to quaver the languid drone of hunting bees. A spider, working steadily in the shaded corner of a peeling post and sloping roof, ambushed a fly while a mantis lurking on the lattice flanking the steps watched, praying. There were ants, marching, but the man on the bottom step ignored their parade, waiting instead for the sounds of anger to drain from the house. He rubbed his face, tugged at his chin, blaming the summer-long heat for the pots he heard slamming onto the stove, the crack of cabinet doors, the thud and hollow roll of an empty can on the linoleum floor. He hunched at the sharp noises and glanced up the block, wondering why none of the houses to the top of the gentle hill had emptied at the aftermath of the fight.

Sounds carried on a street like this, he thought, like the night the week before when Casper Waters had ordered his wife to pack and leave just before the late evening news. By the time she had limped with a suitcase to her car and had driven around the corner, not a porch was deserted, not a lawn with flickering flashlights carried by men ostensibly searching for lost tools. So now where are they, he wondered at the blank facades of Hawthorne Street. They're no better than I am. Why the hell don't they come out?

The milkman, he answered himself. They've figured the bogeyman milkman has done it again, and some of them believe it, and they're as afraid as I am.

A robin landed silently beneath one of the front yard's two ancient willows and cocked a brown eye toward the lawn.

"Gerry?"

It pecked twice and fluttered, hopping rapidly across the slate walk to the other side, where it pecked twice again and flew off.

"Gerry?"

He leaned backward, feeling the ragged edge of the step pressing against his spine, and tilted his head until his neck stretched close to choking. Ruth, her night-soft hair twisted back to a ponytail and wisping around her temples, looked down at him, trying to manipulate muscles that once made her smile. One softly tanned hand lay flat against her stomach, and he suddenly wished the baby would hurry up and show itself; his first daughter had kept Ruth slim, and had died before birth. He closed his eyes briefly, then stretched up a palm, holding it open until she covered it and came down beside him.

"They must be tired of men beating their wives," he said quietly, waving his free hand toward the street. "Not even old lady Greene's left her precious garden."

Nearly four years ago he would have been a father for the second time.

"Gerry, I'm sorry."

"Don't be silly, lover," he said. "You've nothing to be sorry for. I'm the one who started it. I guess I'm not used to such heat in September."

Smiling then, she rested her cheek against his damp shoulder, and they watched for an hour the shadows of the willows glide away from the house. A lawn mower sputtered; a gaggle of small girls shrieked by in pursuit of a dream; there were birds and clustering gnats, and a Siamese cat that disdained Gerry's enticements for the stalking of a jay. Then, explosive, a trio of boys sped past on bicycles, shouting and gesturing to one another before separating at the block's center, one to swerve widely and thump over the curb, mischievous bravado in the skid that came to a halt inches from the juncture of step and walk.

"Hi," he said, with Ruth's thin lips and Gerry's heavy jaw.

"I'm too young for a heart attack," Gerry said, noticing absently the clotted mud on the boy's jeans. "Put the bike away and wash up. We're going to eat; your mother's tired."

"She asleep?" his son whispered loudly.

"No," Ruth said, keeping her eyes shut. "I'm recovering from shock. One of these days you're going to hit these steps and wind up in pieces all over the porch." It should have been a joke, but the boy knew it wasn't. "Your father," she added, aware of the strained silence. "Your father just painted it last summer."

"It'll never happen," he said, laughing as he walked the bicycle around to the side of the house. "How much time?"

"Not enough time for you to call that girl," Gerry said. "Just wash up and get on out here. And change those pants."

"Maybe the milkman will bring me a new pair. I've sure messed this one up."

Ruth immediately sat up, preparing to stand, when Gerry grabbed her firmly by the wrist. "Relax," he said. "Sandy didn't mean anything by it. He doesn't know for sure. None of the kids do."

A joke, Gerry had thought in a long-ago May when the grass was new and the smell of it cut filled the neighborhood like meadowed incense. In addition to the family's usual order for milk, eggs, and butter, he had added at the bottom of the note a mocking request for a clean shirt when Ruth had forgotten to do one up for him the evening before. They had laughed and gone to bed, and the following morning a package lay beside the milkbox. Inside was a shirt the proper size and perfect color for the suit he had been planning to wear.

"Now this is the kind of milkman I like," he said, but Ruth, though laughing, was uneasy. "Oh, come on, woman," he said. "This guy obviously appreciates a joke. I'll just leave the box if it'll make you feel better, and I'll bet it will be gone the next time he comes. Okay?"

He did, and when the plain-wrapped package remained, he only shrugged and shoved the shirt to the bottom of his dresser drawer. Ruth asked him to get up early enough to give it back personally; she was wary of gifts from a man they'd never seen.

"Now you're being silly," he said, more stubbornly than he had intended. "I'll be damned if I'm going to get up before dawn just to give a stupid milkman back his shirt. Besides, it's a pretty nice one, you said so yourself. I'll just wait for the bill and see how much he nails me for it."

There was a week before the payment notice arrived, itemizing nothing more than the dairy products they'd consumed. Gerry shrugged again and decided the shirt was a present. He assumed it was a clever bit of maneuvering for a whopping Christmas gift but did not mind since he had planned after the first delivery to do it anyway. The Sweet Milk Dairy Farm was a firm he'd never heard of and decided was an independent farmer. Since he was willing to patronize the little guy over the big guy, especially one whose service provided unexpected benefits and the best-tasting buttermilk he'd had since he was a kid, he ignored Ruth's misgivings.

Shortly afterward, he needled Ruth into asking for something, and when she proved as intransigent in her refusals as he was in his insistence, he petulantly added a request for a tie to match the shirt. And when it came, in a plain-wrapped box, he laughed all day, shaking his head and telling his friends at the office what a tailor he had. Bolder then, he decided to ask for a suit to go with the shirt and tie; and this time, when the hand-tailored-to-fit-no-one-else sharkskin garment hung on a nail over the mailbox, he stopped laughing and began wondering what kind of racket he was getting himself into. Ruth, he noticed with some relief, had not said a word but placed the suit at the back of the closet, still wrapped in its clear plastic bag.

"You got to admit," he said at dinner one evening when Fritz Foster and the Yorks had joined them, "the man's a go-getter. I just wish he'd send me a bill or something. Ruth here thinks he might be peddling stolen goods. I've been thinking about asking around the police myself, to tell the truth."

Syd York, puff-cheeked and portly, glanced at his wife, who nodded, and Gerry's eyebrows raised in question. "Yeah, yeah," Syd admitted. "We've been picking up a few things here and there ourselves. Like you, we figured it was some kind of joke but … what the hell, right? I don't ask questions, and I get what I want. There was a set of golf clubs, a pair of shoes and … what else, dear?"

Aggie, her husband's twin, pointed at her mouth with her fork apologetically. Syd snapped his fingers. "Of course, how could I forget. Silverware! Aggie was complaining about the stuff we use in the kitchen, and when I got my clubs, she snuck in a note for the knives and forks. Damn, but didn't we get real silver."

Aggie grinned, and Ruth only stared at her coffee.

Fritz placed his utensils on his empty plate and leaned back, his fingers tucking inside of his belt. "I asked for money."

The women looked at him. Syd laughed, and Gerry only shook his head, not surprised that the block's resident investment broker would be the one to get practical with their dawn genie.

"How much?" he asked. "That is, if you don't mind me getting personal."

"Let's just say substantial, and I received every dime."

"Well, didn't you ask him where he got it?"

Fritz grinned at Ruth and shook his head. "I don't ask, my dear, I just take. The money was in large bills, and when I took it to the bank, it was good. As long as I don't see his face in the post office, what do I care how he operates, as long as he keeps up the good work."

"Besides," Syd added, "how could you know him? None of us have ever seen him."

It had been like moving into another country, Gerry recalled thinking when he and Ruth deserted the city and the routine of the neighborhood settled over them like a worn and welcome sweater. The mailman knocked at every door and knew all the streets by name; a policeman walked the beat three times daily and was covered by a patrol car whose brace of blue was as familiar as the century-old maple on the corner. Through traffic was negligible, and the street was covered with markings for baseball and hopscotch and spur-of-the-moment games comprehensible only to the young. And the milkman, who might have used a fly-bitten horse for all the inhabitants knew, passed each dawn, and only the early-risers and insomniacs heard the clatter of empty bottles as he left each back door more silent than shadow.

No one tried to wake early enough to see him; an unspoken warning about breaking their charm.

As June released summer, children, and, sporadically, husbands, Gerry thought he noticed increasing reluctance to try their luck again. Indeed, they all seemed rather guilty about suspecting their good fortune and began ordering more dairy products than most of them could use. Then Syd, after drinking himself into melancholy on Gerry's porch, asked for a raise, and two days later he was promoted.

"Now that was definitely a coincidence," Gerry said. "I can understand a guy trying to pick up an extra buck peddling goods from God knows where, but there's no way a stupid milkman can get a guy a raise like that."

Ruth immediately agreed, but her face was drawn, and he didn't learn until it was too late that she had finally contributed her own request. It was a Saturday morning when he backfired into the driveway and saw the sleek and gleaming automobile parked in front of the house. In the kitchen, Ruth was crying at the table. Confused, since there didn't seem to be any company in the house, he cradled her softly while she explained that she could no longer stand the daily wait for the call from the police saying he and their twelve-year-old car had died in the traffic.

"I thought about Syd, Gerry, and I was scared, but I put a note in, and this morning this man comes up with a receipt saying we won this car, and we have to pay the taxes but we have a week from this Monday, and I wish it was gone because I'm frightened."

Ridiculous, Gerry thought, coincidence. But nevertheless, he went to bed early and set the alarm for an hour before dawn, thinking the hell with the charm if it was going to do this to his wife.

In not entirely unpleasant contrast to the daylight's enervating heat, the morning was cold, and a residue wind from an evening thunderstorm hunted through the neighborhood for wood to creak and leaves to sail. Silently dressing in the clothes he'd left in the kitchen, Gerry sipped on hot coffee and rubbed his arms briskly. A groan from Sandy's sleep made him motionless, then he slipped a blanket over his shoulders and carefully opened the front door, picking out a chair on the far end of the porch where he could watch the walk that wound round the house to the back. He lighted a cigarette when he was settled, and he was startled by the flare of the match and shook it out quickly. He listened and heard nothing, watched and saw only the dark. The air was still damp, and he hugged himself tightly but would not walk, knowing the floorboards made near as much noise as the children playing in the afternoon. Finally, he tried to count gorillas to pass the time, and when he awakened, the sun was full in his eyes, and blinding.

Ruth was standing over him, smiling sadly. "Big brave watchdog," she said, offering him a steaming cup. "What were you going to do, sprinkle garlic over his horns or tackle him like the football star you thought you were?"

"Knock it off," Gerry said, feeling bad enough that his soap opera plan had failed without his wife telling him how foolish he looked wrapped in a blanket in the middle of August. "Did he leave anything?"

"Nothing."

"Well, damnit, he must have magicked me to sleep, or something. And I asked for a hundred dollars."

"Maybe he figures you were testing him," she said, leaning against the railing and huddling her arms under her breasts. "Maybe he doesn't like testing."

Gerry, suddenly angry because he was more than afraid, stood abruptly and started pacing. "You know, I should have listened to you, because you were right from the beginning. This guy is up to no good. I think I'll cancel the contract, and we can get our milk from the store from now on." Then he glared because his wife was laughing. "Well, what's so funny, damnit? I spent a miserable time out here, I could have maybe even caught double pneumonia, and you think that's funny?"

Shaking her head, Ruth pressed into his arms and quieted. "No, dear, I don't think it's funny. In fact, I think it's kind of sad. Things are just so different out here, I can't really explain it. The city was bad, but at least we knew where we stood. Here, we get a little boost from an invisible milkman and we go into melodramatic hysterics. Maybe country rules are different, I don't know, but there's something wrong with us."

"What?" Gerry said.

"I'm not sure," she said. "But this isn't right."

A short exclamation from Ruth and a dry flurry dragged him reluctantly back to the present where the world appeared to be turning black at the edges of his vision. Feeling a shudder from Ruth, he looked down and saw a praying mantis disappearing over the side of the steps with what looked like the remains of a spider in its jaws.

· · · · ·

"Do you want to change before we go out?" he asked quietly, wondering what was taking his son so long. Ruth shook her head slowly, and he was dismayed at the ridges of darkened skin beneath her eyes, cursing himself for not noticing her condition sooner. To adjust from the city's frantic years had been difficult enough when she was the proliferation of little girls Hawthorne Street had spawned, but the addition of the pregnancy in the century's worst summer was draining her of laughter; she had been claiming since the beginning that the baby hadn't felt right, and no amount of persuasion from husband or doctor could change her mind. And if I told her about the milkman, Gerry thought, she might literally kill me. Finally he eased a solicitous arm about her shoulders and drew from her a melancholy smile.

"I spoke with Syd on the golf course this morning," he said after calling for Sandy to get a move on. "We've decided to confront the dairy company—"

"Please, Gerry, I don't want to hear it."

"Oh, come on, Ruth, let's not start again, please? This milkman business is getting all out of hand. I don't see why you're letting it get to you like this. I mean, no one else is all that bothered."

"Well, maybe nobody else cares whether or not they're doing the morally right thing by letting this farce continue the way it has," she said angrily, shrugging away his arm. "I told you before, I don't want that man, beast, whatever the hell he is, coming to my house anymore. Suppose Sandy starts sneaking notes to him? Suppose the other kids find out this isn't a game? Suppose …" She turned to him, and he flinched at the hardened lines destroying her mouth. "Suppose one of you big brave men gets tired of his wife and asks for a new one? What happens then?" Her hands went protectively across her stomach, accusing him with their barrier, and he realized that she suspected what he had done.

Suddenly angry to camouflage his fear, he paced to the sidewalk and back, his hands fisted in his pockets. "What the hell are you talking about," he demanded as slowly and flatly as he could. "A few ties, a few shirts, one lousy set of golf clubs, and everyone—no, you go flying off the goddamned handle. Tell me, do you see anyone else on this block worried? Do you see the place crumbling in moral decay just because a milkman runs a shoddy little business on the side?"

"What about Syd's promotion and the new car?"

Gerry spun around, frustration at his wife's persistence threatening to erupt in shouting. "Syd has been with that firm for fifteen years, and a promotion was just plain due. I won that bloody car in a raffle at the office, and what the hell more explanation do you want anyway, Ruth?"

"The hundred dollars."

"For crying out loud, I didn't get it."

"Yes," she said. "Yes, you did."

Gerry stopped just as Sandy ran out the front door and flopped next to his mother, grinning. "Well?" he said. "We going or not?"

"In a minute," Gerry said to him before turning back to Ruth. "What are you talking about, Ruth? What hundred dollars?"

Ruth obviously did not want to continue the argument in front of their son, but Gerry's face, in an uncontrollable sneer, forced her to ignore him. "In the mail, while you were out with your precious friends on that precious golf course. A check from the insurance company. Overpayment."

Gerry froze, the sun suddenly chilling as he loosened and began waving his hands impotently in the air. "Nonsense," he said. "Pure nonsense."

"Then what about this baby?" she said, throwing the question like scalding water into his face. She stood then, swaying, crying silently, her head shaking away what answers he might have had. Sandy gaped before reaching up to her, but she only cried out and ran into the house.

"Dad?"

Gerry fumbled in his hip pocket, pulling out his wallet from which he yanked the first bill his fingers could grip. "Here," he said hoarsely, extending the money blindly, "take the bike and grab some hamburgers or something. I …" He looked helplessly at his son, who nodded and left without a word. When he returned with his bike, Gerry looked at him. "Your sister," he started but could not finish.

"I know, Dad," he said. "Today should have been her birthday, right?"

Gerry nodded mutely and stared as his son wheeled into the street and vanished around the corner; the boy seemed so old. He watched the empty sidewalks until his legs began to tremble; then he shuffled to the porch and sought out his chair in the far corner, remembering the night he had waited and slept, and the morning when Ruth had smiled and laughed at him. Though he didn't see how it was possible, he was positive Ruth knew he had asked the milkman for a daughter to replace a daughter. He had done it, he told himself every evening in freeflowing nightmares, because she needed it, because the two of them had been too afraid to try again only to renew the pain.

"Insane," he muttered to a hovering bee.

And did she know, he wondered, that Casper Waters had asked for his freedom and had found his wife naked in bed with Fritz Foster?

"Insane."

"I'll tell you," Syd had whispered confidentially at the course that morning, "If I had the nerve, I'd dump Aggie in a minute for a twenty-year-old girl without ten tons of fat."

Perversely, the temperature climbed as the sun fell, and perspiration on his neck trickled warmly to his chest and back. Cicadas passed him a childhood warning of the next day's heat, and he dozed, fitfully, swiping flies in his sleep, flicking a spider from his shoulder. Up the street there was music, and Sandy drifted back for permission to accept a last-minute invitation to a block party over the hill. Inside, the house was dark though he had heard Ruth stumble once in the living room.

Embryos floating through ink and white blood, their faces not his, not hers, blank and unfilled and waiting for a wish from unarmed despair.

There was a rattling far back in his dreams that twisted his head until he snapped awake and heard the footsteps on the walk.

"Hey," he said sleepily, and the footsteps halted. "I, uh, was just kidding about the daughter bit, you know." He shook his head but remained groggy and nodding, his speech slurred though he heard himself clearly. "I mean, let's face it, shirts are one thing, a kid's another, you know what I mean? Hey, you know what I mean?"

There was a silence before the clinking resumed and Gerry slept on, dreaming pink and white lace, until he awakened, the sun barely rising, to Sandy's shouts for help and Ruth's hysterical screaming.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46446629)

For at the center of what happened on that Sunday many years ago is blackness.

I can remember what led to the blackness and what followed after it—not clearly, but to a degree, as, waking vague and stunned from a powerful dream, we retain shreds of the dream though we remain incapable of making them coalesce into a whole; nor can we “see” them as we’d seen them during the dream. So I can summon back a memory of the black rectangle and I can superimpose depth upon it—for it could not be flat, like a canvas—but I have to admit defeat, I can’t “see” anything inside it. And this black rectangle is at the center of that Sunday in July 1969, and at the center of my girlhood.

Unless it was the end of my girlhood.

But how do I know, if I can’t remember?

The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the GrotesqueI was eleven years old. It was to be my first time ever—and it was to be the last time, too, though I didn’t know it then—that I was brought by my father’s older stepbrother Uncle Rebhorn to visit his new house and to go sailing on Lake St. Clair. Because of my cousin Audrey, who was like a sister of mine though I saw her rarely—I guessed this was why. Mommy told me, in a careful, neutral voice, that of course Audrey didn’t have any friends, or Darren either. I asked why and Mommy said they just didn’t, that’s all. That’s the price you pay for moving up too quickly in the world.

All our family lived in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck and had lived there for a long time. Uncle Rebhorn too, until the age of eighteen when he left and now, how many years later, he was a rich man—president of Rebhorn Auto Supply, Inc., and he’d married a well-to-do Grosse Pointe woman—and built his big, beautiful new house on Lake St. Clair everybody in the family talked about but nobody had actually seen. (Unless they’d seen the house from the outside? Not my parents, who were too proud to stoop to such a maneuver, but other relatives were said to have driven all the way to Grosse Pointe Shores to gape at Uncle Rebhorn’s pink mansion, as much as they could see of it from Buena Vista Drive. Uninvited, they dared not ring the buzzer at the wrought-iron gate shut and presumably locked at the foot of the drive.) Uncle Rebhorn whom I did not know at all had left Hamtramck far behind and was said to “scorn” his upbringing and his own family. There was a good deal of jealousy of course, and envy, but since everybody hoped secretly to be remembered by him sometime, and invited to share in his amazing good fortune—imagine, a millionaire in the family!—they were always sending cards, wedding invitations, announcements of birth and christenings and confirmations; sometimes even telegrams, since Uncle Rebhorn’s telephone number was unlisted and even his brothers didn’t know what it was. Daddy said, with that heavy, sullen droop to his voice we tried never to hear, if he wants to keep to himself that’s fine, I can respect that. We’ll keep to ourselves, too.

Then, out of nowhere, the invitation came to me. Just a telephone call from Aunt Elinor.

Mommy, who’d taken the call of course, and made the arrangements, didn’t want me to stay overnight. Aunt Elinor had suggested this, for it was a long drive, between forty-five minutes and an hour, and she’d said that Audrey would be disappointed, but Mommy said no and that was that.

So, that Sunday, how vividly I can remember!—Uncle Rebhorn, Aunt Elinor, Audrey, and Darren came to get me in Uncle Rebhorn’s shiny black Lincoln Continental, which rolled like a hearse up our street of woodframe asphalt-sided bungalows and drew stares from our neighbors. Daddy was gone—Daddy was not going to hang around, he said, on the chance of saying hello and maybe getting to shake hands with his stepbrother—but Mommy was with me, waiting at the front door when Uncle Rebhorn pulled up; but there were no words exchanged between Mommy and the Reb-horns, for Uncle Rebhorn merely tapped the car horn to signal their arrival, and Aunt Elinor, though she waved and smiled at Mommy, did not get out of the car, and made not the slightest gesture inviting Mommy to come out to speak with her. I ran breathless to the curb—I had a panicky vision of Uncle Rebhorn starting the big black car up and leaving me behind in Hamtramck—and climbed into the back seat, to sit beside Audrey. “Get in, hurry, we don’t have all day,” Uncle Rebhorn said in that gruff jovial cartoon voice some adults use with children, meant to be playful—or maybe not. Aunt Elinor cast me a frowning sort of smile over her shoulder and put her finger to her lips as if to indicate that I take Uncle Rebhorn’s remark in silence, as naturally I would. My heart was hammering with excitement just to be in such a magnificent automobile!

How fascinating the drive from our familiar neighborhood into the city of Detroit where there were so many black people on the streets and many of them, glimpsing Uncle Rebhorn’s Lincoln Continental, stared openly. We moved swiftly along Outer Drive and so to Eight Mile Road and east to Lake St. Clair where I had never been before, and I could not believe how beautiful everything was once we turned onto Lakeshore Drive. Now it was my turn to stare and stare. Such mansions on grassy hills facing the lake! so many tall trees, so much leafy space! so much sky! (The sky in Hamtramck was usually low and overcast and wrinkled like soiled laundry.) And Lake St. Clair which was a deep rich aqua like a painted lake! During most of the drive, Uncle Rebhorn was talking, pointing out the mansions of wealthy, famous people—I only remember “Ford”— “Dodge”— “Fisher”— “Wilson”—and Aunt Elinor was nodding and murmuring inaudibly and in the back seat, silent and subdued, Audrey and Darren and I sat looking out the tinted windows. I was a little hurt and disappointed that Audrey seemed to be ignoring me, and sitting very stiffly beside me; though I guessed that, with Uncle Rebhorn talking continuously, and addressing his remarks to the entire car, Audrey did not want to seem to interrupt him. Nor did Darren say a word to anyone.

At last, in Grosse Pointe Shores, we turned off Lakeshore Drive
 onto a narrow, curving road called Buena Vista, where the man
sions were smaller, though still mansions; Buena Vista led into a
 cul-de-sac bordered by tall, massive oaks and elms. At the very 
end, overlooking the lake, was Uncle Rebhorn’s house—as I’ve
 said, the most beautiful house I had ever seen up close, or would
 ever enter. Made of that pale-pink glimmering sandstone, with a 
graceful portico covered in English ivy, and four slender columns,
 and dozens of latticed windows reflecting the sun like smiles, the house looked like a storybook illustration. And beyond was the sky, a pure cobalt blue except for thin wisps of cloud. Uncle Rebhorn pressed a button in the dashboard of his car, and the wrought-iron gate swung open—like nothing I’d ever seen before in real life. The driveway too was like no driveway I knew, curving and dipping, and made of rosy-pink gravel, exquisite as miniature seashells. Tiny pebbles flew up beneath the car as Uncle Rebhorn drove in and the gate swung miraculously shut behind us.

How lucky Audrey was to live here, I thought, gnawing at my thumbnail as Mommy had told me a thousand times not to do. Oh I would die to live in such a house, I thought.

Uncle Rebhorn seemed to have heard me. “We think so, yes indeed,” he said. To my embarrassment, he was watching me through the rearview mirror and seemed to be winking at me. His eyes glittered bright and teasing. Had I spoken out loud without meaning to?—I could feel my face burn.

Darren, squeezed against the farther armrest, made a sniggering, derisive noise. He had not so much as glanced at me when I climbed into the car and had been sulky during the drive so I felt that he did not like me. He was a fattish, flaccid-skinned boy who looked more like twelve than fourteen; he had Uncle Rebhorn’s lard-colored complexion and full, drooping lips, but not Uncle Rebhorn’s shrewd-glittering eyes, his were damp and close-set and mean. Whatever Darren meant by his snigger, Uncle Rebhorn heard it above the hum of the air conditioner—was there anything Uncle Rebhorn could not hear?—and said in a low, pleasant, warning voice, “Son, mind your manners! Or somebody else will mind them for you.”

Darren protested, “I didn’t say anything, sir. I—”

Quickly, Aunt Elinor intervened, “Darren.”

“—I’m sorry, sir. I won’t do it again.”

Uncle Rebhorn chuckled as if he found this very funny and in some way preposterous. But by this time he had pulled the magnificent black car up in front of the portico of the house and switched off the ignition. “Here we are!”

But to enter Uncle Rebhorn’s sandstone mansion, it was strange, and a little scary, how we had to crouch. And push and squeeze our shoulders through the doorway. Even Audrey and me, who were the smallest. As we approached the big front door which was made of carved wood, with a beautiful gleaming brass American eagle, its dimensions seemed to shrink; the closer we got, the smaller the door got, reversing the usual circumstances where of course as you approach an object it increases in size, or gives that illusion. “Girls, watch your head,” Uncle Rebhorn cautioned, wagging his forefinger. He had a brusque laughing way of speaking as if most subjects were jokes or could be made to seem so by laughing. But his eyes bright as chips of glass were watchful and without humor.

How could this be?—Uncle Rebhorn’s house that was so spacious-seeming on the outside was so cramped, and dark, and scary on the inside?

“Come on, come on! It’s Sunday, it’s the Sabbath, we haven’t got all day!” Uncle Rebhorn cried, clapping his hands.

We were in a kind of tunnel, crowded together. There was a strong smell of something sharp and hurtful like ammonia; at first I couldn’t breathe, and started to choke. Nobody paid any attention to me except Audrey who tugged at my wrist, whispering, “This way, June—don’t make Daddy mad.” Uncle Rebhorn led the way, followed by Darren, then Aunt Elinor, Audrey and me, walking on our haunches in a squatting position; the tunnel was too low for standing upright and you couldn’t crawl on your hands and knees because the floor was littered with shards of glass. Why was it so dark? Where were the windows I’d seen from the outside? “Isn’t this fun! We’re so glad you could join us today, June!” Aunt Elinor murmured. How awkward it must have been for a woman like Aunt Elinor, so prettily dressed in a tulip-yellow summer knit suit, white high-heeled pumps and stockings, to make her way on her haunches in such a cramped space!—yet she did it uncomplaining, and with a smile.

Strands of cobweb brushed against my face. I was breathing so hard and in such a choppy way it sounded like sobbing which scared me because I knew Uncle Rebhorn would be offended. Several times Audrey squeezed my wrist so hard it hurt, cautioning me to be quiet; Aunt Elinor poked at me, too. Uncle Rebhorn was saying, cheerfully, “Who’s hungry?—I’m starving,” and again, in a louder voice, “Who’s hungry?” and Darren echoed, “I’m starving!” and Uncle Rebhorn repeated bright and brassy as a TV commercial, “WHO’S HUNGRY?” and this time Aunt Elinor, Darren, Audrey, and I echoed in a chorus, “I’M STARVING!” Which was the correct reply, Uncle Rebhorn accepted it with a happy chuckle.

Now we were in a larger space, the tunnel had opened out onto a room crowded with cartons and barrels, stacks of lumber and tar pots, workmen’s things scattered about. There were two windows in this room but they were small and square and crudely criss-crossed by strips of plywood; there were no windowpanes, only fluttering strips of cheap transparent plastic that blocked out most of the light. I could not stop shivering though Audrey pinched me hard, and cast me an anxious, angry look. Why, when it was a warm summer day outside, was it so cold inside Uncle Rebhorn’s house? Needles of freezing air rose from the floorboards. The sharp ammonia odor was mixed with a smell of food cooking which made my stomach queasy. Uncle Rebhorn was criticizing Aunt Elinor in his joky angry way, saying she’d let things go a bit, hadn’t she?—and Aunt Elinor was frightened, stammering and pressing her hand against her bosom, saying the interior decorator had promised everything would be in place by now. “Plenty of time for Christmas, eh?” Uncle Rebhorn said sarcastically. For some reason, both Darren and Audrey giggled.

Uncle Rebhorn had a thick, strong neck and his head swiveled alertly and his eyes swung onto you before you were prepared— those gleaming, glassy-glittering eyes. There was a glisten to the whites of Uncle Rebhorn’s eyes I had never seen in anyone before and his pupils were dilated and black. He was a stocky man, he panted and made a snuffling noise, his wide nostrils flattened with deep, impatient inhalations. His pale skin was flushed, especially in the cheeks; there was a livid, feverish look to his face. He was dressed for Sunday in a red-plaid sport coat that fitted him tightly in the shoulders, and a white shirt with a necktie, and navy blue linen trousers that had picked up some cobwebs on our way in. Uncle Rebhorn had a glowing bald spot at the crown of his head over which he had carefully combed wetted strands of hair; his cheeks were bunched like muscles as he smiled. And smiled. How hard it was to look at Uncle Rebhorn, his eyes so glittering, and his smile—! When I try to remember him now miniature slices of blindness skid toward me █████ in my vision, I have to blink carefully to regain my full sight. And why am I shivering, I must put an end to such neurotic behavior, what other purpose to this memoir?—what other purpose to any effort of the retrieval of memory that gives such pain?

Uncle Rebhorn chuckled deep in his throat and wagged a forefinger at me, “Naughty girl, I know what you’re thinking,” he said, and at once my face burned, I could feel my freckles standing out like hot inflamed pimples, though I did not know what he meant. Audrey, beside me, giggled again nervously, and Uncle Rebhorn shook his forefinger at her, too, “And you, honeybunch—for sure, Daddy knows you.” He made a sudden motion at us the way one might gesture at a cowering dog to further frighten it, or to mock its fear; when, clutching at each other, Audrey and I flinched away, Uncle Rebhorn roared with laughter, raising his bushy eyebrows as if he was puzzled, and hurt. “Mmmmm girls, you don’t think I’m going to hit you, do you?”

Quickly Audrey stammered, “Oh no, Daddy—no.”

I was so frightened I could not speak at all. I tried to hide behind Audrey, who was shivering as badly as I was.

“You don’t think I’m going to hit you, eh?” Uncle Rebhorn said, more menacingly; he swung his fist playfully in my direction and a strand of hair caught in his signet ring and I squealed with pain which made him laugh, and relent a little. Watching me, Darren and Audrey and even Aunt Elinor laughed. Aunt Elinor tidied my hair and again pressed a finger to her lips as if in warning.

I am not a naughty girl I wanted to protest and now too I am not to blame.

For Sunday dinner we sat on packing cases and ate from planks balanced across two sawhorses. A dwarfish olive-skinned woman with a single fierce eyebrow waited on us, wearing a white rayon uniform and a hairnet. She set plates down before us sulkily, though with Uncle Rebhorn, who kept up a steady teasing banter with her, calling her “honey” and “sweetheart,” she did exchange a smile. Aunt Elinor pretended to notice nothing, encouraging Audrey and me to eat. The dwarf-woman glanced at me with a look of contempt, guessing I was a poor relation I suppose, her dark eyes raked me like a razor.

Uncle Rebhorn and Darren ate hungrily. Father and son hunched over the improvised table in the same posture, bringing their faces close to their plates and, chewing, turning their heads slightly to the sides, eyes moist with pleasure. “Mmmmm!—good,” Uncle Rebhorn declared. And Darren echoed, “—good.” Aunt Elinor and Audrey were picking at their food, managing to eat some of it, but I was nauseated and terrified of being sick to my stomach. The food was lukewarm, served in plastic containers. There were coarse slabs of tough, bright pink meat curling at the edges and leaking blood, and puddles of corn pudding, corn kernels and slices of onion and green pepper in a runny pale sauce like pus. Uncle Rebhorn gazed up from his plate, his eyes soft at first, then regaining some of their glassy glitter when he saw how little his wife and daughter and niece had eaten. “Say, what’s up? ‘Waste not, want not.’ Remember”—he reached over and jabbed my shoulder with his fork—”this is the Sabbath, and keep it holy. Eh?”

Aunt Elinor smiled encouragingly at me. Her lipstick was crimson-pink and glossy, a permanent smile; her hair was a shining pale blond like a helmet. She wore pretty pale-pink pearls in her ears and a matching necklace around her neck. In the car, she had seemed younger than my mother, but now, close up, I could see hairline creases in her skin, or actual cracks, as in glazed pottery; there was something out of focus in her eyes though she was looking directly at me. “June, dear, there is a hunger beyond hunger,” she said softly, “—and this is the hunger that must be reached.”

Uncle Rebhorn added, emphatically, “And we’re Americans. Remember that.”

Somehow, I managed to eat what was on my plate. I am not a naughty girl but a good girl: see!

For dessert, the dwarf-woman dropped bowls in front of us containing a quivering amber jelly. I thought it might be apple jelly, apple jelly with cinnamon, and my mouth watered in anticipation, we were to eat with spoons but my spoon wasn’t sharp enough to cut into the jelly; and the jelly quivered harder, and wriggled in my bowl. Seeing the look on my face, Uncle Rebhorn asked pleasantly, “What’s wrong now, Junie?” and I mumbled, “—I don’t know, sir,” and Uncle Rebhorn chuckled, and said, “Hmmmm! You don’t think your dessert is a jellyfish, do you?”—roaring with delight, as the others laughed, less forcefully, with him.

For that was exactly what it was: a jellyfish. Each of us had one, in our bowls. Warm and pulsing with life and fear radiating from it like raw nerves.

█████ █████ flicking toward me, slivers of blindness. Unless fissures in the air itself?—fibrillations like those at the onset of sleep the way dreams begin to skid toward you—at you—into you—and there is no escape for the dream is you.

Yes I would like to cease my memoir here. I am not accustomed to writing, to selecting words with such care. When I speak, I often stammer but there is a comfort in that—nobody knows, what comfort!—for you hold back what you must say, hold it back until it is fully your own and cannot surprise you. I am not to blame, I am not deserving of hurt neither then nor now but do I believe this, even if I can succeed in making you believe it?

How can an experience belong to you if you cannot remember it? That is the extent of what I wish to know. If I cannot remember it, how then can I summon it back to comprehend it, still less to change it. And why am I shivering, when the sun today is poison-hot burning through the foliage dry and crackling as papier-mache yet I keep shivering shivering shivering if there is a God in heaven please forgive me.

After Sunday dinner we were to go sailing. Uncle Rebhorn had a beautiful white sailboat bobbing at the end of a dock, out there in the lake which was a rich deep aqua-blue scintillating with light. On Lake St. Clair on this breezy summer afternoon there were many sailboats, speedboats, yachts. I had stared at them in wondering admiration as we’d driven along the Lakeshore Drive. What a dazzling sight like nothing in Hamtramck!

First, though, we had to change our clothes. All of us, said Uncle Rebhorn, have to change into bathing suits.

Audrey and I changed in a dark cubbyhole beneath a stairway. This was Audrey’s room and nobody was supposed to come inside to disturb us but the door was pushing inward and Audrey whimpered, “No, no Daddy,” laughing nervously and trying to hold the door shut with her arm. I was a shy child, when I had to change for gym class at school I turned my back to the other girls and changed as quickly as I could, even showing my panties to another girl was embarrassing to me, my face burned with a strange wild heat. Uncle Rebhorn was on the other side of the door, we could hear his harsh labored breathing. His voice was light, though, when he asked, “Hmmmm—d’you naughty little girls need any help getting your panties down? or your bathing suits on?” “No, Daddy, please,” Audrey said. Her eyes were wide and stark in her face and she seemed not aware of me any longer but in a space of her own, trembling, hunched over. I was scared, too, but thinking why don’t we joke with Uncle Rebhorn, he wants us to joke with him, that’s the kind of man he is, what harm could he do us?—the most any adult had ever done to me by the age of eleven was Grandpa tickling me a little too hard so I’d screamed with laughter and kicked but that was years ago when I’d been a baby practically, and while I had not liked being tickled it was nothing truly painful or scary—was it? I tried to joke with my uncle through the door, I was giggling saying, “No no no, you stay out of here, Uncle Rebhorn! We don’t need your help no we don’t!” There was a moment’s silence, then Uncle Rebhorn chuckled appreciatively, but there came then suddenly the sound of Aunt Elinor’s raised voice, and we heard a sharp slap, and a cry, a female cry immediately cut off. And the door ceased its inward movement, and Audrey shoved me whispering, “Hurry up! You dumb dope, hurry up!” So quickly— safely—we changed into our bathing suits.

It was a surprise, how by chance Audrey’s and my bathing suits looked alike, and us like twin sisters in them: both were pretty shades of pink, with elasticized tops that fitted tight over our tiny, flat breasts. Mine had emerald green sea horses sewn onto the bodice and Audrey’s had little ruffles, the suggestion of a skirt.

Seeing my face, which must have shown hurt, Audrey hugged me with her thin, cold arms. I thought she would say how much she liked me, I was her favorite cousin, she was happy to see me—but she didn’t say anything at all.

Beyond the door Uncle Rebhorn was shouting and clapping his hands.

“C’mon move your sweet little asses! Chop-chop! Time’s a-wastin! There’ll be hell to pay if we’ve lost the sun!”

Audrey and I crept out in our bathing suits and Aunt Elinor grabbed us by the hands making an annoyed “tsking” sound and pulling us hurriedly along. We had to push our way out of a small doorway—no more than an opening, a hole, in the wall—and then we were outside, on the back lawn of Uncle Rebhorn’s property. What had seemed like lush green grass from a distance was synthetic grass, the kind you see laid out in flat strips on pavement. The hill was steep down to the dock, as if a giant hand was lifting it behind us, making us scramble. Uncle Rebhorn and Darren were trotting ahead, in matching swim trunks—gold trimmed in blue. Aunt Elinor had changed into a single-piece white satin bathing suit that exposed her bony shoulders and sunken chest, it was shocking to see her. She called out to Uncle Rebhorn that she wasn’t feeling well—the sun had given her a migraine headache—sailing would make the headache worse—could she be excused?—but Uncle Rebhorn shouted over his shoulder, “You’re coming with us, God damn you! Why did we buy this frigging sailboat except to enjoy it?” Aunt Elinor winced, and murmured, “Yes, dear,” and Uncle Rebhorn said, snorting, with a wink at Audrey and me, “Hmmm! It better be ‘yes, dear,’ you stupid cow-cunt.”

By the time we crawled out onto the deck of the sailboat a chill wind had come up, and in fact the sun was disappearing like something being sucked down a drain. It was more like November than July, the sky heavy with clouds like stained concrete. Uncle Rebhorn said sullenly, “—bought this frigging sailboat to enjoy it for God’s sake—for the family and that means all the family.” The sailboat was lurching in the choppy water like a living, frantic thing as Uncle Rebhorn loosed us from the dock and set sail. “First mate! Look sharp! Where the hell are you, boy? Move your ass!”— Uncle Rebhorn kept up a constant barrage of commands at poor Darren who scampered to obey them, yanking at ropes that slipped from his fingers, trying to swing the heavy, sodden mainsail

around. The wind seemed to come from several directions at once and the sails flapped and whipped helplessly. Darren did his best but he was clumsy and ill-coordinated and terrified of his father. His pudgy face had turned ashen, and his eyes darted wildly about; his gold swim trunks, which were made of a shiny material like rayon, fitted him so tightly a loose belt of fat protruded over the waistband and jiggled comically as, desperate to follow Uncle Rebhorn’s instructions, Darren fell to one knee, pushed himself up, slipped and fell again, this time onto his belly on the slippery deck. Uncle Rebhorn, naked but for his swimming trunks and a visored sailor’s cap jammed onto his head, shouted mercilessly, “Son, get up. Get that frigging sail to the wind or it’s mutiny!”

The sailboat was now about thirty feet from the safety of the dock, careening and lurching in the water, which was nothing like the painted-aqua water I had seen from shore; it was dark, metallic-gray and greasy, and very cold. Winds howled about us. There was no cabin in the sailboat, all was exposed, and Uncle Rebhorn had taken the only seat. I was terrified the sailboat would sink, or I would be swept off to drown in the water by wild, frothy waves washing across the deck. I had never been in any boat except rowboats with my parents in the Hamtramck Park lagoon. “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t it! Sailing is the most exciting—” Aunt Elinor shouted at me, with her wide fixed smile, but Uncle Rebhorn, seeing my white, pinched face, interrupted, “Nobody’s going to drown today, least of all you. Ungrateful little brat!”

Aunt Elinor poked me, and smiled, pressing a finger to her lips. Of course, Uncle Rebhorn was just teasing.

For a few minutes it seemed as if the winds were filling our sails in the right way for the boat moved in a single unswerving direction. Darren was holding for dear life to a rope, to keep the mainsail steady. Then suddenly a dazzling white yacht sped by us, three times the size of Uncle Rebhorn’s boat, dreamlike out of the flying spray, and in its wake Uncle Rebhorn’s boat shuddered and lurched; there was a piercing, derisive sound of a horn—too late; the prow of the sailboat went under, freezing waves washed across the deck, the boat rocked crazily. I’d lost sight of Audrey and Aunt Elinor and was clutching a length of frayed rope with both hands, to keep myself from being swept overboard. How I whimpered with fear and pain! This is your punishment, now you know you must be bad. Uncle Rebhorn crouched at the prow of the boat, his eyes glittering in his flushed face, screaming commands at Darren who couldn’t move fast enough to prevent the mainsail from suddenly swinging around, skimming over my head and knocking Darren into the water.

Uncle Rebhorn yelled, “Son! Son!” With a hook at the end of a long wooden pole he fished about in the sudsy waves for my cousin, who sank like a bundle of sodden laundry; then surfaced again as a wave struck him from beneath and buoyed him upward; then sank again, this time beneath the lurching boat, his arms and legs flailing. I stared aghast, clutching at my rope. Audrey and Aunt Elinor were somewhere behind me, crying, “Help! help!” Uncle Rebhorn ignored them, cursing as he scrambled to the other side of the boat, and swiping the hook in the water until he snagged something and, blood vessels prominent as angry worms in his face, hauled Darren out of the water and onto the swaying deck. The hook had caught my cousin in the armpit, and streams of blood ran down his side. Was Darren alive?—I stared, I could not tell. Aunt Elinor was screaming hysterically. With deft, rough hands Uncle Rebhorn laid his son on his back, like a fat, pale fish, and stretched the boy’s arms and legs out, and straddled Darren’s hips and began to rock in a quickened rhythmic movement and to squeeze his rib cage, squeeze and release! squeeze and release! until driblets of foamy water and vomit began to be expelled from Darren’s mouth, and, gasping and choking, the boy was breathing again. Tears of rage and sorrow streaked Uncle Rebhorn’s flushed face. “You disappoint me, son! Son, you disappoint me! I, your dad who gave you life—you disappoint me!”

A sudden prankish gust of wind lifted Uncle Rebhorn’s sailor cap off his head and sent it flying and spinning out into the misty depths of Lake St. Clair.

I have been counseled not to retrieve the past where it is █████ blocked by █████ like those frequent attacks of “visual impairment” (not blindness, the neurologist insists) but have I not a right to my own memories? to my own past? Why should that right be taken from me?

What are you frightened of, Mother, my children ask me, sometimes in merriment, what are you frightened of?—as if anything truly significant, truly frightening, could have happened, or could have been imagined to have happened, to me.

So I joke with them, I tease them saying, “Maybe—you!”

For in giving birth to them I suffered █████ slivers of █████ too, which for the most part I have forgotten █████ as all wounds heal and pain is lost in time—isn’t it?

What happened on that lost Sunday in July 1969 in Uncle Rebhorn’s house in Grosse Pointe Shores is a true mystery never comprehended by the very person (myself) who experienced it. For at the center is an emptiness ███████ black rectangular emptiness █████ skidding toward me like a fracturing of the air and it is ticklish too, my shivering turns convulsive on the brink of wild leaping laughter. I recall the relief that my cousin Darren did not drown and I recall the relief that we returned to the dock which was swaying and rotted but did not collapse, held firm as Uncle Rebhorn cast a rope noose to secure the boat. I know that we returned breathless and excited from our outing on Lake St. Clair and that Aunt Elinor said it was too bad no snapshots had been taken to commemorate my visit, and Uncle Rebhorn asked where the Polaroid camera was, why did Aunt Elinor never remember it for God’s sake, their lives and happy times flying by and nobody recording them. I know that we entered the house and once again in the dark cubbyhole that was my cousin Audrey’s room beneath the stairs we were changing frantically from our bathing suits which were soaking wet into our dry clothes and this time Aunt Elinor, still less Audrey, could not prevent the door from pushing open ██████████ crying “Daddy, no!” and “No, please, Daddy!” until I was crying too and laughing screaming as a man’s rough fingers ████ ran over my bare ribs bruising ██████ the frizzy-wiry hairs of his chest and belly tickling my face until what was beneath us which I had believed to be a floor fell away suddenly █████ dissolving like █████ water I was not crying, I was not fighting I was a good girl: see? █████████ ████████████ ████████████████████████ ███████████████████████ ████████████████████████ ████████████████████████ waking then like floating to the surface of a dream as again the tiny pink pebbles exquisite as seashells were being thrown up beneath the chassis of the shiny black car, and Uncle Rebhorn rosy-faced and fresh from his shower in crisp sport shirt, Bermuda shorts and sandals drove me the long long distance back to Hamtramck away from Lake St. Clair and the mansions like castles on their grassy hills, on this return ride nobody else was with us, not Audrey, not Aunt Elinor, not Darren, only Uncle Rebhorn and me, his favorite niece he said, beside him in the passenger’s seat in the air-conditioned cool inside the tinted windows through which, at the foot of the graveled drive, as the wrought-iron gate swung open by magic, I squinted back with my inflamed eyes at the luminous sandstone mansion with the latticed windows, the portico covered in English ivy, the slender columns like something in a children’s storybook, it was the most beautiful house I had ever seen up close, or was ever to enter in my life. And nothing would change that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46448609)

http://www.williamflew.com/mars.pdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46452958)

It's a good collection and many of the stories have stuck with me through the years. Here's one such story, that, as mentioned, is dedicated to the memory of the Titan Sub.

TERRY HEAVED the last shovelful of dirt aside, then jumped into the three-foot hole he and Sara had just dug. “Do you think it should be deeper?” he asked, looking up at her.

It’s deep enough,” she said and dropped her shovel. In the moonlight that filtered through the pine trees, he thought he saw her shiver.

“You’re right,” he said. “Deep enough.” He scrambled out of the hole again. “Ready for the box now?” he asked.

“I don’t know about this,” Sara said suddenly. “Now that we’ve dug the hole and I can actually see how long and deep it is….”

“I know,” he said grinning. “It makes it real.”

I was simple, really—if he could remain calm and under control while buried alive for eight hours, he could handle anything. Strong people didn’t take the easy road. They were always testing themselves, building their inner power. Eight hours wasn’t all that long if you were mentally tough.

In a sense, the experience would be a controlled nightmare. He would tape-record his reactions. When it was all over, he would play the tapes in the comfort of his bedroom and coolly analyze the experience.

For weeks, he had planned every detail, right down to the heavy rubber tubing that would be his lifeline. He needed Sara’s help, of course. Even Houdini had had an assistant. No one was more reliable than Sara. She would dig him up on schedule—8:00 A.M. sharp.

Even if there was some unforeseen delay, there would be enough water if he rationed it. And there would always be plenty of air coming through the tube.

At the cemetery gate, Terry checked everything a final time—blankets, a full canteen, the rubber tubing, a pillow, a cassette recorder and a tape, and a homemade, six-foot pine box. First, they carried the box and a lantern to the grave. Terry noticed with some interest that he would be lying close to Rufus James, 1850-1899, according to the tombstone. Of all the graves nearby, that one alone seemed to have been tended recently.

“Shouldn’t you have some sandwiches or something?” Sara asked after they carried the rest of the gear to the newly dug grave.

“No,” Terry said, “it’s not exactly a picnic.” He smiled at Sara, but she just looked away.

A cloud bank moved in and switched off the moon. Suddenly the night was very dark. As Sara watched Terry light a lantern, a new thought occurred to her.

“What if I stay here, right in the truck, just to make sure you’re all right?”

“I’m going to be fine. I’ll probably sleep most of the night away.”

“Still, I’d feel a lot better if you’d let me stay and watch.”

“Watch for what? This cemetery is a forgotten place. No one comes here. I’ve checked it out for two weeks.”

“Right. All part of your perfect plan,” she said.

“Sara, you don’t get it. I want total isolation. It’s a very important part of the experiment. Knowing you were here would wreck everything. A crowd might as well hang around and dig me up every five minutes to see how I’m doing.

Sara sighed. “Do you think the air tube is wide enough?”

“Quit worrying, will you? We tried it above ground, and it worked fine. Why should it be any different with a foot of dirt over it?”

“I can’t believe we’re really doing this,” Sara said as Terry spread the blankets in the pine box. “We need a couple of those Houdini straitjackets.”

“You think it’s crazy, and I think it’s an exploration.”

“Of what?”

“Of me. Of who I am. I’m not like anyone else. I’m different.”

That much Sara agreed with. Terry wasn’t like other people. Maybe that was why she found him so attractive. Being with him was like taking a journey and not knowing what would be around the next bend.

He climbed down into the box. There was just enough room for him to stretch. “OK, now hand me the rest of the stuff.”

Sara handed him the canteen of water, the pillow, the portable tape player. Then she helped him push the stiff rubber tube snugly into the hole in the lid. It was a perfect fit. No dirt could come in around it.

“That’s it, I guess, Terry said. “I’ll see you at eight o’clock.”

Sara leaned over him. “it’s not too late to change your mind,” she said.

“I can’t do this without you Sara. Don’t let me down. I’m counting on you.”

She nodded grimly, then tried to smile. “See you in the morning.”

Terry grinned. “You’d better—or I’ll never speak to you again.”

“That’s not funny!”

Lying there, looking at the moonless sky, Terry felt a kinship with anyone who had ever explored anything first—the first person to submerge in a submarine, the first person to crawl into a space capsule. Now it was his turn to explore the unknown.

Sara carefully placed the lid on top of the box and hammered a nail into each corner, leaving part of the nailhead sticking up for easy removal. Terry had said four would be enough. The air hose stuck out about a foot above ground level. As she shoveled dirt over the box, Sara was careful that no dirt got into the tube opening.

When she had finished, she knelt and spoke into the tube. “Are you OK?” She put her ear to the tube, listening. When there was no answer, she started to panic. “Terry,” she yelled, “say something!”

The answer came at once. “Sweet dreams, Sara.”

Sara knelt, shaking, near the fresh mound of dirt. Clouds had completely blotted the sky now, and the moon was hidden. She looked at the tombstones bathed in pale lantern light. For the first time, she began to feel a sense of violating sacred ground.

She waited a few minutes longer, listening in case Terry had changed his mind after all. But the cemetery was silent. Not even the wind was blowing now. She turned off the lantern and started toward the truck.

She sat in the cab and stared at the cemetery. The darkness had swallowed the tombstones. From where she sat, it was impossible to see that anything had been disturbed. Once more she considered spending the night in the truck. Terry would never know she was there. But it was Saturday night, and her parents expected her home by 11:00. Besides, Terry had turned down the idea, and that was that. No way could she betray his trust.

She turned on the motor and, after a final glance at the cemetery, drove toward town.

Terry lay in the black confinement, sweating from every pore. Mistake number one—not figuring on the heat. There was enough air to breathe but not enough to evaporate the perspiration. He kept brushing the sleeve of his sweater across his forehead and eyes.

He tried fanning himself. As long as he kept it up, things were a little better. When he stopped, he was right back where he started. He pressed the button on his watch, and the little red numerals sprang at him in the blackness. 12:10. Only an hour gone? Incredible.

He spoke into the recorder: “Twelve-ten, and all is not well.”

He was startled by his voice, so hollow and alien. “The heat is miserable. I’ve got to squirm out of these clothes as much as possible. The air smells pretty bad by now. I can breathe well enough, but I’m melting. More later.”

A sudden sharp cramp in his right calf made him rise up quickly and crack his forehead on the lid of the box. It hurt some, but the pain in his calf was the main concern. He tried to massage the aching muscle but couldn’t reach it. After a time, the pain slowly began to ebb away.

Sweat ran in rivulets, stinging his eyes and puddling up in his ears. Mistake number two—wrong clothing. Outside, frost crystals might be forming on the blades of grass. Outside, he might have needed the sweater, the blankets.

Twisting back and forth, he tried to get out of his sweater and T-shirt. In his struggle, he used the air too quickly, and he started to black out. Giving up, he lay motionless until he slowly regained his senses. His head began to throb where he had hit it, and his drenched clothes hung to his body like leeches.

Sara couldn’t sleep. She had been foolish to think she could put Terry out of her mind. She could still see him, lying in that awful box, looking up at her and the moon. A dozen what-ifs ran through her mind. What if he didn’t have enough air after all? What if the truck broke down as she was driving to the cemetery? What if her parents thought up some dumb chore she had to do before she left the house in the morning?

The clock on her bed table read 2:30. Impossible! She cried silently. She got out of bed and looked out her window. Dawn was still endless hours away.

What if he had panicked and was shouting for her?

If she took the truck now, her parents would surely hear her. She had to wait until at least 6:00. She sat on the edge of her bed, then lay back, staring at the black ceiling of her room.

Terry looked at his watch again through watery eyes. The tiny numerals dance and wavered like a red mirage—2:45. A little more than five hours. He mustn’t struggle. Getting enough air had become a serious problem.

Or was it a problem? Maybe the heat and the sweating and the suffocating lack of air were only in his imagination. Still, it seemed as if the box had somehow shrunk. Mistake number three—he hadn’t realized he was claustrophobic.

He reached for the canteen and took a long drink, then cursed himself for spilling some of the precious water over his chin and neck. Still, the water gave him some relief. How stupid to misjudge the amount of heat his body would generate inside a closed box. He tried to think of Houdini, how his mind had controlled his emotions while he calmly had gone about his escape. Then something occurred to him. Houdini had died in a freak accident—someone had punched him in the stomach and burst his appendix.

What if Sara doesn’t come? What if some freak accident happens to her? He pushed the button on his recorder, but the red numerals on his watch were somersaulting again. “I don’t know what time it is. I must not move.”

He wasn’t sure why he shouldn’t move. Something about air. His mind was confused. The point of the whole experiment was escaping him. Only one thought filled him.

“Sara?” he called hoarsely into the recorder. “I’m counting on you.”

Edith James drove to Belden Park in her old Ford with her poodle, Misty, and a large potted mum to put on the grave of her grandfather Rufus. She had risen before dawn, as always, and by the time she reached the old graveyard at 6:00 A.A., the first light of day was filtering through the pine trees. She loved this part of the day best of all, and she wanted to get things done early so she could get back to study her Bible lesson for the class before church.

When she was four, her father had died in World War I and had been buried somewhere in France. She’d never really known him, but she had a vague memory of him throwing her laughing into the air on her third birthday. She could not bring flowers to her father, but she could bring them to her grandfather—and in that way honor the man whose memory she would always cherish.

She drove her car to the end of the dirt road and parked near the gate. “All right, Misty,” she said as she opened the door, “go have yourself a good run.” Misty leaped outward and immediately began sniffing a small bush. His mistress primped for a second in the rearview mirror, patting her gray hair carefully into place. Then she took the plant and followed the dog into the cemetery.

She went straight to the grave, the one she visited every two months to keep it neat and tidy. She placed the plant with its pretty orange blossoms in front of Rufus’s stone and was just beginning to say a prayer when she thought she heard a faint voice.

Turning her head, she saw the freshly dug grave. Misty was sniffing curiously, pawing a bit of the bare dirt. No one had been buried in the cemetery for years, Edith knew. She shook her head sadly. “Must be some pauper’s grave,” she spoke aloud. “Someone with no money buried here secretly during the night.”

Again, she thought she heard a voice. She decided it must have been Misty whining in excitement or just her tired old ears playing tricks on her again. Then she saw the tube coming from the ground near the head of the grave. “What a pathetic little flower holder,” she sighed. “And so empty. Well, whoever you are, you won’t be forgotten today.”

Terry had drifted in and out of frightening dreams all through the night. His throat was raw, as if he had been yelling, but he remembered nothing about it. He fumbled for his canteen and managed to get it to his mouth. Only a few drops trickled onto his lips. Sara. There was something about Sara he should remember. He wondered whether he had been dreaming of her. His chest ached dully. Why was it so difficult to breathe? Hang on, he whispered to himself, but he wasn’t sure why he should hang on or to what.

Edith James snapped half a dozen mums from the plant she had brought for her grandfather and stuck the stems snugly into the rubber flower holder. “There,” she said, standing up to admire their feathery orange heads. “That certainly brightens things up!” Satisfied, she called Misty and returned to her car.

Mile or two down the road, she was quite surprised to pass a pickup truck heading the other way. A girl was driving, driving fast. A pretty young thing, but her face looked anxious as the truck flashed by. What on earth, Edith James wondered, would bring one of today’s teenagers racing out here at this hour of the morning? Well, that wasn’t her worry. She had plenty of time to take Misty home and then head off for Bible study.

Edith smiled gently. How nice, she thought, to have already done her good deed for the day.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46458072)

They won’t find this; they won’t ever know you still hear the songs. You’ve conned them this long. What’s to make them grow some brains now?

But so what if they do figure it out? What have you got to look forward to out here, you stupid, crazy loser? What the fuck is the big allure, these wide-open spaces they call the world?

Wide open spaces, ha! Tell me, girlfriend. Tell me about that wide-open space of yours, got you into all this shit in the first place. It was because you wanted that boy, and …

No. No, it went another way. Please, it happened the way you,

the way you,

you dreamed it all.

You dreamed it all. That’s it, period, the end. I wish I could tell you different, hon, but just like on Dallas, it was all a dream. You know, the way you go off sometimes, like that girl in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; you just zone out, and then

you hear the voices singing,

and you hear them sing you a story:

This, my life:

Once upon a time, I am the most precious of the Sea King’s seven daughters, fondled and dandled, and loved by all. I rule gentle Pacificus for my father, and I am kind and generous.

I am the most treasured, the most beautiful. My tail sparkles and gleams, my hair undulates like sunbeam shafts through the water. My skin is pale and rosy as a pearl. And I live in the most splendid of the seven seas, wonder upon wonder: brilliant Garibaldis and purple sawfish laze and bob; anemone carpets of orange, pink, and yellow spread beneath me as I drift, combing my hair; castles of red coral dot my domain, and majestic jade-green kelp forests, towering in the currents, mark my borders. Elaborate curtains of sponges and starfish adorn my bower, and sea treasure and luxury surrounds me. Seahorses cuddle me; maidens attend me. Young lords come in great haste at my call.

Everything I can possibly want.

And when I am fifteen, I rise to the surface, as is my right, and come into the other world for the first time. The first gasp of air terrifies me, but quickly I get my bearings. New smells enfold me: oranges, pineapples, sandalwood.

And the first sight fascinates me. It is a ship, sailing upon the dark waves! Long and gray, laden with boxes. A freighter, carrying goods to other lands.

Oh, ship, oh, wondrous object! And then sharp flashes of lightning crack open the sky, and thunder’s rumblings shoot across the waves. Water cascades from above—rain, it is rain!—and the bulging ocean tosses the ship like a bauble in its hand.

I am exhilarated. And I sing of its fierce magnificence, this world above, this angel-world. I strain to see men on the ship, for I know there must be some. Those who dwell here possess something called souls, something that allows them to live on, and on, though we of the water live for three hundred years before our bodies break upon the foam. What must it be like, immortality? To live for a hundred thousand storms, a million infinite songs?

The ship sails on, and I sing of its safety. It disappears, and so do I, back into my perfect kingdom.

But I think the whole night of the world I have caught but a glimpse of, and I am preoccupied all the next day. I do not hear the pleadings of my courtiers for my attentions; and the justice I dispense in my court is hasty and arbitrary. I hear sad songs in the spire and halls of my palace, lamenting my unfairness, and I determine to set all to rights on the morrow.

Yet the night was made for the upper world, and I rise again.

The sky is dark, and the round orb they call Moon glows like … like me. Beyond, a beach shimmers silver; and lush treetops wave in zephyr breezes. Enchanted, I swim closer. I hear laughter, and I sing of it. I sing of the joy of these angel-people, who walk and live forever.

I long to see one of them. Down below, I have seen only their dead shells—for I assume they must shed their forms and seek new ones, as the hermit crabs do; else how can they live forever? I want to see one move and walk. I want to touch one of them.

I am bewitched by the thought of meeting one of them.

And then, as if by magic, the moon shines on a glorious, sinewy man, riding a flat chariot over the waves. Each muscle of his brown body gleams in the magic light; his hair is long and blue-black and flies behind him like a tail. His legs are spread wide, and I am mesmerized by them. I swim toward him, singing a greeting.

He shouts in reply, “Cowabunga!” and I sing to him. I sing of cowabunga, hello; and as I gaze at him, my body hungers. I have only known this hunger for my father and my sisters, as we swim and stroke each other. My father has coupled with all my sisters, producing offspring; when I turn sixteen, he will couple with me.

But now I think of coupling with the legged man, though I can’t imagine how. And I sing to him of my sexual desire, of my lust for his strange, exciting body. I sing and sing, and he shouts “Cowabunga!” in reply.

Then, like the night before, a storm churns the sea into a bombastic symphony. The young god falters on his chariot and tumbles into the sea. I have seen him do this several times before, and he has always recovered and swum to the beach. But now the chariot smacks his head as he surfaces, and his head sinks below the waves.

For a moment I do nothing, because I assume he will simply shed his shell if he is in danger. But something inside me tugs hard and tells me to go to him and carry him to the beach myself, though my father has expressly forbidden us to go near it. I ignore the feeling and sing to him of waking and swimming, but still he remains beneath the waves.

My eyes hurt. As you know, we of the sea cannot make the teardrops the angel-people do. For a moment I ponder that, wondering if that is the secret of their immortality, but my eyes hurt worse, pounding, and I find myself darting through the wild waves toward the spot I saw him last.

I find a shadow in the black water—we can see, even in the dark—and I put my arms around his chest and start for the surface.

And I cannot stop touching him, everywhere, as he lies limp in my arms. I kiss the back of his head, I nip it gently. I want to open for him, but I don’t understand where his parts are. I don’t know, but I’m shaking for him. The sea foams and boils around us and I nearly lose hold of him in my rapture, the rapture that is the deep. I sing of it, I sing of my need for him, my unfathomable yearning. I want the man. I want to couple with him.

The moon shines on his face as I reach the breakers and push him onto the sand. Mixed with my desire is a thrill of terror: If I beach myself I am doomed.

I stare at him, willing him to open his eyes. He lies inert. I run my hands over his body, and I find a hard, stiff shaft between his legs, and I smile: They are not so different, after all.

As I have done for my father, I do for him. I take him into my mouth and suck, for it gives intense pleasure. I suck harder, harder, though the flesh around his shaft is loose. Then I remember the stories of their clothes and realize he iswearing some, and in my haste I rip them off his body, tearing them into pieces that are caught by the waves and carried out to sea like so many little jellyfish.

He is marvelous and thick. He is red and pink and he bobs in my mouth.

And he begins to gasp and sigh and move. He holds onto my head and pushes. He says, “Wha … wha … and then he releases his hot stream into me.

Cowabunga, little mermaid. Cowabunga, angel-god of the flat chariot. Ah, a surfboard. Yes, of course.

He begins to awaken, and I lose my nerve. My father has told me all my life I must have nothing to do with this world, and I am his favorite, most treasured daughter. So I leave.

But I am ruined now, for the sea. I pine for him, for my legged man. I cannot endure without him.

I must couple with him.

I caress my tail; I find my opening and slide my fingers into it. It would not work, he and I. It would not be possible.

But it must be possible. I must make it possible. Without him, my body will dissolve on the foam and I shall become nothing.

Though I say nothing of my dilemma, my sisters strive to comfort me. They touch me and kiss me. My father takes me in his arms and squeezes my breasts as I love him to do. They gather round me, all my family, and I am the most loved, the most adored.

And yet, I am wretched.

I rise night after night to the surface. Sometimes he is there, and sometimes he is not. And he sings that he misses me, too: Cowabunga, cowabunga.

Cowabunga, little mermaid.

I begin to fade away, and my father grows worried. My sisters sing for my recovery from whatever strange illness has befallen me. Dolphins serenade me. The whales chant healing melodies. Even the smallest of snails hum and whistle to soothe me.

And I know I must do something, and do it soon.

Though my father would die if he knew, I go to the sea witch.

Vile is she, with fangs longer than any viperfish; and her bleeding eyes bob on stalks; she is covered with barnacles and pieces of black swallowers; she is an abomination.

She is my last hope.

Pieces of black swallowers, and the bones of dead angelmen, poisonous plants, and puffer fish. Horrible toxins she has found in leaking drums, dropped by the upper world. She mixes these up and tells me to drink when I reach the surface. She tells me to drink and that she will take my voice in payment.

My voice!

“Your life as a walker will be a living nightmare,” she promises me as she hands me the bottle. “Death and madness are your answers there.”

And I think of nothing but the dark-haired man, thrusting his shaft into me.

The bottle burns my hand as I carry it to the surface; the water bubbles, and blisters rise on my palm. I bite my lip and swim quickly, but I am wondering: What will it be like to swallow such a thing?

And I rise to the world of the air and the night, and I see the glorious beauty of the man, and I swim as close to him as I dare. I uncap the bottle and sing to him one last time, oh, cowabunga, and then I drink:

Lava slides down my throat. Burning it away, burning all away, my voice, my beautiful voice; all my songs, a bonfire in my throat. A conflagration, a holocaust.

In the morning, I awaken. And he is kneeling over me, and I cannot understand a word he is saying.

My life:

I still don’t remember who I am, just some weird chick who tried to kill herself, got drunk, and nearly drowned.

He found me, gave me CPR. When I woke up, his mouth was pressed over mine and his breath thrust through my lungs, hot and humid. I had a strange thought: Now his soulis in me; now I’m immortal—which now I understand is tied up with all that stuff that got me in trouble in the first place.

My hand was wrapped so tightly around the Scotch bottle he almost had to break my fingers to get me to let go of it. We kept the Scotch bottle as a souvenir, and it was the first thing besides his fists that he hit me with.

Keep writing, girl. Keep going. You know you gotta get it out. But god, now you have to remember what a stupid bitch you are. You have to remember all that … that other stuff is a bunch of whacked-out bullshit

that you still believe,

that you still relive.

And you hear songs.

And you hear …

shit. You hear jack shit.

I’m glad for what happened. Don’t get me wrong; we had some good times. Jesus, our sex was incredible. I never could get enough, and for a while, that was all we needed. I guess he got turned on by how weird it all was: Here was this young chick, couldn’t talk, wanted it all the time. He felt like some big hero, taking me in. Found me some clothes of his sister’s, took me to live with him in the little apartment he rented on the beach.

Yeah, it was great at first, and sex was enough. But I couldn’t do anything. It was like I’d never seen a kitchen before. I wasn’t steady on my feet, even. He was worried about that, thought I was a heroin addict or something. The way I shook and moaned. I told him with gestures that it was my legs, and he tried to laugh it off by showing me his surfer’s knees. Knobby beyond belief. But I never went into severe withdrawal or anything, and I had that freckled, turned-up nose and those perky tits, and the tightest little snatch he’d ever had—he told me that a million times. It was good, living with Bobby. Yes, his name. Bobby.

Then I got knocked up. He totally freaked. Wanted me to have an abortion. No way. No way on earth; and I finally realized he didn’t love me, not the way I loved him, or he’dbe jazzed. I was so mad. I was so hurt. I had given up … I knew I had given up something for him. And I was just a piece of tail to him.

I think he was hoping I’d move out, but I kept hoping he’d fall in love with me. He started drinking, and going out, and then he didn’t come home until morning, still drunk.

“Don’t stare at me with those eyes!” he would scream at me, and then he began to knock me around.

You’d think I’d tell him to fuck off and leave, but where could I go? I didn’t even know where I was. Or who I was. And I had this despair inside me. This overwhelming sorrow, that grew stronger and stronger the angrier Bobby got with me. The more he regretted being with me.

Fish out of water, I told myself. That was what I was. A misfit. A freak. I deserved his fists, cuz I was such a drag. I was a burden. I was useless. It made sense that he lost his patience with me.

I was going down, really drowning. I started wandering down on the beach, staggering around for hours on end. My legs hurt worse and worse; I didn’t know why, but I thought it had something to do with the baby. Just wandering up and down, all day, falling into the sand over and over, crying. People thought I’d gone out of my mind.

And then one day I found a knife on the beach. It was stuck in the sand and the sun caught it just so, danced off it. I pulled it out and stared at it, with tears running down my cheeks. My eyes burned in the bright light; they always hurt when I cry.

I thought, I’ll just kill the fucker. I’ll fucking kill him.

We went to a surfing tournament, and he did things like imitate the way I walked and squeeze my tits in front of the other couples, and all I could do was stare at him with tears running down my cheeks. Some of the other surfer chicks came over to me while he was in the waves and said, “Christ, Annie (everyone calls me Annie), why the hell do you put up with that crap?”

I couldn’t talk, which was just as well. I had nothing to say.

Bobby won the tournament. There was a lot of partying to celebrate. He won some money, too. He drank more and more, and then he fucked me, hard, and I was scared about the baby. That it might get hurt. I thought of it, swimming around in its peaceful ocean, not knowing how ugly the world is. The sea, the sea, the beautiful, cowabunga sea, and it was going to have to come out and walk on the land with the two of us.

What if Bobby hit the baby?

I had packed the knife in my suitcase. I had pretended not to notice when I slipped it under the beach towels, as if it were some kind of accident; it was like someone was talking to me in my head: Do it, do it, do it. I thought about how I must have had a mother, and a father, and maybe brothers or sisters; how something really awful must have happened, since I didn’t remember them. I dreamed sometimes that my father raped me, or my brother, or my mother abused me. But none of that felt right.

But then again, nothing in my life felt particularly right.

Anyway, Bobby got drunk. He sat facing me in our motel room with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his lap, and a strange smile on his face, and for some reason I was more afraid than I’d ever been before. Something was in the air, something sharp and dangerous and slashing. The air was too cold, and inside the sound of the surf, I thought I heard

singing: Whales gray and kind; or dark-nosed dolphins; or

people; or

one person, one very special man.

Bobby said, “Whatcha looking at, you retard?” I shrank from him. I thought about the knife. My heart pounded. My body was dry as dust, and my skin prickled. My legs ached.

Jesus, they ached.

“I’m going out.” He lurched to his feet. “And when I get back, Annie, you better be gone.”

I stared at him. His face changed. He swore at me, came at me, hit me. Sliced my cheek open. “Goddamnit, I don’t want that kid!” he shouted, and slugged me in the stomach. “I want you gone!”

I doubled over, my hands over my head. I wanted to ask, Did you never love me? Isn’t there something about me worth caring about and sacrificing for?

Did I mention before that Bobby was only seventeen?

My legs couldn’t hold me up, and I collapsed. He turned his back and walked out. My heart dissolved inside my body and I breathed out, in, long and slow, like it was new to me. I felt as if I were floating, looking down through water at what was happening. For a second, I thought I was going to rise up out of the motel room and fly over the ocean. I thought I was fucking dying.

I was so scared, I ran after him. I know, it’s hard to believe: Here he had just beat me up and I was chasing him for more.

But I took the knife.

The waves were racing up the cliff near the motel, just soaring like a typhoon or a tidal wave or something. I had never seen surf like that, and it was violent and terrifying, but somehow it was wonderful, too. The moon was out and I let out a sob, almost a noise, as I looked up at it. The knife was too long to put in my purse, or a pocket; I had to carry it at my side. There was no hiding it.

I had the strongest compulsion to cut my legs; or maybe it was to cut one of them off. Like they were growths, and something wrong. Like they didn’t belong to me, the way I didn’t belong to anybody.

The baby. I could never let him hurt the baby.

But I added that in later; I remembered thinking that later. I was running after him, not from him.

The waves crashed on top of the cliff and they roared like sea monsters. Even at a distance, spray slapped my face. It was the end of the world, I thought, mine and everybody’s. It was all over.

I ran toward it. I ran as fast as I could, even though white-hot pains shot up my legs and into my heart. Throbbed in my throat. Scalding, blinding pain coursed right through me and grew as I got nearer and nearer.

And then I saw Bobby, standing on the edge of the cliff with his arms outstretched, laughing. His head thrown back, wild and free, his hair streaming behind him like a tail; he was brown and handsome, and even then, I wanted him.

He shouted something, like a dare. He laughed again and began to sing, but I couldn’t make out the tune. The waves crashed over him and he staggered backward.

I came closer. The water pelted me like stones. Angry ocean, I thought. Angry at him, angry at me.

Another wave dropped over him. I couldn’t see him. I kept running. And I thought, Oh, God, when I reach him, I’m going to stick this knife into him.

I ran. I ran hard. I was going to do it. I would do it.

Another wave. He turned around and saw me. The laughter died. He screamed at me, “Freak! You fucking freak!”

And I was going to do it. I was going to really do it.

And then I heard the singing:

Beloved, beloved,

most treasured.

The littlest princess,

the littlest mermaid,

the joy of the seas,

the father’s lost darling.

I heard it. I know I heard it. I heard it.

And the wave took him, just reached out with a watery embrace and yanked him off that cliff and pulled him into the water and

your voice moved the world and you screamed.

No, that’s what you think when you’re crazy. That’s what you dreamed.

You pushed him. You know you did, and they knew it, but your lawyers were cagey and got you off as a nutcase. With your scratchy, pathetic voice, and those sad, kick-me eyes, the jury pitied you and let you off, into a barred, safe place full of therapy sessions and medication. The baby was a miscarriage. You were knocked out when they took it, but they promised you it was for the best and looked away when they said it.

Years of medication. And talking, talking, with a new voice. But there was a man in that wave, a powerful man with streaming gray hair and a long gray beard and a crown. There was a man, and he grabbed Bobby.

You stupid lying bitch. There was no man. There was not.

I’m better now. I don’t need this shit. I’m better now, and I don’t, won’t, hear that singing anymore.

This, my life, once upon a time

no, goddamnit, no.

And now I’ll wad these pages up and stick them in that goddamned Scotch bottle, and no one will ever find them cuz they’ll sink like a stone.

Like a dead man.

Like Bobby—never found his body. Shed it. Found a new woman to live inside, hermit crab.

And I don’t know why I’m writing this, except I feel so sick inside; I feel like I can’t breathe and I’m drying up. Shriveling into nothingness, and I really wish someone would really help me. Because I am a crazy bitch, and no one on this earth wants me.

And now I’m standing on the cliff where I pushed Bobby, and throwing this bottle out to sea, cuz I can’t get that damned singing out of my head. I hear it all the time, and it makes me dream. I hate dreaming. I know what the world is: hard, and mean, and ugly. You’re a hungry puppy and it’s the boot connecting with your stomach.

And the hunger’s for something you can’t name, anyway.

And the name of the tune is:

For a day and an hour, the bottle bobs upon the waters. Then it sinks down slowly, slowly, like a pearl in liquid gold, drifting into the outstretched grasp of the Sea King. He cracks it open like an oyster, extracting the morsel within. Reads quickly, as the ink begins to run.

Then he flashes to the surface and screams for his daughter. But she is already walking away.

Tears course down his cheeks, and while it is true that merfolk cannot cry, the laws of fatherhood transcend the laws of nature.

In the ocean blue, home of the little mermaid, sea fantasy and sea dream; aqua, purple, pacific, and serene.

“This, for a boy?” he wails to the cliffs, the waves. “This, for lust?”

And he dives back into the depths, back to his throne and his six beautiful, naked daughters and their sunken Grecian temples, and pulverizes with his fists the bones of the boy who ruined his daughter and drove her mad; pounds the bones, and no heart! No soul!

Pounds the bones, and the ashes

of the beauty of the sea.

I hear the mermaids singing, each to each,

I do not think that they will sing to me.

—T. S. Eliot

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46462500)

I'm not quite sure it works for me on the re-read but I thought it would be a good one to challenge you guys with. It is quintessential '90s dark fantasy in the 'gritty fairy tale reimagining' genre.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46474190)

He'd had a headache, and his secretary, after offering him various patent medicines, complete with their manufacturer's slogans, had said "Why don't you take the rest of the day off, Mr Bliss?"

Everyone called him Mr Bliss. The others in the office were Dave or Dan or Charlie, but he was Mr Bliss. He liked it that way. Sometimes he thought that even his wife should call him Mr Bliss.

Instead, she was calling on God.

Her voice came from on high. From upstairs. In the bedroom. She didn't seem to be in pain, but Mr Bliss could remedy that.

She wasn't alone; someone was grunting in harmony with her cries to the creator. Mr Bliss was bitter about this.

Without even waiting to hang up his overcoat, he tiptoed into the kitchen, and plucked from its magnetic rack one of the Japanese knives his wife had ordered after watching a television commercial. They were designed for cutting things into small pieces, and they were guaranteed for life, however long that happened to be. Mr Bliss would see to it that his wife had no cause for complaint. He turned away from the rack, paused for a sigh, then went back and selected another knife. The first was for the one who wanted to meet God, and the second for the one who was making those animal noises.

After a moment's reflection, he decided to use the back stairs. They were more secretive, somehow, and Mr Bliss intended to have a big secret just as soon as he could get organized.

He had an erection for the first time in weeks, and his headache was gone.

He moved as quickly and carefully as he could, sliding across the checkerboard linoleum and taking the back stairs two at a time in slow, painful, thigh-straining stretches. He knew there was a step which creaked, couldn't recall which one it was, and knew he would step on it anyway.

That hardly mattered. The groans and wails were reaching a crescendo, and Mr Bliss suspected that not even a brass band behind him could have distracted the people above him from their business. They were about to achieve something, and he wanted very much to be there before they did.

The bedroom took up the entire top floor of the house. It had been a whim of his to flatter his young bride with as spacious a spawning ground as his salary would allow; the tastefully carpeted stairs led up to it in front as inexorably as the shabby wooden stairs crept up the back.

Mr Bliss creaked at the appointed spot, cursed quietly and opened the door.

His wife's eyes, rolled back in her head, were like wet marble. Her lips fluttered as she blew damp hair from her face. The beautiful breasts that had persuaded him to marry her were covered with sweat, and not all of it was hers.

Mr Bliss didn't even recognize the man; he was nobody. The milkman? A census taker? He was plump, and he needed a haircut.

It was all very discouraging. Cuckolding by an Adonis would at least have been understandable, but this was a personal affront.

Mr Bliss dropped one knife to the floor, grasped the other in both hands, and slammed its point into the pudgy interloper at the spot where spine meets skull.

It worked at once. The man gave one more grunt and toppled over backwards, blade grinding against bone as head and handle hit the floor.

Mrs Bliss was there, baffled and bedraggled, spreadeagled naked against sopping sheets.

Mr Bliss picked up the other knife.

He pulled her up by the hair and stabbed her in the face. She blubbered blood. Madly but methodically, he shoved the sharp steel into every place where he thought she'd like it least.

Most of his experiments were successful.

She died unhappily.

The last expression she was able to muster was a mixture of pain, reproach, and resignation that thrilled him more than anything she'd shown him since their wedding night.

He wasn't done with her yet. She had never been so submissive.

It was late that night before he put down the knife and put on his clothes.

Mr Bliss had made a terrible mess. Cleaning up was always a chore, as she had so frequently reminded him, but he was equal to the task. The worst part was that he had stabbed the water bed, but at least the flood had diluted some of the blood.

He buried them in separate sections of the flower garden and showed up late for work. This was an unprecedented event. The quizzical eyebrows of his colleagues got on his nerves.

For some reason he didn't feel like going home that night. He went to a motel instead. He watched television. He saw a movie about someone killing several other people, but it didn't amuse him as much as he'd hoped. He felt that it was in bad taste.

He left the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the doorknob of his room each day; he did not wish to be disturbed. Still, the unmade bed to which he returned each night began to bother him. It reminded him of home.

After a few days, Mr Bliss was ashamed to go to the office. He was still wearing the same clothes he'd left home in, and he was convinced that his colleagues could smell him. No one had ever longed for the weekend as passionately as he did.

Then he had two days of peace in his motel room, huddling under the covers in the dark and watching people kill each other in a phosphorescent glow, but on Sunday night he looked at his socks and knew he would have to go back to the house.

He wasn't happy about this.

When he opened the front door, it reminded him of his last entrance. He felt that the stage was set. Still, all he had to do was go upstairs and get some clothes. He could be gone in a matter of minutes. He knew where everything was.

He used the front stairs. The carpeting made them quieter, and somehow he felt the need for stealth. Anyway, he didn't like the ones in the back anymore.

Halfway up the stairs, he noticed two paintings of roses that his wife had put there. He took them down. This was his house now, and the pictures had always vaguely annoyed him. Unfortunately, the blank spaces he left on the wall bothered him too.

He didn't know what to do with the paintings, so he carried them up into the bedroom. There seemed to be no way to get rid of them. He was afraid this might be an omen, and for a second considered the idea of burying them in the garden. This made him laugh, but he didn't like the sound of it. He decided not to do it again.

Mr Bliss stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked around it critically. He'd made quite a neat job of it. He was just opening a dresser drawer when he heard a thump from below. He stared at his underwear.

A scrape followed the thump, and then the sound of something bumping up the back stairs.

He didn't wonder what it was, not even for an instant. He closed his underwear drawer and turned around. His left eyelid twitched; he could feel it. He was walking without thinking toward the front stairs when he heard the door below them open. Just a little sound, a bolt slipping a latch. Suddenly, the inside of his head felt as big as the bedroom.

He knew they were coming for him, one from each side. What could he do? He ran around the room, slamming into each wall and finding it solid. Then he took up a post beside the bed and put a hand over his mouth. A giggle spilled between his fingers, and it made him angry, for this was a proud moment.

They were coming for him.

Whatever became of him (no more job, no more television), he had inspired a miracle. The dead had come back to life to punish him. How many men could say as much? Come clump, come thump, come slithering sounds! This was a triumph.

He stepped back against the wall to get a better view. As both doors opened his eyes flicked back and forth. His tongue followed, licking his lips. He experienced an ecstasy of terror.

The stranger, of course, had used the back stairs.

He had tried to forget what a mess he had made of them, especially his wife. And now they were even worse.

And yet, as she dragged herself across the floor, there was something in her pale flesh, spotted with purple where the blood had settled, and striped with rust where the blood had spilled, that called to him as it rarely had before. Her skin was clumped with rich brown earth. She needs a bath, he thought, and he began to snort with laughter that would soon be uncontrollable.

Her lover, approaching from the other side, was hardly marked. There had been no wish to punish him, only to make him stop. Still, the single blow of the TV knife had severed his spine, and his head lurched unpleasantly. The odd disappointment Mr Bliss had felt in the man's flabbiness intensified. After six days in the ground, what crawled toward him was positively puffy.

Mr Bliss tried to choke back his chuckles till his eyes watered and snot shot from his nose. Even as his end approached, he saw their impossible lust for vengeance as his ultimate vindication.

Yet his feet were not as willing to die as he was; they backed over the carpet toward the closet door.

His wife looked up at him, as well as she could. The eyes in her sockets seemed shrivelled, like inquisitive prunes. A part of her where he had cut too deeply and too often dropped quietly to the floor.

Her lover shuffled forward on hands and knees, leaving some sort of a trail behind him.

Mr Bliss pulled the gleaming brass bed around to make a barricade. He stepped back into the closet. The smell of her perfume and of her sex enveloped him. He was enveloped in her gowns.

His wife reached the bed first, and grasped the fresh linen with the few fingers she had left. She hauled herself up. Stains smeared the sheets. This was certainly the time to slam the closet door, but he wanted to watch. He was positively fascinated.

She squirmed on the pillows, arms flailing, then collapsed on her back. There were gurgles. Could she be really dead at last?

No.

It didn't really matter. Her lover crawled over the counterpane. Mr Bliss wanted to go to the bathroom, but the way was blocked.

He cringed when his wife's lover (who was this creeping corpse, anyway?) stretched out fat fingers, but instead of clawing for revenge they fell on what had been the breasts of the body beneath him. They began to move gently.

Mr Bliss blushed as the ritual began. He heard sounds that had embarrassed him even when the meat was live: liquid lurchings, ghastly groans, and supernatural screams.

He shut himself in the closet. What was at work on the bed did not even deign to notice him. He was buried in silk and polyester.

It was worse than he had feared. It was unbearable.

They hadn't come for him at all.

They had come for each other.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46469145)

The title, of course, is a reference to Night of the Living Dead.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46474194)

John was not the only man who wanted to marry her: she was the belle of our village coterie, and we were all in love with her more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like heliotrope ties or Inverness capes. Therefore we were as much annoyed as surprised when John Charrington walked into our little local Club--we held it in a loft over the saddler's, I remember--and invited us all to his wedding.

'Your wedding?'

'You don't mean it?'

'Who's the happy pair? When's it to be?'

John Charrington filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said:

'I'm sorry to deprive you fellows of your only joke--but Miss Forster and I are to be married in September.'

'You don't mean it?'

'He's got the mitten again, and it's turned his head.'

'No,' I said, rising, 'I see it's true. Lend me a pistol someone--or a first-class fare to the other end of Nowhere. Charrington has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it mesmerism, or a love-potion, Jack?'

'Neither, sir, but a gift you'll never have--perseverance--and the best luck a man ever had in this world.'

There was something in his voice that silenced me, and all chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further.

The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated Miss Forster, she blushed and smiled and dimpled, for all the world as though she were in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. Upon my word, I think she had. Women are strange creatures.

We were all asked to the wedding. In Brixham everyone who was anybody knew everybody else who was anyone. My sisters were, I truly believe, more interested in the trousseau than the bride herself, and I was to be best man. The coming marriage was much canvassed at afternoon tea-tables, and at our little Club over the saddler's, and the question was always asked, 'Does she care for him?'

I used to ask that question myself in the early days of their engagement, but after a certain evening in August I never asked it again. I was coming home from the Club through the churchyard. Our church is on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and soft that one's footsteps are noiseless.

I made no sound as I vaulted the low lichened wall, and threaded my way between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that I heard John Charrington's voice, and saw her. May was sitting on a low flat gravestone, her face turned towards the full splendour of the western sun. Its expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of love for him; it was transfigured to a beauty I should not have believed possible, even to that beautiful little face.

John lay at her feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of the golden August evening.

'My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted me!'

I coughed at once to indicate my presence, and passed on into the shadow fully enlightened.

The wedding was to be early in September. Two days before I had to run up to town on business. The train was late, of course, for we are on the South-Eastern, and as I stood grumbling with my watch in my hand, whom should I see but John Charrington and May Forster. They were walking up and down the unfrequented end of the platform, arm in arm, looking into each other's eyes, careless of the sympathetic interest of the porters.

Of course I knew better than to hesitate a moment before burying myself in the booking--office, and it was not till the train drew up at the platform, that I obtrusively passed the pair with my Gladstone, and took the corner in a first-class smoking-carriage. I did this with as good an air of not seeing them as I could assume. I pride myself on my discretion, but if John were travelling alone I wanted his company. I had it.

'Hullo, old man,' came his cheery voice as he swung his bag into my carriage; 'here's luck; I was expecting a dull journey!'

'Where are you off to?' I asked, discretion still bidding me turn my eyes away, though I saw, without looking, that hers were red-rimmed.

'To old Branbridge's,' he answered, shutting the door and leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart.

'Oh, I wish you wouldn't go, John,' she was saying in a low, earnest voice. 'I feel certain something will happen.'

'Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me, and the day after tomorrow our wedding day?'

'Don't go,' she answered, with a pleading intensity which would have sent my Gladstone onto the platform and me after it. But she wasn't speaking to me. John Charrington was made differently: he rarely changed his opinions, never his resolutions.

He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the carriage door.

'I must, May. The old boy's been awfully good to me, and now he's dying I must go and see him, but I shall come home in time for---' the rest of the parting was lost in a whisper and in the rattling lurch of the starting train.

'You're sure to come?' she spoke as the train moved.

'Nothing shall keep me,' he answered; and we steamed out. After he had seen the last of the little figure on the platform he leaned back in his corner and kept silence for a minute.

When he spoke it was to explain to me that his godfather, whose heir he was, lay dying at Peasmarsh Place, some fifty miles away, and had sent for John, and John had felt bound to go.

'I shall be surely back tomorrow,' he said, 'or, if not, the day after, in heaps of time. Thank heaven, one hasn't to get up in the middle of the night to get married nowadays!'

'And suppose Mr Branbridge dies?'

'Alive or dead I mean to be married on Thursday!' John answered, lighting a cigar and unfolding The Times.

At Peasmarsh station we said 'goodbye', and he got out, and I saw him ride off; I went on to London, where I stayed the night.

When I got home the next afternoon, a very wet one, by the way, my sister greeted me with:

'Where's Mr Charrington?'

'Goodness knows,' I answered testily. Every man, since Cain, has resented that kind of question.

'I thought you might have heard from him,' she went on, 'as you're to give him away tomorrow.'

'Isn't he back?' I asked, for I had confidently expected to find him at home.

'No, Geoffrey,' my sister Fanny always had a way of jumping to conclusions, especially such conclusions as were least favourable to her fellow-creatures--'he has not returned, and, what is more, you may depend upon it he won't. You mark my words, there'll be no wedding tomorrow.'

My sister Fanny has a power of annoying me which no other human being possesses.

'You mark my words,' I retorted with asperity, 'you had better give up making such a thundering idiot of yourself. There'll be more wedding tomorrow than ever you'll take the first part in.' A prophecy which, by the way, came true.

But though I could snarl confidently to my sister, I did not feel so comfortable when late that night, I, standing on the doorstep of John's house, heard that he had not returned. I went home gloomily through the rain. Next morning brought a brilliant blue sky, gold sun, and all such softness of air and beauty of cloud as go to make up a perfect day. I woke with a vague feeling of having gone to bed anxious, and of being rather averse to facing that anxiety in the light of full wakefulness.

But with my shaving-water came a note from John which relieved my mind and sent me up to the Forsters with a light heart.

May was in the garden. I saw her blue gown through the hollyhocks as the lodge gates swung to behind me. So I did not go up to the house, but turned aside down the turfed path.

'He's written to you too,' she said, without preliminary greeting, when I reached her side.

'Yes, I'm to meet him at the station at three, and come straight on to the church.'

Her face looked pale, but there was a brightness in her eyes, and a tender quiver about the mouth that spoke of renewed happiness.

'Mr Branbridge begged him so to stay another night that he had not the heart to refuse,' she went on. 'He is so kind, but I wish he hadn't stayed.'

I was at the station at half past two. I felt rather annoyed with John. It seemed a sort of slight to the beautiful girl who loved him, that he should come as it were out of breath, and with the dust of travel upon him, to take her hand, which some of us would have given the best years of our lives to take.

But when the three' o'clock train glided in, and glided out again having brought no passengers to our little station, I was more than annoyed. There was no other train for thirty-five minutes; I calculated that, with much hurry, we might just get to the church in time for the ceremony; but, oh, what a fool to miss that first train! What other man could have done it?

That thirty-five minutes seemed a year, as I wandered round the station reading the advertisements and the timetables, and the company's bye-laws, and getting more and more angry with John Charrington. This confidence in his own power of getting everything he wanted the minute he wanted it was leading him too far. I hate waiting. Everyone does, but I believe I hate it more than anyone else. The three thirty-five was late, of course.

'Drive to the church!' I said, as someone shut the door. 'Mr Charrington hasn't come by this train.'

I ground my pipe between my teeth and stamped with impatience as I watched the signals. Click. The signal went down. Five minutes later I flung myself into the carriage that I had brought for John.

Anxiety now replaced anger. What had become of the man? Could he have been taken suddenly ill? I had never known him have a day's illness in his life. And even so he might have telegraphed. Some awful accident must have happened to him. The thought that he had played her false never--no, not for a moment--entered my head. Yes, some thing terrible had happened to him, and on me lay the task of telling his bride. I almost wished the carriage would upset and break my head so that someone else might tell her, not I, who--but that's nothing to do with this story.

It was five minutes to four as we drew up at the churchyard gate. A double row of eager onlookers lined the path from lychgate to porch. I sprang from the carriage and passed up between them. Our gardener had a good front place near the door. I stopped.

'Are they waiting still, Byles?' I asked, simply to gain time, for of course I knew they were by the waiting crowd's attentive attitude.

'Waiting, sir? No, no, sir; why, it must be over by now.'

'Over! Then Mr Charrington's come?'

To the minute, sir; must have missed you somehow, and I say, sir,' lowering his voice, 'I never see Mr John the least bit so afore, but my opinion is he's been drinking pretty free. His clothes was all dusty and his face like a sheet. I tell you I didn't like the looks of him at all, and the folks inside are saying all sorts of things. You'll see, something's gone very wrong with Mr John, and he's tried liquor. He looked like a ghost, and in he went with his eyes straight before him, with never a look or a word for none of us: him that was always such a gentleman!'

I had never heard Byles make so long a speech. The crowd in the churchyard were talking in whispers and getting ready rice and slippers to throw at the bride and bridegroom. The ringers were ready with their hands on the ropes to ring out the merry peal as the bride and bride-groom should come out.

A murmur from the church announced them; out they came. Byles was right. John Charrington did not look himself. There was dust on his coat, his hair was disarranged. He seemed to have been in some row, for there was a black mark above his eyebrow. He was deathly pale. But his pallor was not greater than that of the bride, who might have been carved in ivory--dress, veil, orange blossoms, face and all.

As they passed out the ringers stooped--there were six of them--and then, on the ears expecting the gay wedding peal, came the slow tolling of the passing bell.

A thrill of horror at so foolish a jest from the ringers passed through us all. But the ringers themselves dropped the ropes and fled like rabbits out into the sunlight. The bride shuddered, and grey shadows came about her mouth, but the bridegroom led her on down the path where the people stood with the handfuls of rice; but the handfuls were never thrown, and the wedding bells never rang. In vain the ringers were urged to remedy their mistake: they protested with many whispered expletives that they would see themselves further first.

In a hush like the hush in the chamber of death the bridal pair passed into their carriage and its door slammed behind them.

Then the tongues were loosed. A babel of anger, wonder, conjecture from the guests and the spectators.

'If I'd seen his condition, sir,' said old Forster to me as we drove off, 'I would have stretched him on the floor of the church, sir, by heaven I would, before I'd have let him marry my daughter!'

Then he put his head out of the window.

'Drive like hell,' he cried to the coachman; 'don't spare the horses.'

He was obeyed. We passed the bride's carriage. I forbore to look at it, and old Forster turned his head away and swore. We reached home before it.

We stood in the doorway, in the blazing afternoon sun, and in about half a minute we heard wheels crunching the gravel. When the carriage stopped in front of the steps old Forster and I ran down.

'Great heaven, the carriage is empty! And yet---'

I had the door open in a minute, and this is what I saw . . .

No sign of John Charrington; and of May, his wife, only a huddled heap of white satin lying half on the floor of the carriage and half on the seat.

'I drove straight here, sir,' said the coachman, as the bride's father lifted her out; 'and I'll swear no one got out of the carriage.'

We carried her into the house in her bridal dress and drew back her veil. I saw her face. Shall I ever forget it? White, white and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror as I have never seen since except in dreams. And her hair, her radiant blonde hair, I tell you it was white like snow.

As we stood, her father and I, half mad with the horror and mystery of it, a boy came up the avenue--a telegraph boy. They brought the orange envelope to me. I tore it open.

Mr Charrington was thrown from the dogcart on his way to the station at half past one. Killed on the spot!

And he was married to May Forster in our parish church at half past three, in presence of half the parish.

'I shall be married, dead, or alive!'

What had passed in that carriage on the homeward drive? No one knows--no one will ever know. Oh, May! oh, my dear!

Before a week was over they laid her beside her husband in our little churchyard on the thyme-covered hill--the churchyard where they had kept their love-trysts.

Thus was accomplished John Charrington's wedding.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46470646)

This isn't a very surprising story--probably a 6 or 7 year old would be able to figure out what's going to happen by the second page--but Nesbit pulls it off with a much grimmer tone than I was expecting, and there's more than a hint of the ghastliest implications by the end.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46474185)

Neil was just sixteen years old, Glenn thought. His lips were tight and gray, and the last of his summer tan had faded from his gaunt, hollowed face. Just sixteen. His hands tightened around the steering-wheel, the knuckles bleaching white. It's not fair. My son is dead---and you're still alive. Oh, I know you're there. I've figured it all out. You think you're so damned smart. You think you've got everybody fooled. But not me. Oh no---not me.

He reached over the seat beside him and picked up his pack of Winstons, chose a cigarette and clamped the filter between his lips. Then he punched the cigarette lighter in and waited for it to heat up.

His eyes, pale blue behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, remained fixed on the Olympic-sized public swimming pool beyond the high chainlink fence. A sign on the admissions gate said in big, cheerful red letters: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON! SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER! Beyond the fence were bleachers and sundecks where people had lolled in the hot, sultry summer of north Alabama, and there was a bandstand where an occasional rock band had played at a pool party on a Saturday night. Steam rose from the glistening concrete around the pool and, in the silence between the patter of raindrops, with his windows rolled down and the moody smell of August's last hours inside the car, he thought he could hear ghostly music from that bandstand, there under the red canopy where he himself had danced as a kid in the late fifties

He imagined he could hear the shouts, squeals and rowdy laughter of the generations of kids that had come to this pool, here in wooded Parnell Park, since it had been dug out and filled with water back in the mid-forties. He cocked his head to one side, listening, and he felt sure that one of these ghostly voices belonged to Neil, and Neil was speaking like a ripple of water down a drain, calling "Dad? Dad? It killed me, Dad! I didn't drown! I was always a good swimmer, Dad! You know that, don't you...?"

"Yes," Glenn answered softly, and tears filled his eyes. "I know that."

The lighter popped out. Glenn got his cigarette going and returned the lighter to the dashboard. He stared at the swimming pool as a tear crept down his cheek. Neil's voice ebbed and faded, joining the voices of the other ghosts that were forever young in Parnell Park.

If he had a dollar for every time he'd walked through that admissions gate he'd be a mighty rich man today. At least he'd have a lot more money, he mused, than running the Pet Center at Brookhill Mall paid him. But he'd always liked animals, so that was okay, though when he'd been young enough to dream he'd had plans of working for a zoo in a big city like Birmingham, travelling the world and collecting exotic animals. His father had died when he was a sophomore at the University of Alabama, and Glenn had returned to Barrimore Crossing and gone to work because his mother had been hanging on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He'd always planned on going back to college but the spool of time just kept unwinding: he'd met Linda, and they'd fallen in love. And then they'd gotten married and Neil was born four years later, and....

Well, that was just the story of life, wasn't it?

There were little flecks of rain on his glasses, caused when the drops ricocheted off the edge of the rolled-down window. Glenn took them off to wipe the lenses with a handkerchief. Without the glasses, everything was kind of fuzzy, but he could still see all right.

His hands were trembling. He was afraid, but not terrified. Funny. He'd thought for sure he'd be scared shitless. Of course, it wasn't time yet. Oh, no. Not yet. He put his glasses back on, drew deeply at his cigarette and let the smoke leak from his mouth. Then he touched the heavy-duty chain cutter that lay on the seat beside him.

Today---the last day of summer---he had brought his own admission ticket to the pool.

Underneath his trousers he was wearing his bathing suit---the red one, the one that Linda said he'd better not wear around the bull up in Howard Mackey's pasture. Glenn smiled grimly. If he hadn't had Linda these past two weeks it might've made him slip right off the deep end. She said they were strong, that they would go on and learn to live with Neil's death, and Glenn had agreed---but that was before he'd started thinking. That was before he'd started reading and studying about the Parnell Park swimming pool.

That was before he knew.

After Neil had drowned, the town council had closed the pool and park. Neil had been its third victim of the summer; back in June a girl named Wanda Shackleford had died in the pool, and on the fourth of July it had been Tom Dunnigan. Neil had known Wanda Shackleford. And Glenn remembered that they'd talked about the incident at home one night.

"Seventeen years old!" Glenn had said, reading from a copy of the Barrimore Crossing Courier. "What a waste!" He was sitting in his Barcalounger in the den, and Linda was on the sofa doing her needlepoint picture for Sue Ann Moore's birthday. Neil was on the floor in a comfortable sprawl, putting together a plastic model of a space ship he'd bought at Brookhill Mall that afternoon. "Says here that she and a boy named Paul Buckley decided to climb the fence and go swimming around midnight." He glanced over at Linda. "Is that Alex Buckley's boy? The football player?"

"I think so. Do you know, Neil?"

"Yeah. Paul Buckley's a center for Grissom High." Neil glued a triangular weapons turret together and put it aside to dry, then turned to face his father. Like Glenn, the boy was thin and lanky and wore glasses. "Wanda Shackleford was his girlfriend. She would've been a senior next year. What else does it say?"

"It's got a few quotes from Paul Buckley and the policeman who pulled the girl's body out. Paul says they'd had a sixpack and then decided to go swimming. He says he never even knew she was gone until he started calling her and she didn't answer. He thought she was playing a trick on him." He offered his son the paper.

"I can't imagine wanting to swim in dark water," Linda said. Her pleasant oval face was framed with pale blond hair, and her eyes were hazel, the same color as Neil's. She concentrated on making a tricky stitch and then looked up. "That's the first one."

"The first one? What do you mean?"

Linda shrugged uneasily. "I don't know. Just . . . well they say things happen in threes." She returned to her work. "I think the City should fill in that swimming pool."

"Fill in the pool?" There was alarm in Neil's voice. "Why?"

"Because last June the Happer boy drowned in it, remember? It happened the first weekend school was out. Thank God we weren't there to see it. And two summers before that, the McCarrin girl drowned in four feet of water. The lifeguard didn't even see her go down before somebody stepped on her." She shivered and looked at Glenn. "Remember?"

Glenn drew on his cigarette, staring through the rain-streaked windshield at the pool. "Yes," he said softly. "I remember." But at the time, he'd told Linda that people---especially kids---drowned in pools, ponds and lakes every summer. People even drown in their own bathtubs! he'd said. The city shouldn't close Parnell Park pool and deprive the people of Barrimore Crossing, Leeds, Cooks Springs and the other surrounding communities. Without Parnell Park, folks would have to drive either to Birmingham or go swimming in the muddy waters of nearby Logan Martin lake on a hot summer afternoon!

Still, he'd remembered that a man from Leeds had drowned in the deep end the summer before Gil McCarrin's daughter died. And hadn't two or three other people drowned there as well?

"You think you're so damned smart," Glenn whispered. "But I know. You killed my son, and by God you're going to pay."

A sullen breeze played over the pool, and Glenn imagined he could hear the water giggle. Off in the distance he was sure he heard Neil's voice, floating to him through time and space: "It killed me, Dad! I didn't drown . . . I didn't drown . . . I didn't. . . I---"

Glenn clamped a hand to his forehead and squeezed. Sometimes that made the ghostly voice go away, and this time it worked. He was getting a whopper of a headache, and he opened the glove compartment and took a half-full bottle of Excedrin from it. He popped it open, put a tablet on his tongue and let it melt.

Today was the last day of August, and tomorrow morning the city workmen would come and open the big circular metal-grated drain down in the twelve-foot depths of the deep end. An electric pump would flood the water through pipes that had been laid down in 1945, when the pool was first dug out. The water would continue for more than two miles, until it emptied into a cove on Logan Martin lake. Glenn knew the route that water would take very well, because he'd studied the yellowed engineering diagrams in Barrimore Crossing's City Hall. And then, the last week of May, when the heat had come creeping back and summer was about to blaze like a nova, the pipes would start pumping Logan Martin lake water back through another system of filtration tanks and sanitation filters and when it spilled into the Parnell Park swimming pool it would be fresh, clean and sparkling.

But it would not be lifeless.

Glenn chewed a second Excedrin, crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray. This was the day. Tomorrow would be too late. Because tomorrow, the thing that lurked in the public swimming pool would slither away down the drain and get back to the lake where it would wait in the mud for another summer season and the beckoning rhythm of the pump.

Glenn's palms were wet. He wiped them on his trousers. Tom Dunnigan had drowned in the deep end on the fourth of July, during the big annual celebration and barbecue. Glenn and Linda had been eating sauce-sloppy barbecues when they'd heard the commotion at the pool, and Linda had screamed, "Oh my God! Neil!"

But it was not Neil who lay on his stomach as the lifeguard tried to force breath back into the body. Neil had been doing cannonballs off the high dive when Tom's wife had shouted for help. The pool had been crowded with people, but no one had seen Tom Dunnigan slip under; he had not cried out, had not even left a ripple in the water. Glenn got close enough through the onlookers to see Tom's body as the lifeguard worked on him. Tom's eyes were open, and water was running between the pale blue lips. But Glenn had found himself staring at a small, circular purple bruise at the back of Tom's neck, almost at the base of the brain; the bruise was pinpricked with scarlet, as if tiny veins in the skin had been ruptured. He'd wondered what could have caused a bruise like that, but it was so small it certainly wasn't important. Then the ambulance attendants wheeled Tom away, covered with a sheet, and the pool closed down for a week.

It was later---much later---that Glenn realized the bruise could've been a bitemark.

He'd been feeding a chameleon in the pet store when the lizard, which had turned the exact shade of green as the grass at the bottom of his tank, had decided to give him a bite on his finger. A chameleon has no teeth, but the pressure of the lizard's mouth had left a tiny circular mark that faded almost at once. Still the little mark bothered Glenn until he'd realized what it reminded him of.

He'd never really paid much attention to the chameleon before that, but suddenly he was intrigued by how it changed colors so quickly, from grass-green to the tan shade of the sand heaped up in the tank's corner. Glenn put a large gray rock in there as well, and soon the chameleon would climb up on it and bloom gray; in that state, he would be invisible but for the tiny, unblinking black circles of his eyes.

"I know what you are," Glenn whispered. "Oh, yeah. I sure do."

The light was fading. Glenn looked in the rear seat to check his gear: a snorkel, underwater mask, and fins. On the floorboard was an underwater light---a large flashlight sealed in a clear plastic enclosure with an upraised red off-on switch. Glenn had driven to the K-Mart in Birmingham to buy the equipment in the sporting goods department. No one knew him there. And wrapped up in a yellow towel in the back seat was his major purchase. He reached over for it, carefully picked it up, and put it across his lap. Then he began to unfold the towel, and there it was---clean, bright, and deadly.

"Looks wicked, doesn't it?" the K-Mart clerk had asked.

Glenn had agreed that it did. But then, it suited his needs.

"You couldn't get me underwater," the clerk had said. "Nossir! I like my feet on solid ground! What do you catch with that thing?"

"Big game," Glenn had told him. "So big you wouldn't believe it."

He ran his hands over the cool metal of the speargun in his lap. He'd read all the warnings and instructions, and the weapon's barbed spear was ready to fire. All he had to do was move a little lever with his thumb to unhook the safety, and then squeezing the trigger was the same as any other gun. He'd practiced on a pillow in the basement, late at night when Linda was asleep. She'd really think he was crazy if she found what was left of that tattered old thing.

But she thought he was out of his mind anyway, so what did it matter? Ever since he'd told her what he knew was true, she'd looked at him differently. It was in her eyes. She thought he'd slipped right off the deep end.

"We'll see about that." There was cold sweat on his face now, because the time was near. He started to get out of the station wagon, then froze. His heart was pounding.

A police car had turned into the parking lot, and was heading toward him.

Oh, Jesus! he thought. No! He visualized Linda on the phone to the police: "Officer, my husband's gone crazy! I don't know what he'll do next. He's stopped going to work, he has nightmares all the time and can't sleep, and he thinks there's a monster in the Parnell Park swimming pool! He thinks a monster killed our son, and he won't see a doctor or talk to anybody else about---"

The police car was getting closer. Glenn hastily wrapped the towel around the speargun, put it down between the seat and the door. He laid the chain cutter on the floorboard and then the police car was pulling up right beside him and all he could do was sit rigidly and smile.

"Having trouble, sir?" the policeman on the passenger side asked through his rolled-down window.

"No. No trouble. Just sitting here." Glenn heard his voice tremble. His smile felt so tight his face was about to rip.

The policeman suddenly started to get out of the car, and Glenn knew he would see the gear on the back seat. "I'm fine!" Glenn protested. "Really!" But the police car's door was opening and the man was about to walk over and see---

"Hey, is that you, Mr. Calder?" the policeman sitting behind the wheel asked. The other one hesitated.

"Yes. I'm Glenn Calder."

"I'm Mike Ward. I bought a cocker spaniel puppy from you at the first of the summer. Gave it to my little girl for her birthday. Remember?"

"Uh . . . yes! Sure." Glenn recalled him now. "Yes! How's the puppy?"

"Fine. We named him Bozo because of those big floppy feet. I'll tell you, I never knew a puppy so small could eat so much!"

Glenn strained to laugh. He feared his eyes must be bulging with inner pressure.

Mike Ward was silent for a few seconds, and then he said something to the other man that Glenn couldn't make out. The second policeman got back into the car and closed the door, and Glenn released the breath he'd been holding.

"Everything okay, Mr. Calder?" Mike asked; "I mean . . . I know about your son, and---"

"I'm fine!" Glenn said. "Just sitting here. Just thinking." His head was about to pound open.

"We were here the day it happened," Mike told him. "I'm really sorry."

"Thank you." The whole, hideous scene unfolded again in Glenn's mind: he remembered looking up from his Sports Illustrated magazine and seeing Neil going down the aluminum ladder on the left side of the pool, down at the deep end. "I hope he's careful," Linda had fretted and then she'd called to him. "Be careful!" Neil had waved and gone on down the ladder into the sparkling blue water.

There had been a lot of people there that afternoon. It had been one of the hottest days of the summer.

And then Glenn remembered that Linda suddenly set aside her needlepoint, her face shaded by the brim of her straw hat, and said the words he could never forget: "Glenn? I don't see Neil anymore."

Something about the world had changed in that moment. Time had been distorted and the world had cracked open, and Glenn had seen the horror that lies so close to the surface.

They brought Neil's body up and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but he was dead. Glenn could tell that right off. He was dead. And when they turned his body over to try to pound the life back into him, Glenn had seen the small purple bruise at the back of his son's neck, almost at the base of the brain.

Oh God, Glen had thought. Something stole the life right out of him.

And from that moment on, maybe he had gone crazy. Because he'd looked across the surface of the pool, and he had realized something very odd.

There was no aluminum ladder on the left side of the pool down at the deep end. On the pool's right side there was a ladder---but not on the left.

"He was a good boy," Glenn told the two policemen. There was still a fixed smile on his face, and he could not make it let go. "His mother and I loved him very, very much."

"Yes sir. Well . . . I guess we'll go on, then. You sure you're all right? You . . . uh . . . haven't been drinking, have you?"

"Nope. Clean as a whistle. Don't you worry about me, I'll go home soon. Wouldn't want to get Linda upset, would I?"

"No sir. Take care, now." Then the police car backed up, turned around in the parking lot and drove away along the wooded road.

Glenn had a splitting headache. He chewed a third Excedrin, took a deep breath, and reached down for the chain cutter. Then he got out of the car, walked to the admissions gate and cleaved the chain that locked it. The chain rattled to the concrete, and the gate swung open.

And now there was nothing between him and the monster in the swimming pool.

He returned to the car and threw the clippers inside, shucked off his shoes, socks and trousers. He let them fall in a heap beside the station-wagon, but he kept his blue-striped shirt on. It had been a present from Neil. Then he carried his mask, fins and snorkel into the pool area, walked the length of the pool and laid the gear on a bleacher. Rain pocked the dark surface, and on the pool's bottom were the black lines of swimming lanes, sometimes used for area swim-meets Ceramic tiles on the bottom made a pattern of dark blue, aqua and pale green.

There were thousands of places for it to hide, Glenn reasoned. It could be lying along a black line, or compressed flat and smooth like a stingray on one of the colored tiles. He looked across the pool where the false ladder had been---the monster could make itself resemble a ladder, or it could curl up and emulate the drain, or lie flat and still in a gutter waiting for a human form to come close enough. Yes. It had many shapes, many colors, many tricks. But the water had not yet gone back to the lake, and the monster that had killed Neil was still in there. Somewhere.

He walked back to the car, got the underwater light and the speargun. It was getting dark, and he switched the light on.

He wanted to make sure the thing found him once he was in the water---and the light should draw it like a neon sign over a roadside diner.

Glenn sat on the edge of the pool and put on his fins. He had to remove his glasses to wear the facemask; everything was out of focus, but it was the best he could do. He fit the snorkel into his mouth, hefted the underwater light in his left hand, and slowly eased himself over the edge.

I'm ready, he told himself. He was shaking, couldn't stop. The water, untended for more than two weeks, was dirty---littered with Coke cups, cigarette butts, dead waterbugs. The carcass of a bluejay floated past his face, and Glenn thought that it appeared to have been crushed.

He turned over on his stomach, put his head underwater, and kicked off against the pool's side, making a splash that sounded jarringly loud. He began to drift out over the drain, directing the light's yellow beam through the water. Around and beneath him was gray murk. But the light suddenly glinted off something, and Glenn arched down through the chill to see what it was---a beer can on the bottom. Still, the monster could be anywhere. Anywhere. He slid to the surface, expelling water through the snorkel like a whale. Then he continued slowly across the pool, his heartbeat pounding in his ears and the sound of his breathing like a hellish bellows through the snorkel. In another moment his head bumped the other side of the pool. He drifted in another direction, guiding himself with an occasional thrust of a fin.

Come on, damn you! Glenn thought. I know you're here!

But nothing moved in the depths below. He shone the light around, seeking a shadow.

I'm not crazy, he told himself. I'm really not. His head was hurting again, and his mask was leaking, the water beginning to creep up under his nose. Come out and fight me, damn you! I'm in your element now, you bastard! Come on!

Linda had asked him to see a doctor in Birmingham. She said she'd go with him, and the doctor would listen. There was no monster in the swimming pool, she'd said. And if there was where had it come from?

Glenn knew. Since Neil's death, Glenn had done a lot of thinking and reading. He'd gone back through the Courier files, searching for any information about the Parnell Park swimming pool. He'd found that, for the last five years, at least one person had died in the pool every summer. Before that you had to go back eight years to find a drowning victim---an elderly man who'd already suffered one heart attack.

But it had been in a copy of the Birmingham News, dated October tenth six years ago, that Glenn had found his answer.

The article's headline read "Bright Light" Frightens Lake Residents.

On the night of October ninth, a sphere of blue fire had been seen by a dozen people who lived around Logan Martin lake. It had flashed across the sky, making a noise---as one resident put it---"like steam whistling out of a cracked radiator." The blue light had gone down into the lake, and for the next two days, dead fish washed up on shore.

You found the pipes that brought you up into our swimming pool, didn't you? Glenn thought as he explored the gray depths with his light. Maybe you came from somewhere that's all water, and you can't live on land. Maybe you can suck the life out of a human body just as fast and easy as some of us step on ants. Maybe that's what you live on---but by God I've come to stick you, and I'll find you if I have to search all---

Something moved.

Down in the gloom, below him. Down near the drain. A shadow . . . something.

Glenn wasn't sure what it was. He just sensed a slow, powerful uncoiling.

He pushed the speargun's safety off with his thumb. He couldn't see anything, dead bugs floated through the light like a dust storm, and a sudden newspaper page drifted up from the bottom, flapped in his face and sank out of sight again. Glenn's nerves were near snapping, and he thought with a touch of hysterical mirth that it might have been an obituaries page.

He lowered his head and descended.

Murky clouds swirled around him. He probed with the light, alert for another movement. The water felt thick, oily; a contaminated feel. He continued to slide down into the depths, and they closed over him. His fins stirred more pool silt, and the clouds refused the light. He stayed down as long as he could, until his lungs began to heave, and then he rose toward the surface like a flabby arrow.

When he reached the top, something grasped his head.

It was a cold, rubbery thing, and Glenn knew it was the grip of death. He couldn't help it; he shrieked around the snorkel's mouthpiece, twisted violently in the Water and caught sight of slick green flesh. His frantic movement dislodged the facemask, and water flooded in. He was blinded, water was pressing up his nostrils and the thing was wrapped around his shoulders. He heard his gurgling underwater scream, flailed the thing off him and thrashed desperately away.

Glenn kicked to the edge of the pool, raising geysers. The aluminum ladder was in front of him, and he reached up to haul himself out.

No! he thought, wrenching his hand back before it touched the metal---or what was supposed to pass as metal. That's how it had killed Neil. It had emulated the other ladder and entwined itself around Neil as he entered the water, and it had taken him under and killed him in an instant while everyone else was laughing and unaware.

He swam away from the ladder and hung to the gutter's edge. His body convulsed, water gurgling from his nostrils. His dangling legs were vulnerable, and he drew them up against his chest, so fast he kneed himself in the chin. Then he dared to look around and aim the light at the monster.

About ten feet away, bouncing in the chop of his departure, was a child's deflated rubber ring, the green head of a seahorse with a grinning red mouth lying in the water.

Glenn laughed, and spat up more of the pool. Brave man, he thought. Real brave. Oh Jesus, if Linda had been here to see this! I was scared shitless of a kid's toy! His laughter got louder, more strident. He laughed until it dawned on him that he was holding his facemask's strap around his right wrist, and his right hand gripped the gutter.

In his left hand was the underwater light.

He had lost his snorkel. And the speargun.

His laughter ceased on a broken note.

Fear shot up his spine. He squinted, saw the snorkel bobbing on the surface five or six feet away. The speargun had gone to the bottom.

He didn't think about getting out of the pool. His body just did it, scrabbling up over the sloshing gutter to the concrete, where he lay on his belly in the rain and shivered with terror.

Without the speargun, he had no chance. I can use the chain cutter, he thought. Snap the bastard's head off! But no, no: the chain cutter needed two hands, and he had to have a hand free to hold the light. He thought of driving back to Birmingham, buying another speargun, but it occurred to him that if he got in the car and left Parnell Park, his guts might turn to jelly on the highway and Neil's voice would haunt him: "You know I didn't drown, don't you, Dad? You know I didn't . . ."

He might get in that car and drive away and never come back, and today was the last day of summer, and when they opened the drain in the morning, the monster would go back to the lake and await another season of victims.

He knew what he had to do. Must do. Must. He had to put the facemask back on, retrieve the snorkel, and go down after that speargun. He lay with his cheek pressed against the concrete and stared at the black water; how many summer days had seen him in that pool, basking like a happy whale? As a kid, he couldn't wait for the clock of seasons to turn around and point him to this pool---and now, everything had changed. Everything, and it could never be the same again.

Neil was dead, killed by the monster in the swimming pool. The creature had killed part of him, too, Glenn realized. Killed the part that saw this place as a haven of youthful dreams, an anchor-point of memories. And next summer, when the monster came back, someone else's dreams would die as well.

He had to go down and get the speargun. It was the only way.

It took him another minute or so to make his body respond to his mind's command. The chill shocked his skin again as he slipped over the side; he moved slowly, afraid of noise or splashes. Then he put the mask on, swam carefully to the snorkel with his legs drawn up close to the surface; he bit down hard on the mouthpiece, thinking suddenly that if there was really a monster here it could have emulated the snorkel, and both of them would've gotten a very nasty surprise. But the snorkel remained a snorkel, as Glenn blew the water out of it.

If there was really a monster here. The thought caught him like a shock. If. And there it was. What if Linda was right? he asked himself. What if there's nothing here, and I'm just treading dirty water? What if everything I've thought is wrong---and I'm losing my mind? No, no, I'm right. I know I am. Dear God. I have to be right.

He took a deep breath, exhaled it. The collapsed green seahorse seemed to be drifting toward him again. Was its grin wider? Did it show a glint of teeth? Glenn watched the rubber ring move through the light's beam, and then he took another breath and slid downward to find the speargun.

His thrashing had stirred up more debris. The water seemed alive with reaching, darting shadows as he kicked to the bottom and skimmed along it, his belly brushing the tiles. The light gleamed off another beercan, off a scatter of pennies left by children who'd been diving for them. Something bony lay on the bottom, and Glenn decided it was a chicken drumstick somebody had tossed over the fence. He kept going, slowly swinging his light in an arc before him.

The dirty clouds opened under his waving hand, and more metal glinted. Another crushed beercan---no, no, it wasn't. His heart kicked. He fanned the murk away, and caught sight of the speargun's handle. Gripped it in his right hand with a flood of relief. Thank God! he thought. Now he felt powerful again, and the shadows seemed to flee before him. He turned in a circle, illuminating the darkness at his back. Nothing there. Nothing. To his right the newspaper page flapped like a manta ray, and to his left the clouds parted for a second to show him a glimpse of the drain. He was in the twelve-foot depth. The deep end, that place where parents warned their kids not to go.

And about three feet from the drain lay something else. Something that made Glenn's throat catch and bubbles spill from his nostrils.

And that was when the thing that had taken the shape of a speargun in his hand burst into its true form, all camouflage done. Ice-white tentacles tightened around Glenn's wrist as his fingers spasmed open.

The bubbles of a scream exploded from Glenn's mouth, but his jaws clamped shut before all his air was lost. As he tried to lunge upward, a third and fourth tentacle---pale, almost translucent and as tough as piano-wire---shot out, squeezing into the drain's grate and locked there.

Glenn fought furiously, saw the monster's head taking shape from its gossamer ghost of a body; the head was triangular, like a cobra's, and from it emerged a single scarlet, blazing eye with a golden pupil. Below the eye was a small round mouth full of suction pads like the underside of a starfish. The mouth was pulsating rapidly, and began to turn from white to crimson.

The single eye stared into Glenn's face with clinical interest. And suddenly the thing's neck elongated and the mouth streaked around for the back of Glenn's neck.

He'd known that's where it was going to strike, and he'd flung his left arm up to ward off the blow an instant before it came. The mouth sealed to his shoulder like a hot kiss, hung there for a second and withdrew with a sputt of distaste. The monster's head weaved back and forth as Glenn hunched his shoulders up to protect the back of his neck and spinal cord. His lungs heaved; his mouth was full of water, the snorkel spun away in the turbulence. Water was streaming into his mask, and the light had dropped from the fingers of his left hand and lay on the bottom, sending rays through the roiling clouds like a weird sunset through an alien atmosphere.

The thing's head jerked forward, its mouth aiming at Glenn's forehead; he jerked aside as much as he could, and the mouth hit the facemask glass. Glenn felt tentacles slithering around his body, drawing him closer, trying to crack his ribs and squeeze the last of his air out. He pressed his left hand to the back of his neck. The monster's eye moved in the socket, seeking a way to the juices it craved. The mouth was bright red now, and deep in the folds of its white body, Glenn saw a crimson mass that pulsated at the same rhythm as its mouth.

Its heart, he realized. Its heart.

The blood thundered in his head. His lungs were seizing, about to grab for water. He looked down, saw the real speargun a few feet away. He had no time for even a second's hesitation, and he knew that if he failed he was dead.

He took his hand away from the back of his neck and reached for the gun, his own heartbeat about to blow the top of his skull off.

The creature's head came around like a whip. The suckers fixed to the base of Glenn's brain, and for an instant there was an agony that he thought would end only when his head split open; but then there was a numbing, floating, novocained sensation, and Glenn felt himself drifting toward death.

But he had the speargun in his hand.

The monster shivered with hungry delight. From between the suction cups tiny needle-like teeth began to drill through the pores of its prey's flesh, toward the spinal cord at the base of the brain.

One part of Glenn wanted to give up. Wanted to drift and sleep. Wanted to join Neil and the others who had gone to sleep in this pool. It would be so easy . . . so easy . . .

But the part of him that clung to life and Linda and the world beyond this pool made him lift the gun, press the barbed spear against the monster's pulsing heart and squeeze the trigger.

Sharp, head-clearing pain ripped through him. A black cloud of blood spilled into the water. The spear had pierced the creature's body and gone into his own forearm. The monster released his neck, its head whipping and the eye wide and stunned. Glenn saw that the spear had gone right through the thing's heart---if that's indeed what the organ was---and then he wrenched at his arm with all his remaining strength. The spear and the heart tore out of the monster's writhing body. The pupil of its eye had turned from gold to black, and its tattered body began to ooze through the drain's grate like strands of opaque jelly.

Glenn's lungs lurched. Pulled in water. He clawed toward the surface, his arm puffing blood. The surface was so far, so terribly far. The deep end had him, was not going to let him go. He strained upward, as dark gnawed at him and his lungs hitched and the water began to gurgle in his throat.

And then his head emerged into night air, and as he drew a long, shuddering breath he heard himself cry out like a victorious beast.

He didn't remember reaching the pool's side. Still would not trust the ladder. He tried to climb out and fell back several times. There seemed to be a lot of blood, and water still rattled in his lungs. He didn't know how long it was, but finally he pulled himself out and fell on his back on the wet concrete.

Sometime later, he heard a hissing sound.

He wearily lifted his head, and coughed more water out. At the end of the spear, the lump of alien flesh was sizzling. The heart shriveled until it resembled a piece of coal---and then it fell apart like black ash, and there was nothing left.

"Got you," Glenn whispered. "Got you . . . didn't I?"

He lay on his back for a long time, as the blood continued to stream from the wound in his arm, and when he opened his eyes again he could see the stars.

"Crazy fella busted in here last night," one of the overall-clad workmen said to the other as he lit a cigarette. "Heard it on the news this mornin'. Radio said a fella broke in here and went swimmin'. That's why the chain's cut off the gate."

"Is that right? Lawd, lawd! Jimmy, this is some crazy world!" The second workman, whose name was Leon, sat on the concrete beside the little brick enclosure housing an iron wheel that opened the drain and a switch that operated the electric pump. They'd spent an hour cleaning the pool out before they'd turned the wheel, and this was the first chance to sit down and rest. They'd filled a garbage bag with beercans, dead bugs, and other debris that had collected at the bottom. Now the water was draining out, the electric pump making a steady thumping sound. It was the first morning of September, and the sun was shining through the trees in Parnell Park.

"Some folks are just born fools," Jimmy offered, nodding sagely. "Radio said that fella shot himself with a spear. Said he was ravin' and crazy and the policeman who found him couldn't make heads or butts outta anythin' he was sayin'."

"Musta wanted to go swimmin' awful bad. Hope they put him in a nice asylum with a swimmin' pool."

Both men thought that was very funny, and they laughed. They were still laughing when the electric pump made a harsh gasping moan and died.

"Oh, my achin' ass!" Jimmy stood up, flicked his cigarette to the concrete. "We musta missed somethin'! Drain's done clogged for sure!" He went over to the brick enclosure and picked up a long-handled, telescoping tool with a hooked metal tip on the end. "Let's see if we can dig whatever it is out. If we can't, then somebody named Leon is goin' swimmin'."

"Uh uh, not me! I don't swim in nothin' but a bathtub!"

Jimmy walked to the edge of the low diving board and reached into the water with his probe. He telescoped the handle out and began to dig down at the drain's grate, felt the hook slide into something that seemed . . . rubbery. He brought the hook up and stood gawking at what dangled from it.

Whatever it was, it had an eye.

"Go . . . call somebody," he managed to tell Leon. "Go call somebody right quick!"

Leon started running for the pay phone at the shuttered concessions stand.

"Hey, Leon!" Jimmy called, and the other man stopped. "Tell 'em I don't know what it is . . . but tell 'em I think it's dead! And tell 'em we found it in the deep end!"

Leon ran on to make the phone call.

The electric pump suddenly kicked on again, and with a noise like a heartbeat began to return water to the lake.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46474116)

McCammon is very much a post-King writer, and so his stuff is sometimes a little bit derivative but it's very straightforward. I think "The Deep End" (which won the 1987 Stoker Award for best horror short story) exemplifies this approach.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46474174)

I guess my point is that McCammon started publishing after King became huge (and made horror profitable for major publishers). Things I'd note here:

-His novels tended towards large, epic doorstoppers, which was what publishers wanted; big thick books

-A lot of his novels are recapitulations of King style themes; They Thirst is Salem's Lot + The Stand; Boy's Life is sort of like IT; Swan Song is The Stand again.

-It's generally straightforward writing with a lot of focus on psychological realism and minor everyday details, and the horror tends to be quite literal. Like the story above--"The Deep End" isn't a shallow (heh) story--there's stuff about grief and guilt--but it's very physical and visceral and literal, with a lot of attention being paid to the nuts and bolts of what's going on. All things being equal, I much prefer that approach to the contemporary trend in the horror field to focus on 'trauma' etc. (elevated horror has been just as annoying in the literary field as in the cinematic).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46474463)

"The Companion" is one of his most celebrated stories--in Danse Macabre, Stephen King singles it out as containing "a horror beyond my ability to describe" and maybe "the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years; it is surely one of half a dozen or so which will still be in print and commonly read a hundred years from now."

I wouldn't go that far (although I *would* for another Campbell tale, "The Entertainment"), since I think the story takes a little too long to get going, but the payoff is one of the best Campbell's ever had. Enjoy!

***

When Stone reached the fairground, having been misdirected twice, he thought it looked more like a gigantic amusement arcade. A couple of paper cups tumbled and rattled on the shore beneath the promenade, and the cold insinuating October wind scooped the Mersey across the slabs of red rock that formed the beach, across the broken bottles and abandoned tyres. Beneath the stubby white mock turrets of the long fairground façade, shops displayed souvenirs and fish and chips. Among them, in the fairground entrances, scraps of paper whirled.

Stone almost walked away. This wasn’t his best holiday. One fairground in Wales had been closed, and this one certainly wasn’t what he’d expected. The guidebook had made it sound like a genuine fairground, sideshows you must stride among not looking in case their barkers lured you in, the sudden shock of waterfalls cascading down what looked like painted cardboard, the shots and bells and wooden concussions of target galleries, the girls’ shrieks overhead, the slippery armour and juicy crunch of toffee-apples, the illuminations springing alight against a darkening sky. But at least, he thought, he had chosen his time well. If he went in now he might have the fairground almost to himself.

As he reached an entrance, he saw his mother eating fish and chips from a paper tray. What nonsense! She would never have eaten standing up in public—“like a horse,” as she’d used to say. But he watched as she hurried out of the shop, face averted from him and the wind. Of course, it had been the way she ate, with little snatching motions of her fork and mouth. He pushed the incident to the side of his mind in the hope that it would fall away, and hurried through the entrance, into the clamour of colour and noise.

The high roof with its bare iron girders reminded him at once of a railway station, but the place was noisier still. The uproar—the echoing sirens and jets and dangerous groaning of metal—was trapped, and was deafening. It was so overwhelming that he had to remind himself he could see, even if he couldn’t hear.

But there wasn’t much to see. The machines looked faded and dusty. Cars like huge armchairs were lurching and spinning helplessly along a switchback, a canvas canopy was closing over an endless parade of seats, a great disc tasselled with seats was lifting towards the roof, dangling a lone couple over its gears. With so few people in sight it seemed almost that the machines, frustrated by inaction, were operating themselves. For a moment Stone had the impression of being shut in a dusty room where the toys, as in childhood tales, had come to life.

He shrugged vaguely and turned to leave. Perhaps he could drive to the fairground at Southport, though it was a good few miles across the Mersey. His holiday was dwindling rapidly. He wondered how they were managing at the tax office in his absence. Slower than usual, no doubt.

Then he saw the merry-go-round. It was like a toy forgotten by another child and left here, or handed down the generations. Beneath its ornate scrolled canopy the horses rode on poles towards their reflections in a ring of mirrors. The horses were white wood or wood painted white, their bodies dappled with purple, red and green, and some of their sketched faces too. On the hub, above a notice MADE IN AMSTERDAM, an organ piped to itself. Around it, Stone saw carved fish, mermen, zephyrs, a head and shoulders smoking a pipe in a frame, a landscape of hills and lake and unfurling perched hawk. “Oh yes,” Stone said.

As he clambered onto the platform he felt a hint of embarrassment, but nobody seemed to be watching. “Can you pay me?” said the head in the frame. “My boy’s gone for a minute.”

The man’s hair was the colour of the smoke from his pipe. His lips puckered on the stem and smiled. “It’s a good merry-go-round,” Stone said.

“You know about them, do you?”

“Well, a little.” The man looked disappointed, and Stone hurried on. “I know a lot of fairgrounds. They’re my holiday, you see, every year. Each year I cover a different area. I may write a book.” The idea had occasionally tempted him—but he hadn’t taken notes, and he still had ten years to retirement, for which the book had suggested itself as an activity.

“You go alone every year?”

“It has its merits. Less expensive, for one thing. Helps me save. Before I retire I mean to see Disneyland and Vienna.” He thought of the Big Wheel, Harry Lime, the earth falling away beneath. “I’ll get on,” he said.

He patted the unyielding shoulders of the horse, and remembered a childhood friend who’d had a rocking-horse in his bedroom. Stone had ridden it a few times, more and more wildly when it was nearly time to go home; his friend’s bedroom was brighter than his, and as he clung to the wooden shoulders he was clutching the friendly room too. Funny thinking of that now, he thought. Because I haven’t been on a merry-go-round for years, I suppose.

The merry-go-round stirred; the horse lifted him, let him sink. As they moved forward, slowly gathering momentum, Stone saw a crowd surging through one of the entrances and spreading through the funfair. He grimaced: it had been his fairground for a little while, they needn’t have arrived just as he was enjoying his merry-go-round.

The crowd swung away. A jangle of pinball machines sailed by. Amid the Dodgems a giant with a barrel body was spinning, flapping its limp arms, a red electric cigar thrust in its blank grin and throbbing in time with its slow thick laughter. A tinny voice read Bingo numbers, buzzing indistinctly. Perhaps it was because he hadn’t eaten for a while, saving himself for the toffee-apples, but he was growing dizzy—it felt like the whirling blurred shot of the fair in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a fair he hadn’t liked because it was too grim. Give him Strangers on a Train, Some Came Running, The Third Man, even the fairground murder in Horrors of the Black Museum. He shook his head to try to control his pouring thoughts.

But the fair was spinning faster. The Ghost Train’s station raced by, howling and screaming. People strolling past the merry-go-round looked jerky as drawings in a thaumatrope. Here came the Ghost Train once more, and Stone glimpsed the queue beneath the beckoning green corpse. They were staring at him. No, he realised next time round, they were staring at the merry-go-round. He was just something that kept appearing as they watched. At the end of the queue, staring and poking around inside his nostrils, stood Stone’s father.

Stone gripped the horse’s neck as he began to fall. The man was already wandering away towards the Dodgems. Why was his mind so traitorous today? It wouldn’t be so bad if the comparisons it made weren’t so repulsive. Why, he’d never met a man or woman to compare with his parents. Admired people, yes, but not in the same way. Not since the two polished boxes had been lowered into holes and hidden. Noise and colour spun about him and inside him. Why wasn’t he allowing himself to think about his parents’ death? He knew why he was blocking, and that should be his salvation: at the age of ten he’d suffered death and hell every night.

He clung to the wood in the whirlpool and remembered. His father had denied him a nightlight and his mother had nodded, saying “Yes, I think it’s time.” He’d lain in bed, terrified to move in case he betrayed his presence to the darkness, mouthing “Please God don’t let it” over and over. He lay so that he could see the faint grey vertical line of the window between the curtains in the far distance, but even that light seemed to be receding. He knew that death and hell would be like this. Sometimes, as he began to blur with sleep and the room grew larger and the shapes dark against the darkness awoke, he couldn’t tell that he hadn’t already died.

He sat back as the horse slowed and he began to slip forward across its neck. What then? Eventually he’d seen through the self-perpetuating trap of religious guilt, of hell, of not daring to believe in it because then it would get you. For a while he’d been vaguely uneasy in dark places, but not sufficiently so to track down the feeling and conquer it. After a while it had dissipated, along with his parents’ overt disapproval of his atheism. Yes, he thought as his memories and the merry-go-round slowed, I was happiest then, lying in bed hearing and feeling them and the house around me. Then, when he was thirty, a telephone call had summoned him to the hole in the road, to the sight of the car like a dead black beetle protruding from the hole. There had been a moment of sheer vertiginous terror, and then it was over. His parents had gone into darkness. That was enough. It was the one almost religious observance he imposed on himself: think no more.

And there was no reason to do so now. He staggered away from the merry-go-round, towards the pinball arcade that occupied most of one side of the funfair. He remembered how, when he lay mouthing soundless pleas in bed, he would sometimes stop and think of what he’d read about dreams: that they might last for hours but in reality occupied only a split second. Was the same true of thoughts? And prayers, when you had nothing but darkness by which to tell the time? Besides defending him, his prayers were counting off the moments before dawn. Perhaps he had used up only a minute, only a second of darkness. Death and hell—what strange ideas I used to have, he thought. Especially for a ten-year-old. I wonder where they went. Away with short trousers and pimples and everything else I grew out of, of course.

Three boys of about twelve were crowded around a pinball machine. As they moved apart momentarily he saw that they were trying to start it with a coin on a piece of wire. He took a stride towards them and opened his mouth—but suppose they turned on him? If they set about him, pulled him down and kicked him, his shouts would never be heard for the uproar.

There was no sign of an attendant. Stone hurried back to the merry-go-round, where several little girls were mounting horses. “Those boys are up to no good,” he complained to the man in the frame.

“You! Yes, you! I’ve seen you before. Don’t let me see you again,” the man shouted. They dispersed, swaggering.

“Things didn’t use to be like this,” Stone said, breathing hard with relief. “I suppose your merry-go-round is all that’s left of the old fairground.”

“The old one? No, this didn’t come from there.”

“I thought the old one must have been taken over.”

“No, it’s still there, what’s left of it,” the man said. ‘‘I don’t know what you’d find there now. Through that exit is the quickest way. You’ll come to the side entrance in five minutes, if it’s still open.”

The moon had risen. It glided along the rooftops as Stone emerged from the back of the funfair and hurried along the terraced street. Its light lingered on the tips of chimneys and the peaks of roofs. Inside the houses, above slivers of earth or stone that passed for front gardens, Stone saw faces silvered by television.

At the end of the terrace, beyond a wider road, he saw an identical street paralleled by an alley. Just keep going. The moon cleared the roofs as he crossed the intersection, and left a whitish patch on his vision. He was trying to blink it away as he reached the street, and so he wasn’t certain if he glimpsed a group of boys emerging from the street he’d just left and running into the alley.

Anxiety hurried him onwards while he wondered if he should turn back. His car was on the promenade; he could reach it in five minutes. They must be the boys he had seen in the pinball arcade, out for revenge. Quite possibly they had knives or broken bottles; no doubt they knew how to use them from the television. His heels clacked in the silence. Dark exits from the alley gaped between the houses. He tried to set his feet down gently as he ran. The boys were making no sound at all, at least none that reached him. If they managed to overbalance him they could smash his bones while he struggled to rise. At his age that could be worse than dangerous. Another exit lurked between the houses, which looked threatening in their weight and impassivity. He must stay on his feet whatever happened. If the boys got hold of his arms he could only shout for help. The houses fell back as the street curved, their opposite numbers loomed closer. In front of him, beyond a wall of corrugated tin, lay the old fairground.

He halted panting, trying to quell his breath before it blotted out any sounds in the alley. Where he had hoped to find a well-lit road to the promenade, both sides of the street ended as if lopped, and the way was blocked by the wall of tin. In the middle, however, the tin had been prised back like a lid, and a jagged entrance yawned among the sharp shadows and moonlit inscriptions. The fairground was closed and deserted.

As he realised that the last exit was back beyond the curve of the street, Stone stepped through the gap in the tin. He stared down the street, which was empty but for scattered fragments of brick and glass. It occurred to him that they might not have been the same boys after all. He pulled the tin to, behind him, and looked around.

The circular booths, the long target galleries, the low roller coaster, the ark and the crazy house draped shadow over each other and merged with the dimness of the paths between. Even the merry-go-round was hooded by darkness hanging from its canopy. Such wood as he could see in the moonlight looked ragged, the paint patchy. But between the silent machines and stalls one ride was faintly illuminated: the Ghost Train.

He walked towards it. Its front was emitting a pale green glow which at first sight looked like moonlight, but which was brighter than the white tinge the moon imparted to the adjoining rides. Stone could see one car on the rails, close to the entrance to the ride. As he approached, he glimpsed from the corner of his eye a group of men, stallholders presumably, talking and gesticulating in the shadows between two stalls. So the fairground wasn’t entirely deserted. They might be about to close, but perhaps they would allow him one ride, seeing that the Ghost Train was still lit. He hoped they hadn’t seen him using the vandals’ entrance.

As he reached the ride and realised that the glow came from a coat of luminous paint, liberally applied but now rather dull and threadbare, he heard a loud clang from the tin wall. It might have been someone throwing a brick, or someone reopening the torn door; the stalls obstructed his view. He glanced quickly about for another exit, but found none. He might run into a dead end. It was best to stay where he was. He couldn’t trust the stallholders; they might live nearby, they might know the boys or even be their parents. As a child he’d once run to someone who had proved to be his attacker’s unhelpful father. He climbed into the Ghost Train car.

Nothing happened. Nobody was attending the ride. Stone strained his ears. Neither the boys, if they were there, nor the attendant seemed to be approaching. If he called out the boys would hear him. Instead, frustrated and furious, he began to kick the metal inside the nose of the car.

Immediately the car trundled forward over the lip of an incline in the track and plunged through the Ghost Train doors into darkness.

As he swung round an unseen clattering curve, surrounded by noise and the dark, Stone felt as if he had suddenly become the victim of delirium. He remembered his storm-racked childhood bed and the teeming darkness pouring into him. Why on earth had he come on this ride? He’d never liked ghost trains as a child, and as he grew up he had instinctively avoided them. He’d allowed his panic to trap him. The boys might be waiting when he emerged. Well, in that case he would appeal to whoever was operating the ride. He sat back, gripping the wooden seat beneath him with both hands, and gave himself up to the straining of metal, the abrupt swoops of the car, and the darkness.

Then, as his anxiety about the outcome of the ride diminished, another impression began to trickle back. As the car had swung around the first curve he’d glimpsed an illuminated shape, two illuminated shapes, withdrawn so swiftly that he’d had no time to glance up at them. He had the impression that they had been the faces of a man and a woman, gazing down at him. At once they had vanished into the darkness or been swept away by it. It seemed to him for some reason very important to remember their expressions.

Before he could pursue this, he saw a greyish glow ahead of him. He felt an unreasoning hope that it would be a window, which might give him an idea of the extent of the darkness. But already he could see that its shape was too irregular. A little closer and he could make it out. It was a large stuffed grey rabbit with huge glass or plastic eyes, squatting upright in an alcove with its front paws extended before it. Not a dead rabbit, of course: a toy. Beneath him the car was clattering and shaking, yet he had the odd notion that this was a deliberate effect, that in fact the car had halted and the rabbit was approaching or growing. Rubbish, he thought. It was a pretty feeble ghost, anyway. Childish. His hands pulled at splinters on the wooden seat beneath him. The rabbit rushed towards him as the track descended a slight slope. One of its eyes was loose, and whitish stuffing hung down its cheek from the hole. The rabbit was at least four feet tall. As the car almost collided with it before whipping away around a curve, the rabbit toppled towards him and the light that illuminated it went out.

Stone gasped and clutched his chest. He’d twisted round to look behind him at the darkness where he judged the rabbit to have been, until a spasm wrenched him frontward again. Light tickling drifted over his face. He shuddered, then relaxed. Of course they always had threads hanging down for cobwebs, his friends had told him that. But no wonder the fairground was deserted, if this was the best they could do. Giant toys lit up, indeed. Not only cheap but liable to give children nightmares.

The car coursed up a slight incline and down again before shaking itself in a frenzy around several curves. Trying to soften you up before the next shock, Stone thought. Not me, thank you very much. He lay back in his seat and sighed loudly with boredom. The sound hung on his ears like muffs. Why did I do that? he wondered. It’s not as if the operator can hear me. Then who can?

Having spent its energy on the curves, the car was slowing. Stone peered ahead, trying to anticipate. Obviously he was meant to relax before the car startled him with a sudden jerk. As he peered, he found his eyes were adjusting to the darkness. At least he could make out a few feet ahead, at the side of the track, a squat and bulky grey shape. He squinted as the car coasted towards it. It was a large armchair.

The car came abreast of it and halted. Stone peered at the chair. In the dim hectic flecked light, which seemed to attract and outline all the restless discs on his eyes, the chair somehow looked larger than he. Perhaps it was farther away than he’d thought. Some clothes thrown over the back of the chair looked diminished by it, but they could be a child’s clothes. If nothing else, Stone thought, it’s instructive to watch my mind working. Now let’s get on.

Then he noticed that the almost invisible light was flickering. Either that, which was possible although he couldn’t determine the source of the light, or the clothes were shifting; very gradually but nonetheless definitely, as if something hidden by them was lifting them to peer out, perhaps preparatory to emerging. Stone leaned towards the chair. Let’s see what it is, let’s get it over with. But the light was far too dim, the chair too distant. Probably he would be unable to see it even when it emerged, the way the light had been allowed to run down, unless he left the car and went closer.

He had one hand on the side of the car when he realised that if the car moved off while he was out of it he would be left to grope his way through the darkness. He slumped back, and as he did so he glimpsed a violent movement among the clothes near the seat of the chair. He glanced towards it. Before his eyes could focus, the dim grey light was extinguished.

Stone sat for a moment, all of him concentrating on the silence, the blind darkness. Then he began to kick frantically at the nose of the car. The car shook a little with his attack, but stayed where it was. By the time it decided to move forward, the pressure of his blood seemed to be turning the darkness red.

When the car nosed its way around the next curve, slowing as if sniffing the track ahead, Stone heard a muted thud and creak of wood above the noise of the wheels. It came from in front of him. The sort of thing you hear in a house at night, he thought. Soon be out now.

Without warning a face came rushing towards him out of the darkness a few feet ahead. It jerked forward as he did. Of course it would, he thought with a grimace, sinking back and watching his face sink briefly into the mirror. Now he could see that he and the car were surrounded by a faint light that extended as far as the wooden frame of the mirror. Must be the end of the ride. They can’t get any more obvious than that. Effective in its way, I suppose.

He watched himself in the mirror as the car followed the curve past. His silhouette loomed on the greyish light, which had fallen behind. Suddenly he frowned. His silhouette was moving independent of the movement of the car. It was beginning to swing out of the limits of the mirror. Then he remembered the wardrobe that had stood at the foot of his childhood bed, and realised what was happening. The mirror was set in a door, which was opening.

Stone pressed himself against the opposite side of the car, which had slowed almost to a halt. No no, he thought, it mustn’t. Don’t. He heard a grinding of gears beneath him; unmeshed metal shrieked. He threw his body forward, against the nose of the car. In the darkness to his left he heard the creak of the door and a soft thud. The car moved a little, then caught the gears and ground forward.

As the light went out behind him, Stone felt a weight fall beside him on the seat.

He cried out. Or tried to, for as he gulped in air it seemed to draw darkness into his lungs, darkness that swelled and poured into his heart and brain. There was a moment in which he knew nothing, as if he’d become darkness and silence and the memory of suffering. Then the car was rattling on, the darkness was sweeping over him and by, and the nose of the car banged open the doors and plunged out into the night.

As the car swung onto the length of track outside the Ghost Train, Stone caught sight of the gap between the stalls where he had thought he’d seen the stallholders. A welling moonlight showed him that between the stalls stood a pile of sacks, nodding and gesticulating in the wind. Then the seat beside him emerged from the shadow, and he looked down.

Next to him on the seat was a shrunken hooded figure. It wore a faded jacket and trousers striped and patched in various colours, indistinguishable in the receding moonlight. The head almost reached his shoulder. Its arms hung slack at its sides, and its feet drummed laxly on the metal beneath the seat. Shrinking away, Stone reached for the front of the car to pull himself to his feet, and the figure’s head fell back.

Stone closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw within the hood an oval of white cloth upon which—black crosses for eyes, a barred crescent for a mouth—a grinning face was stitched.

As he had suddenly realised that the car hadn’t halted nor even slowed before plunging down the incline back into the Ghost Train, Stone did not immediately notice that the figure had taken his hand.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46478814)

“Too much ichor,” said red-faced Jack Magnusson, scowling into a playbook. “The whole tragedy is sopping in it. Blood, blood, blood. No, it won’t do for a student pro­duction. We’re not educating little vampires here.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Nora Sherman, the En­glish office head. She stared into Magnusson’s round obsi­dian paperweight, which he had pushed to the center of the table. Little Mr. Dean’s hand kept darting toward it and receding.

Magnusson, the chairman of Blackstone Intermediate School’s Ethics Advisory Committee, threw the playbook at Steve Dean, who was sometimes mistaken for a student. Dean flinched but caught it.

“Well, Jack . . .”

“Speak up, Dean.”

“Er, it is Macbeth, Jack, and it’s on the reading list this year.”

Magnusson drew himself up, spreading his halfback shoul­ders, running a hand through his thinning steel-wool hair. “That curriculum’s always been trouble,” he said, “but there’s no use asking for more. What with the swear-word in Catcher in the Rye and the dead horse in Red Sky at Morn­ing and the A.V. Department showing Corpse Grinders on Back-to-School Night, we’re going to start losing constitu­ents to other districts that don’t have these problems.”

Dean looked ready to cry into the pages of Macbeth. Nora Sherman grabbed the book from him and held it dan­gling by the spine.

She said, “Tirades aside, Jack, you’d better let the kids do Shakespeare this year or there’ll be a rebellion. Birnham Wood will move at recess, with Neal Bay heading the insur­rection. There’s a lot of talent going to waste around here and the kids damn well know it.”

Dean stared at her, dazed. “Well said, Nora.”

“You stay out of this,” she said.

“What do you want from me?” Magnusson asked her. “I can’t approve this.”

“Perhaps not as it is, but what if it were toned down?”

Magnusson reared back. “Cut out the blood? There’d be nothing left.”

“No editing,” she said. “We won’t use the Shakespeare. We’ll write our own version. Improvise. I’ve seen grade school kids do it with The Wind in the Willows. Once we get rid of the poetry, we’re not stuck to the plot, and that gives the students considerable freedom. We can change the set­ting and period.”

Magnusson got the book back. “Take it out of Scotland, you mean?”

“I’ve seen it done. Romeo and Juliet transplanted into the Stone Age, or onto Monster Beach. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the usual organ donor. Can you imagine it set in German-occupied France? Or in Boston during the Revolu­tionary War? One was set in Transylvania, but it wasn’t ex­actly bloodless …” She trailed off, one metallic blue fingernail tracing the green line of an artery on the back of her hand.

“You could set it in Siberia or the outback,” said Mr. Dean. He sat up and reached for the book, but Magnusson ignored him and held the captive copy spread masklike before his face. Dean dropped back into his seat and gazed into the paperweight.

“Or the Old West,” he said, crossing his arms.

“Too messy, Dean,” said Mrs. Sherman. “What I suggest is we give our actor-warriors weapons that won’t be as sloppy as bullets and swords. Give them, say, ray-guns and send them off to . . . I don’t know, Mars. Sure. Tie it in with the study groups reading The Martian Chronicles.”

“Mars,” said Magnusson, as if the planet were a jaw­breaker that refused to dissolve on his tongue.

“With real Martian music,” said Mr. Dean.

Mrs. Sherman caught and held his eyes. “I didn’t say any­thing about that.”

“No, I did,” said Mr. Dean.

“We have to use the band this year,” said Magnusson.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because he promised,” said Mr. Dean. “We haven’t had a musical in the last three years. The Crucible, Man in the Moon Marigolds, Snake House . . . The things these kids choose, I swear. They have the sense of humor of morti­cians. This year we’re doing something lighter, a musical ‘revue.’ I think our own Sheri DuBose could come up with something appropriate in the way of music and songs for Macbeth.”

“Oh my God,” said Nora, sinking.

Magnusson hardly looked at her, though he was smiling with one side of his mouth. “That should keep the kids tame, yes.”

“For that you’d need wild-animal tamers,” said Mr. Dean. “At least it will keep them happy.”

Mrs. Sherman seemed to come out of a coma. “Forget I ever mentioned Macbeth. Don’t do it to that play. Not that silly girl’s music . . .”

“Nora,” said Mr. Magnusson, shaking his head at her and smiling as if he knew something she didn’t. “So pale. Are you well?”

“Seen Banquo’s ghost?” said Dean, with a chuckle.

“You’re not being a very good sport,” said Magnusson. “We’ve all got what we wanted.”

She tightened her metallic-blue mouth, looked at both of them, then put out a hand and touched the copy of Macbeth as if to swear upon it. When she was perfectly still, she whis­pered, “If you get Sheri DuBose, I get Ricardo Rivera.” Mr. Dean jumped as if he had been grabbed; but before he could form a word or stop her, her hand shot out and touched the black paperweight in the center of the table.

“Ha!” she said. “Motion passed.”

Dean slumped back in his chair.

“All right,” said Magnusson. “Let’s move on to athlet­ics.”

#

Lunch bag in hand, Ricardo Rivera hurried across the quad­rangle toward the crowd of twelve- and thirteen-year-old students that had gathered at the back of the auditorium by the stage door.

He was a small boy, green-eyed, with dark curly hair, fine-cut features, and a grin that some might call elfin. The grin was partly imaginary because at that moment he thought he was to be the next Macbeth.

At the edge of the group he asked Sheri DuBose if the cast list for Macbeth’s Martian Revue had been posted, though it obviously hadn’t.

“Not yet, Ricardo,” she said. “Mr. Dean wants me to write the songs, though.” She smiled. “I have it on good authority.”

“Good authority,’” mimicked Bruce Vicks, pigging his nose at her with a finger. “Sheri DuPug,” he said.

Sheri snorted and turned away, forgetting about Ricardo. “‘If it were done when ’tis done,’” Ricardo said, “then ’tis best it were done when it’s best it were . . . now wait a minute.” His audition piece was already sliding from mem­ory.

“Here come de prez,” somebody said.

Ricardo jumped to look over the heads of the others and saw a tall boy with longish sun-bleached hair, a sure and smiling freckled face, and the lopsided walk of a skateboarder.

Ricardo waved at him. “Hey, Neal, over here!”

Neal Bay joined the crowd, smiling at everyone.

“Good job, Neal,” said Randy Keane, shaking Neal’s hand. “You better remember your campaign promise for lots of movies.”

“Won’t forget,” said Neal. “I’ve already got The Red Bal­loon on order.”

Keane groaned and laughed. “That stinker?”

Ricardo pushed his way to Neal’s side. “The list’s not up yet.”

“Duh,” said Neal. “My brilliant campaign manager. I can see the list isn’t up yet, dipstick. I don’t know how I won with you on my side.”

Ricardo ignored the insult and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I hear Cory gave you trouble yesterday.”

“Trouble? Who told you that?”

“At student council.”

“No trouble, except maybe for you. I just asked Cory about a few of the things you told me.”

Ricardo stepped back. “I told you? Like what?”

“Oh, like how you said that Lisa Freuhoff told you Cory was fixing the elections.”

“That’s what Lisa said,” said Ricardo, backing away but pointing at Neal. “I didn’t say it was true.”

“Yeah? And how she swore I’d be sorry if I won. She’d get even, you said. I never asked where you heard that one.”

“Lisa said it,” Ricardo said.

Neal crossed his arms, rolled his eyes, and smirked. “Yeah? Well, Cory and I are a team now.”

“But she was your-your enemy!”

“We were never enemies. We always knew one of us would win, and the other would be vice-president. You just wanted us to be enemies.”

Ricardo fell silent, trying to imagine what Neal meant. “We’ve been good friends, Neal,” he said. “You shouldn’t just treat me like this now that you’ve won. You’ll still see me around. Maybe you’ll even get the part of Banquo. You did a great audition.”

“Banquo?” Neal laughed. “I’m going to be Mister Mac­beth, Junior.”

“No way,” said Ricardo. The idea was laughable, and he laughed. Then he turned his tongue back to the more im­portant issue. “Cory was always nasty to you. Remember that time in the cafeteria?”

“You shut up,” Neal said, taking a step to hook his forefinger into the soft flesh and glands under Ricardo’s jaw. The bigger boy grinned, and it was not the kind of smile that makes one comfortable.

Ricardo moaned until Neal let him slip free. There were tears in his eyes, and his voice didn’t carry.

“Bet you don’t even get Malcolm’s part,” he said. “Bet you don’t even get to be a Murderer.”

Neal started forward.

“It’s a fight!”

A cry from the direction of the door interrupted them. Mr. Dean stepped outside, wincing at the sunlight and the students. He waved a sheet of ditto paper as if it were a pennant. Everyone cheered. He tacked it to the door and slipped back in before he could be trapped by the kids.

As Ricardo struggled forward, he dropped his lunch bag. He bent down, but before he could grab it a Hush Puppy squashed the sack, spilling the guts of a peanut butter and banana sandwich onto the asphalt. Rising, suddenly hungry, he heard someone say, “Awright! Macbeth for President!”

“No,” Ricardo said in disbelief. “Oh, no.”

President Bay appeared above him, looking down his long, straight nose. “Sorry, buddy, you’re Banquo. Sorry for both of us, I mean. I’d just as soon not see you on that stage.”

Ricardo felt his face scrunch up with anger. “Banquo,” he said. “Banquo gets killed halfway through, then he’s just a- a-a ghost. I wanted—”

“Don’t be a wussy,” Neal said.

“A wussy?” Ricardo said. His anger passed and he felt weak. “Neal, see if I was second choice.”

“You dummy, you’re not even my understudy. Be glad you got anything.”

“But you can’t do it, Neal, you don’t have the time. You’re already president, isn’t that enough?”

“President no thanks to you, when all you did was tell me lies about Cory Fordyce, which is pretty screwed consider­ing how you’ve got the hots for her.”

Around them, kids were staring and starting to laugh. Some even looked frightened in a tentative, eager way. “The hots,” someone repeated.

Ricardo tripped on an ankle out of nowhere, and falling backward grabbed the nearest object: Neal’s chest. He heard a rip as he continued to fall, and when he landed he had a handful of torn, threadbare cotton with Primo Beer written across it.

He looked slowly up at a bare-chested, raging Neal, and something happened to freeze them in time. Something kept his words in his mouth and Neal’s fists in the air. Everything stopped and Ricardo sat suspended outside of the world.

Until Cory Fordyce looked in.

Long blond hair, Miss Clairol curls, rosy cheeks and lips, pale blue eyes. All he could see of her was her face; the crowd hid the rest. She was peering around Neal, while Neal turned slowly to look at her.

“Hello, Cory,” Neal said, smiling as his fingers uncurled.

She scowled past him and looked down at Ricardo. “What did you tell him about me, Ricardo?”

“I didn’t say a thing!” Ricardo shouted. “Lisa said! Ask Lisa!”

Neal stepped forward with a shout, swinging his arm as if he were bowling. Ricardo’s face went numb with pain; he wasn’t sure why. He lay back on the asphalt, smelling a cloud of tarry, rusty, bloody smoke rising around him. Neal’s fist floated above in slow motion, a white planet spat­tered in blood. Ricardo’s awareness roamed into the dark.

#

“Ricardo?” A woman’s voice. “This is Mrs. Ensign, the nurse. We’ve called your mother. I’m afraid she’ll have to take you to the hospital. Your nose is quite broken. Breathe through your mouth and you won’t have so much trouble.”

His face felt like a pane of safety glass, shattered but clinging together. She wiped his eyes with a wet cloth as the sounds of typewriters and telephones filled his ears.

Jars rattled and a fluorescent light appeared. Mrs. Ensign stood above, shaking a thermometer. Then she shook her head.

“If I did that you wouldn’t be able to breathe,” she said. “Poor boy.”

“Bisses Edsid, could I see a cast list for Bacbeth’s Bartiad Revue?”

“A catalyst for who?”

“Cast list, cast list. I cad’t talk right.”

“Can you read right? Stay put, I’ll get you the list.”

When she returned, she had a ditto so fresh it fumed. She held it before his face so that he could read:

MACBETH’S MARTIAN REVUE

Macbeth . . . . . . Neal Bay

Banquo . . . . . . Ricardo Rivera

Lady Macbeth . . . . . Cory Fordyce

“That’s all,” he said.

She left him alone with his pain.

Why me? he thought. Why me?

That was an old thought, worn thin over the years of his childhood. It hardly captured his present frustration, which felt like the undertow at high tide.

Why Neal? he thought. Better.

Why Neal, the sun-tanned surfer, instead of me, the brainy twerp? I’m not such a bad bodysurfer.

And why Neal, with the perfect dumb joke that makes all the girls laugh (except Cory usually, but probably now she’ll laugh), instead of me, s-s-stuttering R-R-Ricardo?

Yeah? Why does Neal get to be President Bloody Mac­beth of the Blackstone Intermediate Bloody Spaceways and the Planet of Bloody Blood; when I get to be Good Ol’ Banquo the Friendly Ghost?

Why does Neal get Cory while I get . . . I get . . .

Cory. Thinking of her was like swallowing a Superball. He had never gotten over the bruises she’d given him the previous year, when he had let himself have a crush on her even while knowing that she hated him, even while knowing for certain that his affection would make her crueler.

In moments of pain, her image always brightened to tor­ment him. He had never known as much pain as he felt now, and her face had never been so bright.

#

That night he cried out in his sleep. His mother found him sitting half-awake in his bed, describing in a senseless rush the events of some nightmare on another world: a planet of blood where starships of rusted metal crashed into the ruins of red cities; where a bloody sun and moon chased each other round and round while the stars howled in a hungry chorus, and seas of blood drenched everything in red. He fell back asleep without truly waking, leaving her clinging to his seemingly empty body, leaving her afraid.

On the table by his bedside, she saw his English assign­ment: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

“I’ll call the office in the morning,” she promised her son. “That place is giving you nightmares.”

#

Mrs. Sherman sighed when she saw Ricardo in homeroom 408 the next morning. His bandaged nose was the subject of several disputes between first and second bells. As the stu­dents punched their new day’s schedules into computer cards and copied each other’s math homework, she watched him gazing into space. Near the end of the period, she checked his schedule and saw that he had no class after home room.

“Would you please come see me at fourth bell?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Sherman,” said Ricardo, and he shuffled away without having met her eyes.

He wandered into the department office at third bell and was waiting for her when she got free of Mr. Ezra and Miss Bachary, who each claimed to have the room for the next period. The scheduling computer was down again.

“Everyone defended Neal,” he said, when she was sitting at her desk. He looked about eighty years old when he said it. She wanted to tell him to look up, to smile.

“They said you started it?” she asked.

He nodded. “I let them give my part away. Newt got it. David Deacon, I mean. He’s even shorter than me. I don’t know why Mr. Dean thinks Banquo’s a shrimp.”

“Have you taken your story to Mr. Magnusson?” she asked.

“He and Mr. Bay go golfing together,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the stupid play anyway.”

“Maybe it’s for the better, Ricardo,” she said. “I thought of you when we chose Macbeth. Mr. Dean will need a stu­dent playwright, someone who can write, to polish what the actors come up with and read it back to them better than before.”

Ricardo looked up, astonished. “You mean me?”

She smiled. “That could be, but it depends on you.”

“I’d do it! I have an idea about-about Macbeth’s mother!”

“Fine, Ricardo. I’ve talked to David Deacon since he was chosen, by the way. He’s in my science fiction class and he loves Mars. He said he’d be glad to help you learn what you need to know to write a story on Mars.”

“Write a story on Mars,” Ricardo said to himself. “Wow.”

“—gladly share his fine ideas about the angry red planet, that grisly world of war and blood.”

She looked past him, through the filing cabinets, up at the clock.

“And Macbeth,” she intoned, “all black and red, dark night and dark blood. A haunted planet, a cursed play. Did you know there was a curse put on the play? It’s bad luck for an actor to hear the Scotsman’s name, unless they’re in the play. If you listen long enough, you’ll hear stories about the strange things that happen when people perform Macbeth. ”

Ricardo’s gaze followed the path her eyes traced upward, ever upward.

“Use your gift, Ricardo.”

“Okay, Mrs. Sherman, I’ll give it a try.”

“A-plus, Ricardo,” she said. “You’re A-plus material.”

#

The new Banquo, David “Newt” Deacon, was a nerd. He even had a bowl-head haircut. When Ricardo found him in the audiovisual room, he had toilet plungers strapped to both legs and was filming himself with an upside-down video camera while extolling the virtues of “Human Housefly Sucker-Cups.” He looked a bit like a housefly himself, wearing bug-eyed glasses with quarter-inch-thick lenses.

Newt shed his plungers and turned off the video recorder.

“Ricky River?” he asked.

“Ricardo Rivera.”

Newt shook his head, as if clearing it. “Thought that couldn’t be right.”

“Mrs. Sherman sent me.”

“Oh, I know. Excuse me a second.” He went poking through shelves cluttered with tape reels and charred copper wire, speaking over his shoulder. “She’s neat, huh? She said I’d tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Mars, right?”

“I guess I know as much as anybody. I read The Martian Chronicles. ”

“Oh,” Newt said. “That’s just the beginning.”

When he came out of the cupboard, holding a burned-out electromagnet, his cheeks were sucked in between his mo­lars. He stared at Ricardo’s bandages.

“Neal was my best friend once,” he said. “Back in fifth grade, we did everything together. He got ideas for all these neat things—squirt-gun burglar traps and stuff—and I built ’em. But he kept taking and breaking them. Now it figures he’s president. And going with Cary Fordyce, too.”

“Cory,” said Ricardo.

Newt unwound some of the scorched copper wire from the motor and began winding it around the fingers of his left hand as he talked.

“Here’s what I thought would work for Mars on the stage: all red lights; we’d make big castles out of red foam rubber—sandstone-looking stuff. I wanted to do a sand­storm—they’re really bad on Mars—but Mr. Dean said no, too messy. We get an avalanche at least. The space suits are gonna be kind of a cross between space suits and kilts.”

“How about canals?” Ricardo asked.

“There aren’t any canals,” Newt said emphatically. “Didn’t you ever see Robinson Crusoe on Mars?”

“No, but-but I think I know how Mars looks.” He looked up and saw a clock with its hands skipping backward. The office reset speeding clocks several times a day. “It has two moons, a red sky, towers, and Martians who nobody ever sees . . . I bet I could write it so everyone acted like they would if they were really up there.”

“Make it good and bloody,” said Newt, fidgeting with the prongs of an electric plug. The other end of the wire was hooked to the motor, now strapped to his left hand.

“Yeah,” Ricardo sighed, “except they won’t let us have any blood in it.”

“Aw, there’s this great word from horror stories that no one would ever mind.”

Ricardo leaned closer. “Tell me.”

Newt’s hand exploded. He yanked the plug out of the wall socket while Ricardo, in shock, peered at the smoldering hand.

“You did that to yourself?”

Grinning, Newt unwrapped his hand and held it out. The fingers and palm were powdered with carbon but unharmed.

“Mr. Dean’s letting me do the special effects,” he said. “Now, you were asking about a good word for blood?”

#

A small flame licked up and seared Ricardo’s heart each time Cory and Neal shared the stage. Two weeks after the primaries, their political sessions were notorious; according to Lisa Freuhoff, they would as soon ogle each other as fil­ibuster. Sunk deep into a folding chair, Ricardo daily watched them declare their sappy Martian version of love while a piano student rapped out accompaniment. When the ruddy stage lighting lingered in their eyes even off the stage, he saw it as the glow of lust and hated it. Cory tried none of the tricks she had played on Ricardo last year. She and Neal were at each other’s mercy.

One afternoon, between scenes, Neal jumped from the stage and sauntered over to Ricardo.

“What a quay-zar,” Neal said.

Ricardo drew up his knees and sank down into the safety of his own lap. “What are you trying to prove, Bay?”

“Nothing you haven’t proved already. That you’re a lying little wimp. If your mouth and fingers are both really con­nected to your brain, then everything you’re writing is prob­ably a lie, too.”

Ricardo sat up and set the script book down. He was get­ting hot now.

“Neal, would you just fuck off?”

Of course, of course his voice had to break when he said the worst word he knew.

“Ooooh! What nasty words! They’re just what I’d expect from a nasty little boy like you. Nasty little fag.”

Neal spun away and leapt back onto the stage without using his hands. Ricardo lapsed into a fever of pent rage; he almost smote his breast in public.

“Just because I don’t have a bitch for a girlfriend!”

Sheri DuBose, who was passing behind him, gasped.

He blushed, felt his ears burning. When she was gone, he looked at Cory Fordyce, alone at the center of the stage. He covered her with a hand, imagining the bitch-queen of them all in her place. Lady Macbeth, with long black hair and vampire teeth and bloody lips and hungry eyes. In his mind, the Lady consumed Cory, another bitch, and he began to smile.

“I don’t care if I’m not Macbeth or Banquo or any of you,” he whispered, giggling.

He held his pen up before his eyes, concentrating on it until he went slightly cross-eyed. His thinking also did some­thing like doubling; he suddenly thought of himself as every one of them. He could be Duncan, murdered in his sand castle, and any or all of the three witches who danced across the viewscreen of the starship Silex; he could be the comical porter of the air-lock. The whole time the players thought they were creating the play, he had actually been writing new lines and getting the actors to learn them.

Over Christmas break, he was left to polish the script and prepare a final version. He lost interest in the mundane holi­day and often had to be coerced to take part in family af­fairs such as ornamenting the tree and visiting relatives.

For two solid weeks he breathed the sands of Mars and haunted the winding stairs of a crumbling Martian castle. Instead of carols, he heard phantom birds cawing from the high thin air as murder sneaked through the two-mooned night. His dreams were premonitions of laser-fire, in which no blood was allowed. The holes in Duncan’s chest smoldered, cauterized. And always, just before he woke, the sand dunes of the Birnham Waste came humping for­ward, crawling, alive . . . .

He wrote and rewrote. Sometimes he stared at the wall and the soccer trophies and the Certificates of Merit and the pencils in the papier-mâché holder he’d made in third grade. He stared at these objects but all the while saw blood, only blood, blood swirling into sand, spraying in the wind, blood that the school would never allow, everywhere the sub­stance that the Committee had forbidden.

The days passed in a red dream.

(“Merry Christmas, darl— Ricardo, did you even sleep?”)

On New Year’s Day, inspired by the changing year, he took a silver pin and pricked his fingertips; squeezed out bright beads and droplets that splashed the fresh-typed manuscript; chanted, “By the pricking of my thumbs, Neal Bay is overcome!”

He smeared a little blood on each page. For a while he watched it dry, then he licked his fingers clean of blood and ink.

#

“Excellent job, Mr. Rivera,” said Mr. Dean the next day. “Sheri turned in the final draft of her songs; I hope you two got together over the holidays? Then I guess that should do it. Listen, if you’re not too busy this trimester, why don’t you lend a hand building sets?”

Ricardo could have cackled and rubbed his hands to­gether, but he had more control than that. He nodded and went looking for a hammer.

That afternoon he worked on the stage, doing quiet tasks with glue and thumbtacks in the dark wings while the actors looked over their new script.

Cory Fordyce said, “But I don’t remember . . . Morris, this isn’t our play.”

“What else would it be?” said Mr. Dean. His word out­weighed that of Morris Fluornoy, the student director. “I’ll expect you to have it memorized by Friday. Don’t forget, opening night’s only two months away.”

“But this is scary,” said Lady Macbeth.

“It’s supposed to be,” said Newt, who had already com­plimented Ricardo on his script. “It’s Mars. Didn’t you ever see Queen of Blood?”

Ricardo resumed hammering. In his hands, the first of the Martian towers began to rise. The flunkies in set construc­tion were used to taking orders; it was easy to shape their understanding of Martian architecture. He explained how low gravity and rarefied air required all structures to be warped until they could withstand ion storms and colloidal temperature gradients.

So, under his direction, they built something like a huge Cubist monster with a low, foam-rubber belly, giraffe-long legs, and a vast fanged mouth missing the lower jaw. They painted it red-orange, stapled a slit sheet of clear plastic be­tween the front legs, and finally gave it wheels. Ricardo dis­covered a talent for painting, and covered it with writhing figures, deliberately crude glyphs of torment.

Portcullis-cum-air-lock. Hell-gate. Beast. It stood like a watchdog, always somewhere on the stage, its upper regions hidden from the audience by hanging backdrops and the proscenium arch.

Another of Ricardo’s talents also came in handy. He proved an excellent mimic, and so created a variety of un­usual sound effects once he’d made friends with the sound technician. The obscure bird of night called, when it called, in a high voice familiar to Neal; and each time it called, the sandy-haired athlete grew slightly pale inside his skier’s tan. The bird’s cry, Neal once said to Cory within Ricardo’s hearing, sounded almost like a voice. He didn’t know that the words, Ricardo’s taunts, had been accelerated and run together until no sense could be made of them.

Neal became an ever more haggard Macbeth, in his plas­tic kilt and rakish cellophane visor. He started crossing the stage to avoid the young playwright and set-builder.

But Lady Macbeth—that is, Cory Fordyce—seemed to grow ever bolder.

Ricardo noticed her watching him as he went about his business in the shadows. One day he climbed a ladder all the way up to the catwalk, where spotlights and unused backdrops hung. He stood directly over her as she read a hologram from her husband who was fighting rebels in space. Ricardo concentrated on the top of her head, and within seconds she looked straight up at him, though he had climbed aloft in perfect silence, unobserved until now. He pretended to adjust a red gel on a spotlight while she contin­ued her speech.

When he descended she walked proudly toward him, seeming to drink up the red light as she came, seeming to swell and tower as it filled her. Her hair caught scarlet high­lights, her mouth wettened with blood, her eyes swam in red tears.

“Ricardo,” she said, “what are you up to?”

He backed away and she moved closer, forcing him into a corner.

“What are you doing to us?” she repeated.

Ricardo could summon no strength to meet the red glare in her eyes. Her intonation was that of Lady Macbeth in speeches he had written. She had such power over him. He felt his own power ebbing, leaking swiftly onto the ground, unstoppable.

She followed him along the row of ropes that dangled up into darkness.

“Don’t you run,” she said, “I want to talk to you. Some­times you make me so mad—”

He saw a door and rushed through it, and turned with a cry as he realized his mistake. He had fled into the light cage. He turned to see her, triumphant and angry as she grabbed the wirework door and slammed it shut upon him.

The last of his strength left him. He slumped backward, catching his elbows on light levers, and so drew the theater into darkness with him as he fell.

When they found the source of trouble, they sent him out to sit in the auditorium until he felt better.

Cory came onstage. For a moment the lights were all wrong, pale white instead of red. She looked like a por­celain doll, eyes wide but blank. When she saw Ricardo, she looked over his head. Though he was the only one in the empty auditorium, she looked everywhere but at him.

“We’ll try Lady Macbeth’s song now,” said Morris.

“It’s Neal I want,” Ricardo whispered. “Stay out of my way.”

He felt murderous and guilty, but the alternative was worse. If he didn’t hate, then there would be nothing left for him at all. He did not want to be numb. If no one loved him, then he would see that they hated him; for though love was but a dream one forgot upon waking, hate worked in full daylight. Hate brought bright red visions of double lu­nacy, of a crimson planet spinning through a velvet-black void.

The piano played a few notes and Cory sang:

“Should l? Could I?

Would I do this deed?

How will—I kill

Duncan and mislead

The Martian warriors who’ll

Find him in his bed

The noble fighters

Who’ll see he’s really dead?

With Duncan’s last breath,

He’ll see a Macbeth,

But will it be my Lord or me?

Should it be my Lord or me?”

Ricardo groaned at Sheri’s song. It was so bad it might ruin the rest of the show.

Neal entered and they began a duet.

“Will we? Shall we?

How can we protect our fate?

Still we . . . will be . . .

Taking risks so very great.”

The monster of hell-gate loomed suddenly flimsy and ri­diculous above the awkward singers.

“Dare we? Care we?”

Ricardo answered, “No!”

He rushed down the row of folding chairs, kicking a few out of his way. The piano stopped and the singers fell quiet. The actors and crew came out on the stage to see him.

“That stuff stinks!” he said.

“Mr. Rivera,” said Mr. Dean, aiming a quivering finger at the door, “you are out of bounds. Now leave and don’t bother returning.”

“I won’t have to come back,” he said. “I’ll hear every­body booing on opening night, even way out where I live.”

Cory’s eyes flashed red and he stayed a moment to look at her. Hate mauled his heart. He slammed his way outside to face a cloudy sky of blue with no trace of red in it.

#

Even then, he did not abandon the play. Whenever possi­ble, he entered the auditorium before crew and cast arrived, and stayed hidden up in the dark catwalks until all had gone. Cory never saw him, for her eyes were always on Neal. Ricardo’s eyes, in the meantime, opened to the full scheme of performance, the total effect of actors and words, lighting and music—such as it was—working in dramatic fu­sion.

With silver pins he pricked his thumbs and dribbled his blood over everything, investing the play with his own power. He bled on the net full of foam boulders intended for the avalanche scene. He daubed the witches’ robes down in the costume rooms; these were worn by three members of Neal and Cory’s cabinet. Let them wear his blood, and though they were enemies their gestures might carry some of his power.

There were rumors, whispers, stories that he overheard from his high place. A girl in the costume room had seen the witches’ robes moving all by themselves. A boy working late on the set had seen a woman in red-black tatters stand­ing in the light cage. Shreds of music drifted over the stage when the tape player was disconnected. Others saw severed heads that vanished. Then the hell-beast rolled swiftly across the stage with no hands pushing it.

Only Ricardo saw Newt at his tricks.

He thought of nothing but Macbeth’s Martian Revue. He never again wondered, “Why him instead of me?” His power carried him beyond all that. In daydreams he com­muned with Shakespeare and saw at first hand the awful history that had provoked the play: Macbeth’s veiled mother (where could she have come from, except his dreams?) pointing the finger of guilt at Duncan. He dipped a hand into eternity and sipped from the splashing spring of the witches’ queen Hecate: a fount of blood in a dark forest. Not even the Ethics Advisory Committee could spoil that sanguine vision or censor its red power, no more than they could stop his Mars from coming into being as he imagined it.

Vampire dreams. Huddled like a bat in the loft, he watched the actors. He hid by the speaker where the night-bird cried, and sometimes joined its voice with his own. Even Newt looked worried then, and he had wished aloud for ghostly visitations.

Cory also came into her own, and nothing strange or out of place could touch her. She led Neal around by the hand; leaned against him during critique sessions; and one after­noon, while Ricardo watched, she kissed him backstage. The kiss lasted too long and Ricardo gasped for air. Neal’s hands on her hips, clutching and tense, pulled her forward; while her hands rested smooth and relaxed upon his shoul­ders, and drew gentle curves, and never needed to tug be­cause he fell toward her of his own will. Ricardo, too, almost fell. Later he lay on his back, panting, dreaming of the plunge he had nearly taken.

Opening night came as if without warning, but Ricardo had been ready for a long time.

“Banquo!” he called through the stage door. “Banquo, psst!”

Newt spied him and came over, looking wary at first, then startled. He wore pointed ears, Mr. Spock style.

“You!” he said. “You’re not supposed to—”

“Come outside a minute,” Ricardo said.

They stood in the lunch quadrangle. It was dark except for a moth-battered floodlight above the stage door.

“Are you going to see the show?” Newt asked. “It shaped up pretty well, except for those dumb songs.”

“I want a favor,” Ricardo said. “No one but you will know, all right?”

“What kind of favor?”

Ricardo held up a paper sack. “I’ve got a space suit in here, kilt and visor with Banquo’s emblem on ’em. I want to play your ghost tonight.”

“What? You can’t—”

Ricardo lunged and caught Newt by the throat. He held him against the wall.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Deacon, but I will. Just let me play Banquo’s ghost. We’ll switch places, it’s a short scene. No one’ll know it’s me except for you.”

“Why?” Newt asked. “It’s crazy.”

“That’s right. And if Neal asks, it was you playing the ghost, not me.”

Newt took a deep breath. “Let go.”

“Not till you agree.”

Newt shrugged. “I don’t care if you’re the ghost. Be my guest. It’s still pretty weird.”

“Yeah. Go on, get ready. I’ll be hiding backstage.” Newt went back inside. Ricardo went to a restroom and changed into the space suit. He fit a cap over his curls and pulled down the visor, thus resembling a dozen others in the cast. A tube of Vampire Blood, left over from Halloween, went into a tunic pocket.

When he returned to the auditorium, the play began with an orchestral flourish that seemed to catch up and echo the coughs of the audience. The Blackstone Intermediate School Band forged on to the end of the overture, then con­tinued a few bars past that and sputtered into silence.

He peered through the backstage curtains and saw the set of Macbeth’s spaceship, the Silex, much resembling the deck of the Enterprise from Star Trek. On the viewscreen—a framework with blue gauze stretched across it—three hags from Cory’s campaign appeared cackling prophecies.

Neal Macbeth set his jaw and told the hags to get out of the way, he needed to see to make a landing. He was taking his shipful of space pirates to fight for the planet Mars.

“Aye, the red planet,” said one witch. “That swollen, in­fected orb of death and decay. Beware you do not stab the crawling sands, for your own ichor may flow below the sur­face.”

“Ichor in crawling sands?” said Macbeth. “What is this?”

Newt Banquo, Macbeth’s second in command, leapt at the screen brandishing his ray-gun. The witches vanished amid shrieks and groans from the sound system.

The irrepressible space pirates broke into song:

“Oh we’re on our way to Mars,

We’ve come from far-off stars,

Though the place we’re really

Fondest of is Earth.

Oh it’s been an endless trip

But the captain of our ship

Knows pretty much just what

A light-year’s worth.

So Hip-Hip Hooray, Macbeth!

Hip-Hip Hooray, Macbeth!”

The audience started laughing, tentatively at first. Ricardo shivered, feeling their hilarity grow.

As if on cue, the spaceship’s flimsy viewscreen trembled and would have toppled except for Newt, who caught and held it till the stagehands had anchored it from behind.

Coolly, Newt turned to his pale captain and said, “They don’t make these screens like they used to.”

The audience never had a chance to breathe.

Ricardo backed into the sets, unable to watch. The laugh­ter went on, but he only half heard it. How could something with so much of himself in it appear so absurd? What had become of his life’s blood, his offering of labor?

“Please,” he prayed to the catwalks. “Please don’t let them laugh.”

Not all of the original spirit was lost. The laughter died out gradually, though never completely, and the lengthening silences seemed full of increasing horror. Much of the ac­tion, unseen to him, must have struck the crowd as gruesome. Murder and betrayal, the beast of hell-gate, the cry of the obscene bird: all cast a spell of red darkness that was nearly but never quite broken each time a DuBose song came up. Relief and dismay were blended in the laughter.

Ricardo smiled. There was still hope. He affixed Vulcan points to his ears and painted his nose with gooey Vampire Blood. When Newt came looking for him, he stepped out from behind a set-piece.

“You enter over there,” Newt whispered, taking his hid­ing place. “You look really gross.”

“Thanks.”

“Break a leg.”

Ricardo pulled down his visor and peeked through a cur­tain at the scene. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were enter­taining officers around an octagonal table. As he waited for his cue, he looked into the audience and immediately spied Mrs. Sherman in the front row, beyond the band, her jewelry glittering in the footlights. He hoped she wouldn’t recognize him.

“Let’s drink this toast in Venusian slug-ichor!” said Mac­beth.

The officers raised their goblets.

Someone strode down the front row, a huge man with silvery hair and a dark red furious face. It was Mr. Magnusson, come to summon Mrs. Sherman from her seat. All around them, parents watched, while politely pretending to see nothing.

Ricardo heard his cue. He took a deep breath and strode onstage, aware of the two adults leaving together. Mr. Dean looked after them in horror, his conductor’s wand drooping. The music swooned.

Neal spotted Ricardo in his costume, and his eyes wid­ened with melodrama. “By the cosmos!” he cried.

“What is it, my Lord?” said Lady Macbeth, her eyes pass­ing through Ricardo as he shambled forward. He heard the expectant breathing of the audience at his side, now invisi­ble in the red glare of footlights. The whole set, everything around him, appeared to be drenched in blood. His insane hieroglyphs crawled over the walls, red-on-red, luminous.

“But-but-but,” said Neal. “You-you-you . . .”

Ricardo walked offstage, turned on his heel, and waited to re-enter. His visor was steamed with the sweat of stage fright. He tried to find his breath

“My lord?” said Cory Fordyce. “What is it? Have you seen some nightmare with your eyes wide open?”

“Didn’t you see him?” Neal asked.

“See who?”

“Nothing, it must be nothing. I am tired, my dear. How­ever, I’ll let nothing stop our celebrations. I propose a toast to—”

Backstage, Ricardo heard a growing commotion. Mr. Magnusson, pulling Mrs. Sherman after him, came through a stage door.

“No, Jack,” Mrs. Sherman whispered. “You can’t just stop the show. If you were going to come late, you shouldn’t have come at all. You’re drunk, Jack.”

“Ichor,” said Mr. Magnusson, almost spitting. “Ichor! That’s practically blood! It was the first word I heard. I’ll pull down the curtain myself if I have to.”

Morris Fluornoy bumped into Ricardo. He was running from the adults.

“What’s going on?” Ricardo asked.

“We’re in trouble!” Morris said, and blinked in puzzle­ment. He stooped to look under the visor. “Hey . . . Ricardo?”

“My cue,” Ricardo said.

He slipped back onto the stage and stood at Neal’s side. His pointed ears and Banquo’s emblems were enough to tell the audience who he was, but now it was time to show Neal alone. He stepped before his former friend and slipped the visor up an inch or so, until Neal could see his grin while the audience saw only the back of his head. Another inch of raised visor exposed the tip of his bloodied nose. Finally Ricardo stared full into Neal’s face. He rolled up his eyes until the whites were showing, and with his hand smeared Vampire Blood all over his face.

Neal turned ghastly green.

“Hello, my friend,” Ricardo whispered.

Cory looked over and yelled, “You!”

The visor dropped. Ricardo turned and ran till he was tangled in the wings. Where was the backstage door? He saw Lady Macbeth scowling after him and Neal still gaping. He ripped off the ears and wiped the red goo on his sleeve.

“Newt?” he whispered. “Trade off.”

“All right,” said a deep voice that echoed through the backstage. Mr. Magnusson came storming around the back­drop, intent on the light cage.

“Jack,” said Mrs. Sherman, just behind him, still trying to whisper. “Jack, they’ll murder you.”

“If not them, their parents,” he said.

Actors rushed from the stage and the next scene began in chaos.

Neal and Cory charged Ricardo.

Mr. Magnusson opened the door to the light cage.

Ricardo turned toward the backstage door but Neal veered to cut him off. The next thing he saw was the ladder.

He was climbing.

Cory cried, “I’ll get him!”

The ladder shuddered as if it were trying to throw him. Looking down past his feet, he saw Lady Macbeth climbing up. Below her, Mr. Magnusson swore at the array of light switches, asked “Which is which?” of the terrified operator, then snarled and stalked out of the cage.

Ricardo reached the top and looked out over the stage. The catwalk was the narrowest of tracks across the deepest of pits. At the bottom, three witches chanted around their cauldron while their red and black queen Hecate—played by Sheri DuBose—rose with her arms outspread to take in all the stage. She met his eyes and screamed.

The band faltered, stopped. Mr. Dean climbed onto the stage and met Mr. Magnusson and Mrs. Sherman at the witches’ cauldron; there they stood looking out at the au­dience. The proper witches backed away. Sheri still stood looking up at Ricardo. He realized he had better move. A door opened onto the roof at the other side of the catwalk.

Mr. Magnusson began, “We apologize—”

Cory’s feet banged on the ladder. Ricardo scuttled over the abyss. Below, Hecate screamed again, pointing now.

“Don’t do it!” she cried.

Murmurs from the audience, yells from the darkened re­gions of the stage. The Committee looked up at him.

Halfway out, he heard Cory speak after him:

“Ricardo, don’t be stupid. You can’t get out that way. Come on back and face the music.”

Her voice was soft.

He took a tentative step.

“Please,” she said. The word was like nothing he had ever heard.

He turned to face her, and crouched with both hands holding the plank. She stood at the end of the catwalk, her red robes flowing into space. She was barefoot tonight, ra­ven-haired, seeming much older and crueler than ever, de­spite her gentle word.

“Don’t come out,” he said.

She took a step.

Glancing down, he saw all of them, Neal and Newt and the faculty, all of them looking up at him with rubies for eyes.

“What is it you want, Ricardo?” she asked. He looked up. “Attention?”

Her face seemed to crack into pieces, everything he rec­ognized in it crumbling away. She was smiling, reaching out to him, yet she was sad. He knew that look: pity. It drove him back.

She took a step. The catwalk shuddered like a diving board.

“Don’t,” he said, and turned to run.

One foot missed the plank.

He fell, bleating.

Cory screamed. Newt was already running through the darkness below, pushing the hell-beast like a cradle to catch him. Ricardo’s clawing hands triggered the net full of foam boulders and he plunged amid a shower of soft Martian rocks.

As he fell, he dreamed with regret of all the scenes that would not be seen tonight because the show was spoiled. There would be no Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, sniffing the ozone left on her fingers by the firing of ray-guns. There would be no attack by Birnham Waste, where soldiers dis­guised as sand dunes advanced on Macbeth. Macbeth’s dis­concerted cry of “Ichor!” would not be heard, for he would never casually thrust a spear-point in that same sand. Ricardo saw all the things that should have been and would have been, if not for his fall.

Falling took longer than it should have.

Above him he saw no catwalk receding, no backdrops rushing past, no dwindling floodlights. There was instead a sky of crimson so dark, so deep that it was almost black; wherein, high up, like the smiling white eyes of a slick red beast, were two tiny horned moons. It was his dream, Mars as he had come to see it, and now it had him.

With much ripping of foam and splintering of wood and creaking of chicken wire, he landed. The belly of the hell-beast split wide, dropping him on the floor. A few boulders tumbled through after him.

A little figure scurried to him, a small boy swathed in red, with wide shiny eyes beneath a strange cowl.

“I’m here,” said Newt. “Ricardo, can you answer?”

The mound of foam on which he lay collapsed, spilling him out from under the hell-beast. Ricardo’s eyes blurred over for a moment, then his vision began to brighten.

“Newt!” he said.

“I’m here.”

“I can see Mars. I really see it. I—I’m going . . .”

“Wow, Ricardo! Great! How is it?”

“Just like I im—”

He shrieked, his eyes fixed on the Martian firmament that no one else could see. He wailed as the moontips burst the membrane of sky and the red heavens poured down around him. Up he rose through the dark flood, like a bubble in a bottle of burgundy, and it seemed he would never reach the surface, never breathe again. For the air of Mars was thin, thin and cold, cold as death.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46483206)

Plus I missed a day early on so I’m gonna do 5-6

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46487080)

Officer Hunton got to the laundry just as the ambulance was leaving—slowly, with no siren or flashing lights. Ominous. Inside, the office was stuffed with milling, silent people, some of them weeping. The plant itself was empty; the big automatic washers at the far end had not even been shut down. It made Hunton very wary. The crowd should be at the scene of the accident, not in the office. It was the way things worked—the human animal had a built-in urge to view the remains. A very bad one, then. Hunton felt his stomach tighten as it always did when the accident was very bad. Fourteen years of cleaning human litter from highways and streets and the sidewalks at the bases of very tall buildings had not been able to erase that little hitch in the belly, as if something evil had clotted there.

A man in a white shirt saw Hunton and walked toward him reluctantly. He was a buffalo of a man with head thrust forward between shoulders, nose and cheeks vein-broken either from high blood pressure or too many conversations with the brown bottle. He was trying to frame words, but after two tries Hunton cut him off briskly:

"Are you the owner? Mr. Gartley?"

"No . . . no. I'm Stanner. The foreman. God, this—"

Hunton got out his notebook. "Please show me the scene of the accident, Mr. Stanner, and tell me what happened."

Stanner seemed to grow even more white; the blotches on his nose and cheeks stood out like birthmarks. "D-do I have to?"

Hunton raised his eyebrows. "I'm afraid you do. The call I got said it was serious."

"Serious—" Stanner seemed to be battling with his gorge; for a moment his Adam's apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. "Mrs. Frawley is dead. Jesus, I wish Bill Gartley was here."

"What happened?"

Stanner said, "You better come over here."

He led Hunton past a row of hand presses, a shirt-folding unit, and then stopped by a laundry-marking machine. He passed a shaky hand across his forehead. "You'll have to go over by yourself, Officer. I can't look at it again. It makes me . . . I can't. I'm sorry."

Hunton walked around the marking machine with a mild feeling of contempt for the man. They run a loose shop, cut corners, run live steam through home-welded pipes, they work with dangerous cleaning chemicals without the proper protection, and finally, someone gets hurt. Or gets dead. Then they can't look. They can't—

Hunton saw it.

The machine was still running. No one had shut it off. The machine he later came to know intimately: the Hadley-Watson Model-6 Speed Ironer and Folder. A long and clumsy name. The people who worked here in the steam and the wet had a better name for it. The mangier.

Hunton took a long, frozen look, and then he performed a first in his fourteen years as a law-enforcement officer: he turned around, put a convulsive hand to his mouth, and threw up.

"You didn't eat much," Jackson said.

The women were inside, doing dishes and talking babies while John Hunton and Mark Jackson sat in lawn chairs near the aromatic barbecue. Hunton smiled slightly at the understatement. He had eaten nothing.

"There was a bad one today," he said. "The worst."

"Car crash?"

"No. Industrial."

"Messy?"

Hunton did not reply immediately, but his face made an involuntary, writhing grimace. He got a beer out of the cooler between them, opened it, and emptied half of it. "I suppose you college profs don't know anything about industrial laundries?"

Jackson chuckled. "This one does. I spent a summer working in one as an undergraduate."

"Then you know the machine they call the speed ironer?"

Jackson nodded. "Sure. They run damp flatwork through them, mostly sheets and linen. A big, long machine."

"That's it," Hunton said. "A woman named Adelle Frawley got caught in it at the Blue Ribbon Laundry crosstown. It sucked her right in."

Jackson looked suddenly ill. "But . . . that can't happen, Johnny. There's a safety bar. If one of the women feeding the machine accidentally gets a hand under it, the bar snaps up and stops the machine. At least that's how I remember it."

Hunton nodded. "It's a state law. But it happened."

Hunton closed his eyes and in the darkness he could see the Hadley-Watson speed ironer again, as it had been that afternoon. It formed a long, rectangular box in shape, thirty feet by six. At the feeder end, a moving canvas belt moved under the safety bar, up at a slight angle, and then down. The belt carried the damp-dried, wrinkled sheets in continuous cycle over and under sixteen huge revolving cylinders that made up the main body of the machine. Over eight and under eight, pressed between them like thin ham between layers of superheated bread. Steam heat in the cylinders could be adjusted up to 300 degrees for maximum drying. The pressure on the sheets that rode the moving canvas belt was set at 800 pounds per square foot to get out every wrinkle.

And Mrs. Frawley, somehow, had been caught and dragged in. The steel, asbestos-jacketed pressing cylinders had been as red as barn paint, and the rising steam from the machine had carried the sickening stench of hot blood. Bits of her white blouse and blue slacks, even ripped segments of her bra and panties, had been torn free and ejected from the machine's far end thirty feet down, the bigger sections of cloth folded with grotesque and bloodstained neatness by the automatic folder. But not even that was the worst.

"It tried to fold everything," he said to Jackson, tasting bile in his throat. "But a person isn't a sheet, Mark. What I saw . . . what was left of her . . ." Like Stanner, the hapless foreman, he could not finish. "They took her out in a basket," he said softly.

Jackson whistled. "Who's going to get it in the neck? The laundry or the state inspectors?"

"Don't know yet," Hunton said. The malign image still hung behind his eyes, the image of the mangier wheezing and thumping and hissing, blood dripping down the green sides of the long cabinet in runnels, the burning stink of her . . . "It depends on who okayed that goddamn safety bar and under what circumstances."

"If it's the management, can they wiggle out of it?"

Hunton smiled without humor. "The woman died, Mark. If Gartley and Stanner were cutting corners on the speed ironer's maintenance, they'll go to jail. No matter who they know on the City Council."

"Do you think they were cutting corners?"

Hunton thought of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, badly lighted, floors wet and slippery, some of the machines incredibly ancient and creaking. "I think it's likely," he said quietly.

They got up to go in the house together. "Tell me how it comes out, Johnny," Jackson said. "I'm interested."

Hunton was wrong about the mangier; it was clean as a whistle.

Six state inspectors went over it before the inquest, piece by piece. The net result was absolutely nothing. The inquest verdict was death by misadventure.

Hunton, dumbfounded, cornered Roger Martin, one of the inspectors, after the hearing. Martin was a tall drink of water with glasses as thick as the bottoms of shot glasses. He fidgeted with a ball-point pen under Hunton's questions.

"Nothing? Absolutely nothing doing with the machine?"

"Nothing," Martin said. "Of course, the safety bar was the guts of the matter. It's in perfect working order. You heard that Mrs. Gillian testify. Mrs. Frawley must have pushed her hand too far. No one saw that; they were watching their own work. She started screaming. Her hand was gone already, and the machine was taking her arm. They tried to pull her out instead of shutting it down—pure panic. Another woman, Mrs. Keene, said she did try to shut it off, but it's a fair assumption that she hit the start button rather the stop in the confusion. By then it was too late."

"Then the safety bar malfunctioned," Hunton said flatly. "Unless she put her hand over it rather than under?"

"You can't. There's a stainless-steel facing above the safety bar. And the bar itself didn't malfunction. It's circuited into the machine itself. If the safety bar goes on the blink, the machine shuts down."

"Then how did it happen, for Christ's sake?"

"We don't know. My colleagues and I are of the opinion that the only way the speed ironer could have killed Mrs. Frawley was for her to have fallen into it from above. And she had both feet on the floor when it happened. A dozen witnesses can testify to that."

"You're describing an impossible accident," Hunton said.

"No. Only one we don't understand." He paused, hesitated, and then said: "I will tell you one thing, Hunton, since you seem to have taken this case to heart. If you mention it to anyone else, I'll deny I said it. But I didn't like that machine. It seemed . . . almost to be mocking us. I've inspected over a dozen speed ironers in the last five years on a regular basis. Some of them are in such bad shape that I wouldn't leave a dog unleashed around them—the state law is lamentably lax. But they were only machines for all that. But this one . . . it's a spook. I don't know why, but it is. I think if I'd found one thing, even a technicality, that was off whack, I would have ordered it shut down. Crazy, huh?"

"I felt the same way," Hunton said.

"Let me tell you about something that happened two years ago in Milton," the inspector said. He took off his glasses and began to polish them slowly on his vest. "Fella had parked an old icebox out in his backyard. The woman who called us said her dog had been caught in it and suffocated. We got the state policeman in the area to inform him it had to go to the town dump. Nice enough fella, sorry about the dog. He loaded it into his pickup and took it to the dump the next morning. That afternoon a woman in the neighborhood reported her son missing."

"God," Hunton said.

"The icebox was at the dump and the kid was in it, dead. A smart kid, according to his mother. She said he'd no more play in an empty icebox than he would take a ride with a strange man. Well, he did. We wrote it off. Case closed?"

"I guess," Hunton said.

"No. The dump caretaker went out next day to take the door off the thing. City Ordinance No. 58 on the maintenance of public dumping places." Martin looked at him expressionlessly. "He found six dead birds inside. Gulls, sparrows, a robin. And he said the door closed on his arm while he was brushing them out. Gave him a hell of a jump. That mangier at the Blue Ribbon strikes me like that, Hunton. I don't like it."

They looked at each other wordlessly in the empty inquest chamber, some six city blocks from where the Hadley-Watson Model-6 Speed Ironer and Folder sat in the busy laundry, steaming and fuming over its sheets.

The case was driven out of his mind in the space of a week by the press of more prosaic police work. It was only brought back when he and his wife dropped over to Mark Jackson's house for an evening of bid whist and beer.

Jackson greeted him with: "Have you ever wondered if that laundry machine you told me about is haunted, Johnny?"

Hunton blinked, at a loss. "What?"

"The speed ironer at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, I guess you didn't catch the squeal this time."

"What squeal?" Hunton asked, interested.

Jackson passed him the evening paper and pointed to an item at the bottom of page two. The story said that a steam line had let go on the large speed ironer at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, burning three of the six women working at the feeder end. The accident had occurred at 3:45 p.m. and was attributed to a rise in steam pressure from the laundry's boiler. One of the women, Mrs. Annette Gillian, had been held at City Receiving Hospital with second-degree burns.

"Funny coincidence," he said, but the memory of Inspector Martin's words in the empty inquest chamber suddenly recurred: It's a spook . . . And the story about the dog and the boy and the birds caught in the discarded refrigerator.

He played cards very badly that night.

Mrs. Gillian was propped up in bed reading Screen Secrets when Hunton came into the four-bed hospital room. A large bandage blanketed one arm and the side of her neck. The room's other occupant, a young woman with a pallid face, was sleeping.

Mrs. Gillian blinked at the blue uniform and then smiled tentatively. "If it was for Mrs. Cherinikov, you'll have to come back later. They just gave her medication."

"No, it's for you, Mrs. Gillian." Her smile faded a little. "I'm here unofficially—which means I'm curious about the accident at the laundry. John Hunton." He held out his hand.

It was the right move. Mrs. Gillian's smile became brilliant and she took his grip awkwardly with her unburnt hand. "Anything I can tell you, Mr. Hunton. God, I thought my Andy was in trouble at school again."

"What happened?"

"We was running sheets and the ironer just blew up—or it seemed that way. I was thinking about going home an' getting off my dogs when there's this great big bang, like a bomb. Steam is everywhere and this hissing noise . . . awful." Her smile trembled on the verge of extinction. "It was like the ironer was breathing. Like a dragon, it was. And Alberta—that's Alberta Keene—shouted that something was exploding and everyone was running and screaming and Ginny Jason started yelling she was burnt. I started to run away and I fell down. I didn't know I got it worst until then. God forbid it was no worse than it was. That live steam is three hundred degrees."

"The paper said a steam line let go. What does that mean?"

"The overhead pipe comes down into this kinda flexible line that feeds the machine. George—Mr. Stanner—said there must have been a surge from the boiler or something. The line split wide open."

Hunton could think of nothing else to ask. He was making ready to leave when she said reflectively:

"We never used to have these things on that machine. Only lately. The steam line breaking. That awful, awful accident with Mrs. Frawley, God rest her. And little things. Like the day Essie got her dress caught in one of the drive chains. That could have been dangerous if she hadn't ripped it right out. Bolts and things fall off. Oh, Herb Diment—he's the laundry repairman—has had an awful time with it. Sheets get caught in the folder. George says that's because they're using too much bleach in the washers, but it never used to happen. Now the girls hate to work on it. Essie even says there are still little bits of Adelle Frawley caught in it and it's sacrilege or something. Like it had a curse. It's been that way ever since Sherry cut her hand on one of the clamps."

"Sherry?" Hunton asked.

"Sherry Ouelette. Pretty little thing, just out of high school. Good worker. But clumsy sometimes. You know how young girls are."

"She cut her hand on something?"

"Nothing strange about that. There are clamps to tighten down the feeder belt, see. Sherry was adjusting them so we could do a heavier load and probably dreaming about some boy. She cut her finger and bled all over everything." Mrs. Gillian looked puzzled. "It wasn't until after that the bolts started falling off. Adelle was . . . you know . . . about a week later. As if the machine had tasted blood and found it liked it. Don't women get funny ideas sometimes, Officer Hinton?"

"Hunton," he said absently, looking over her head and into space.

Ironically, he had met Mark Jackson in a washateria in the block that separated their houses, and it was there that the cop and the English professor still had their most interesting conversations.

Now they sat side by side in bland plastic chairs, their clothes going round and round behind the glass portholes of the coin-op washers. Jackson's paperback copy of Milton's collected works lay neglected beside him while he listened to Hunton tell Mrs. Gillian's story.

When Hunton had finished, Jackson said, "I asked you once if you thought the mangier might be haunted. I was only half joking. I'll ask you again now."

"No," Hunton said uneasily. "Don't be stupid."

Jackson watched the turning clothes reflectively. "Haunted is a bad word. Let's say possessed. There are almost as many spells for casting demons in as there are for casting them out. Frazier's Golden Bough is replete with them. Druidic and Aztec lore contain others. Even older ones, back to Egypt. Almost all of them can be reduced to startlingly common denominators. The most common, of course, is the blood of a virgin." He looked at Hunton. "Mrs. Gillian said the trouble started after this Sherry Ouelette accidentally cut herself."

"Oh, come on," Hunton said.

"You have to admit she sounds just the type," Jackson said.

"I'll run right over to her house," Hunton said with a small smile. "I can see it. 'Miss Ouelette, I'm Officer John Hunton. I'm investigating an ironer with a bad case of demon possession and would like to know if you're a virgin.' Do you think I'd get a chance to say goodbye to Sandra and the kids before they carted me off to the booby hatch?"

"I'd be willing to bet you'll end up saying something just like that," Jackson said without smiling. "I'm serious, Johnny. That machine scares the hell out of me, and I've never seen it."

"For the sake of conversation," Hunton said, "what are some of the other so-called common denominators?"

Jackson shrugged. "Hard to say without study. Most Anglo-Saxon hex formulas specify graveyard dirt or the eye of a toad. European spells often mention the hand of glory, which can be interpreted as the actual hand of a dead man or one of the hallucinogenics used in connection with the Witches' Sabbath—usually belladonna or a psilocybin derivative. There could be others."

"And you think all those things got into the Blue Ribbon ironer? Christ, Mark, I'll bet there isn't any belladonna within a five-hundred-mile radius. Or do you think someone whacked off their Uncle Fred's hand and dropped it in the folder?"

"If seven hundred monkeys typed for seven hundred years—"

"One of them would turn out the works of Shakespeare," Hunton finished sourly. "Go to hell. Your turn to go across to the drugstore and get some dimes for the dryers."

It was very funny how George Stanner lost his arm in the mangier.

Seven o'clock Monday morning the laundry was deserted except for Stanner and Herb Diment, the maintenance man. They were performing the twice-yearly function of greasing the mangler's bearings before the laundry's regular day began at seven-thirty. Diment was at the far end, greasing the four secondaries and thinking of how unpleasant this machine made him feel lately, when the mangier suddenly roared into life.

He had been holding up four of the canvas exit belts to get at the motor beneath and suddenly the belts were running in his hands, ripping the flesh off his palms, dragging him along.

He pulled free with a convulsive jerk seconds before the belts would have carried his hands into the folder.

"What the Christ, George!" he yelled. "Shut the frigging thing off!"

George Stanner began to scream.

It was a high, wailing, blood-maddened sound that filled the laundry, echoing off the steel faces of the washers, the grinning mouths of the steam presses, the vacant eyes of the industrial dryers. Stanner drew in a great, whooping gasp of air and screamed again: "Oh God of Christ I'm caught I'M CAUGHT—"

The rollers began to produce rising steam. The folder gnashed and thumped. Bearings and motors seemed to cry out with a hidden life of their own.

Diment raced to the other end of the machine.

The first roller was already going a sinister red. Diment made a moaning, gobbling noise in his throat. The mangier howled and thumped and hissed.

A deaf observer might have thought at first that Stanner was merely bent over the machine at an odd angle. Then even a deaf man would have seen the pallid, eye-bulging rictus of his face, mouth twisted open in a continuous scream. The arm was disappearing under the safety bar and beneath the first roller; the fabric of his shirt had torn away at the shoulder seam and his upper arm bulged grotesquely as the blood was pushed steadily backward.

"Turn it off!" Stanner screamed. There was a snap as his elbow broke.

Diment thumbed the off button.

The mangier continued to hum and growl and turn.

Unbelieving, he slammed the button again and again—nothing. The skin of Stanner's arm had grown shiny and taut. Soon it would split with the pressure the roll was putting on it; and still he was conscious and screaming. Diment had a nightmare cartoon image of man flattened by a steamroller, leaving only a shadow.

"Fuses—" Stanner screeched. His head was being pulled down, down, as he was dragged forward.

Diment whirled and ran to the boiler room, Stanner's screams chasing him like lunatic ghosts. The mixed stench of blood and steam rose in the air.

On the left wall were three heavy gray boxes containing all the fuses for the laundry's electricity. Diment yanked them open and began to pull the long, cylindrical fuses like a crazy man, throwing them back over his shoulders. The overhead lights went out; then the air compressor; then the boiler itself, with a huge dying whine.

And still the mangier turned. Stanner's screams had been reduced to bubbly moans.

Diment's eye happened on the fire ax in its glassed-in box. He grabbed it with a small, gagging whimper and ran back. Stanner's arm was gone almost to the shoulder. Within seconds his bent and straining neck would be snapped against the safety bar.

"I can't," Diment blubbered, holding the ax. "Jesus, George, I can't, I can't, I—"

The machine was an abattoir now. The folder spat out pieces of shirt sleeve, scraps of flesh, a finger. Stanner gave a huge, whooping scream and Diment swung the ax up and brought it down in the laundry's shadowy lightlessness. Twice. Again.

Stanner fell away, unconscious and blue, blood jetting from the stump just below the shoulder. The mangier sucked what was left into itself . . . and shut down.

Weeping, Diment pulled his belt out of its loops and began to make a tourniquet.

Hunton was talking on the phone with Roger Martin, the inspector. Jackson watched him while he patiently rolled a ball back and forth for three-year-old Patty Hunton to chase.

"He pulled all the fuses?" Hunton was asking. "And the off button just didn't function, huh? . . . Has the ironer been shut down? . . . Good. Great. Huh? . . . No, not official." Hunton frowned, then looked sideways at Jackson. "Are you still reminded of that refrigerator, Roger? . . . Yes. Me too. Goodbye."

He hung up and looked at Jackson. "Let's go see the girl, Mark."

She had her own apartment (the hesitant yet proprietary way she showed them in after Hunton had flashed his buzzer made him suspect that she hadn't had it long), and she sat uncomfortably across from them in the carefully decorated, postage-stamp living room.

"I'm Officer Hunton and this is my associate, Mr. Jackson. It's about the accident at the laundry." He felt hugely uncomfortable with this dark, shyly pretty girl.

"Awful," Sherry Ouelette murmured. "It's the only place I've ever worked. Mr. Gartley is my uncle. I liked it because it let me have this place and my own friends. But now . . . it's so spooky."

"The State Board of Safety has shut the ironer down pending a full investigation," Hunton said. "Did you know that?"

"Sure." She sighed restlessly. "I don't know what I'm going to do—"

"Miss Ouelette," Jackson interrupted, "you had an accident with the ironer, didn't you? Cut your hand on a clamp, I believe?"

"Yes, I cut my finger." Suddenly her face clouded. "That was the first thing." She looked at them woefully. "Sometimes I feel like the girls don't like me so much anymore . . . as if I were to blame."

"I have to ask you a hard question," Jackson said slowly. "A question you won't like. It seems absurdly personal and off the subject, but I can only tell you it is not. Your answers won't ever be marked down in a file or record."

She looked frightened. "D-did I do something?"

Jackson smiled and shook his head; she melted. Thank God for Mark, Hunton thought.

"I'll add this, though: the answer may help you keep your nice little flat here, get your job back, and make things at the laundry the way they were before."

"I'd answer anything to have that," she said.

"Sherry, are you a virgin?''

She looked utterly flabbergasted, utterly shocked, as if a priest had given communion and then slapped her. Then she lifted her head, made a gesture at her neat efficiency apartment, as if asking them how they could believe it might be a place of assignation.

"I'm saving myself for my husband," she said simply.

Hunton and Jackson looked calmly at each other, and in that tick of a second, Hunton knew that it was all true: a devil had taken over the inanimate steel and cogs and gears of the mangier and had turned it into something with its own life.

"Thank you," Jackson said quietly.

"What now?" Hunton asked bleakly as they rode back. "Find a priest to exorcise it? "

Jackson snorted. "You'd go a far piece to find one that wouldn't hand you a few tracts to read while he phoned the booby hatch. It has to be our play, Johnny."

"Can we do it?"

"Maybe. The problem is this: We know something is in the mangier. We don't know what." Hunton felt cold, as if touched by a fleshless finger. "There are a great many demons. Is the one we're dealing with in the circle of Bubastis or Pan? Baal? Or the Christian deity we call Satan? We don't know. If the demon had been deliberately cast, we would have a better chance. But this seems to be a case of random possession."

Jackson ran his fingers through his hair. "The blood of a virgin, yes. But that narrows it down hardly at all. We have to be sure, very sure."

"Why?" Hunton asked bluntly. "Why not just get a bunch of exorcism formulas together and try them out?"

Jackson's face went cold. "This isn't cops 'n' robbers, Johnny. For Christ's sake, don't think it is. The rite of exorcism is horribly dangerous. It's like controlled nuclear fission, in a way. We could make a mistake and destroy ourselves. The demon is caught in that piece of machinery. But give it a chance and—"

"It could get out?"

"It would love to get out," Jackson said grimly. "And it likes to kill."

When Jackson came over the following evening, Hunton had sent his wife and daughter to a movie. They had the living room to themselves, and for this Hunton was relieved. He could still barely believe what he had become involved in.

"I canceled my classes," Jackson said, "and spent the day with some of the most god-awful books you can imagine. This afternoon I fed over thirty recipes for calling demons into the tech computer. I've got a number of common elements. Surprisingly few."

He showed Hunton the list: blood of a virgin, graveyard dirt, hand of glory, bat's blood, night moss, horse's hoof, eye of toad.

There were others, all marked secondary.

"Horse's hoof," Hunton said thoughtfully. "Funny—"

"Very common. In fact—"

"Could these things—any of them—be interpreted loosely?" Hunton interrupted.

"If lichens picked at night could be substituted for night moss, for instance?"

"Yes."

"It's very likely," Jackson said. "Magical formulas are often ambiguous and elastic. The black arts have always allowed plenty of room for creativity." "Substitute Jell-0 for horse's hoof," Hunton said. "Very popular in bag lunches. I noticed a little container of it sitting under the ironer's sheet platform on the day the Frawley woman died. Gelatin is made from horses' hooves."

Jackson nodded. "Anything else?"

"Bat's blood . . . well, it's a big place. Lots of unlighted nooks and crannies. Bats seem likely, although I doubt if the management would admit to it. One could conceivably have been trapped in the mangier."

Jackson tipped his head back and knuckled bloodshot eyes. "It fits . . . it all fits."

"It does?"

"Yes. We can safely rule out the hand of glory, I think. Certainly no one dropped a hand into the ironer before Mrs. Frawley's death, and belladonna is definitely not indigenous to the area."

"Graveyard dirt?"

"What do you think?"

"It would have to be a hell of a coincidence," Hunton said. "Nearest cemetery is Pleasant Hill, and that's five miles from the Blue Ribbon."

"Okay," Jackson said. "I got the computer operator—who thought I was getting ready for Halloween—to run a positive breakdown of all the primary and secondary elements on the list. Every possible combination. I threw out some two dozen which were completely meaningless. The others fall into fairly clear-cut categories. The elements we've isolated are in one of those."

"What is it?"

Jackson grinned. "An easy one. The mythos centers in South America with branches in the Caribbean. Related to voodoo. The literature I've got looks on the deities as strictly bush league, compared to some of the real heavies, like Saddath or He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named. The thing in that machine is going to slink away like the neighborhood bully."

"How do we do it?"

"Holy water and a smidgen of the Holy Eucharist ought to do it. And we can read some of the Leviticus to it. Strictly Christian white magic."

"You're sure it's not worse?"

"Don't see how it can be," Jackson said pensively. "I don't mind telling you I was worried about that hand of glory. That's very black juju. Strong magic."

"Holy water wouldn't stop it?"

"A demon called up in conjunction with the hand of glory could eat a stack of Bibles for breakfast. We would be in bad trouble messing with something like that at all. Better to pull the goddamn thing apart."

"Well, are you completely sure—"

"No, but fairly sure. It all fits too well."

"When?"

"The sooner, the better," Jackson said. "How do we get in? Break a window?"

Hunton smiled, reached into his pocket, and dangled a key in front of Jackson's nose.

"Where'd you get that? Gartley?"

"No," Hunton said. "From a state inspector named Martin."

"He know what we're doing?"

"I think he suspects. He told me a funny story a couple of weeks ago."

"About the mangier?"

"No," Hunton said. "About a refrigerator. Come on."

Adelle Frawley was dead; sewed together by a patient undertaker, she lay in her coffin. Yet something of her spirit perhaps remained in the machine, and if it did, it cried out. She would have known, could have warned them. She had been prone to indigestion, and for this common ailment she had taken a common stomach tablet call E-Z Gel, purchasable over the counter of any drugstore for seventy-nine cents. The side panel holds a printed warning: People with glaucoma must not take E-Z Gel, because the active ingredients causes an aggravation of that condition. Unfortunately, Adelle Frawley did not have that condition. She might have remembered the day, shortly before Sherry Ouelette cut her hand, that she had dropped a full box of E-Z Gel tablets into the mangier by accident. But she was dead, unaware that the active ingredient which soothed her heartburn was a chemical derivative of belladonna, known quaintly in some European countries as the hand of glory.

There was a sudden ghastly burping noise in the spectral silence of the Blue Ribbon Laundry—a bat fluttered madly for its hole in the insulation above the dryers where it had roosted, wrapping wings around its blind face.

It was a noise almost like a chuckle.

The mangier began to run with a sudden, lurching grind—belts hurrying through the darkness, cogs meeting and meshing and grinding, heavy pulverizing rollers rotating on and on.

It was ready for them.

When Hunton pulled into the parking lot it was shortly after midnight and the moon was hidden behind a raft of moving clouds. He jammed on the brakes and switched off the lights in the same motion; Jackson's forehead almost slammed against the padded dash.

He switched off the ignition and the steady thump-hiss-thump became louder. "It's the mangier," he said slowly. "It's the mangier. Running by itself. In the middle of the night."

They sat for a moment in silence, feeling the fear crawl up their legs.

Hunton said, "All right. Let's do it."

They got out and walked to the building, the sound of the mangier growing louder. As Hunton put the key into the lock of the service door, he thought that the machine did sound alive—as if it were breathing in great hot gasps and speaking to itself in hissing, sardonic whispers.

"All of a sudden I'm glad I'm with a cop," Jackson said. He shifted the brown bag he held from one arm to the other. Inside was a small jelly jar filled with holy water wrapped in waxed paper, and a Gideon Bible.

They stepped inside and Hunton snapped up the light switches by the door. The fluorescents flickered into cold life. At the same instant the mangier shut off.

A membrane of steam hung over its rollers. It waited for them in its new ominous silence.

"God, it's an ugly thing," Jackson whispered.

"Come on," Hunton said. "Before we lose our nerve."

They walked over to it. The safety bar was in its down position over the belt which fed the machine.

Hunton put out a hand. "Close enough, Mark. Give me the stuff and tell me what to do."

"But—"

"No argument."

Jackson handed him the bag and Hunton put it on the sheet table in front of the machine. He gave Jackson the Bible.

"I'm going to read," Jackson said. "When I point at you, sprinkle the holy water on the machine with your fingers. You say: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, get thee from this place, thou unclean. Got it?"

"Yes."

"The second time I point, break the wafer and repeat the incantation again."

"How will we know if it's working?"

"You'll know. The thing is apt to break every window in the place getting out. If it doesn't work the first time, we keep doing it until it does."

"I'm scared green," Hunton said.

"As a matter of fact, so am I."

"If we're wrong about the hand of glory—"

"We're not," Jackson said. "Here we go."

He began. His voice filled the empty laundry with spectral echoes. "Turnest not thou aside to idols, nor make molten gods of yourself. I am the Lord thy God . . ." The words fell like stones into a silence that had suddenly become filled with a creeping, tomblike cold. The mangier remained still and silent under the fluorescents, and to Hunton it still seemed to grin.

". . . and the land will vomit you out for having defiled it, as it vomited out nations before you." Jackson looked up, his face strained, and pointed.

Hunton sprinkled holy water across the feeder belt.

There was a sudden, gnashing scream of tortured metal. Smoke rose from the canvas belts where the holy water had touched and took on writhing, red-tinged shapes. The mangier suddenly jerked into life.

"We've got it!" Jackson cried above the rising clamor. "It's on the run!"

He began to read again, his voice rising over the sound of the machinery. He pointed to Hunton again, and Hunton sprinkled some of the host. As he did so he was suddenly swept with a bone-freezing terror, a sudden vivid feeling that it had gone wrong, that the machine had called their bluff—and was the stronger.

Jackson's voice was still rising, approaching climax.

Sparks began to jump across the arc between the main motor and the secondary; the smell of ozone filled the air, like the copper smell of hot blood. Now the main motor was smoking; the mangier was running at an insane, blurred speed: a finger touched to the central belt would have caused the whole body to be hauled in and turned to a bloody rag in the space of five seconds. The concrete beneath their feet trembled and thrummed.

A main bearing blew with a searing flash of purple light, filling the chill air with the smell of thunderstorms, and still the mangier ran, faster and faster, belts and rollers and cogs moving at a speed that made them seem to blend and merge, change, melt, transmute—

Hunton, who had been standing almost hypnotized, suddenly took a step backward. "Get away!" he screamed over the blaring racket.

"We've almost got it!" Jackson yelled back. "Why—"

There was a sudden indescribable ripping noise and a fissure in the concrete floor suddenly raced toward them and past, widening. Chips of ancient cement flew up in a star burst.

Jackson looked at the mangier and screamed.

It was trying to pull itself out of the concrete, like a dinosaur trying to escape a tar pit. And it wasn't precisely an ironer anymore. It was still changing, melting. The 550-volt cable fell, spitting blue fire into the rollers, and was chewed away. For a moment two fireballs glared at them like lambent eyes, eyes filled with a great and cold hunger.

Another fault line tore open. The mangier leaned toward them, within an ace of being free of the concrete moorings that held it. It leered at them; the safety bar had slammed up and what Hunton saw was a gaping, hungry mouth filled with steam.

They turned to run and another fissure opened at their feet. Behind them, a great screaming roar as the thing came free. Hunton leaped over, but Jackson stumbled and fell sprawling.

Hunton turned to help and a huge, amorphous shadow fell over him, blocking the fluorescents.

It stood over Jackson, who lay on his back, staring up in a silent rictus of terror—the perfect sacrifice. Hunton had only a confused impression of something black and moving that bulked to a tremendous height above them both, something with glaring electric eyes the size of footballs, an open mouth with a moving canvas tongue.

He ran; Jackson 's dying scream followed him.

When Roger Martin finally got out of bed to answer the doorbell, he was still only a third awake; but when Hunton reeled in, shock slapped him fully into the world with a rough hand.

Hunton's eyes bulged madly from his head, and his hands were claws as he scratched at the front of Martin's robe. There was a small oozing cut on his cheek and his face was splashed with dirty gray specks of powdered cement.

His hair had gone dead white.

"Help me . . . for Jesus' sake, help me. Mark is dead. Jackson is dead."

"Slow down," Martin said. "Come in the living room."

Hunton followed him, making a thick whining noise in his throat, like a dog.

Martin poured him a two-ounce knock of Jim Beam and Hunton held the glass in both hands, downing the raw liquor in a choked gulp. The glass fell unheeded to the carpet, and his hands, like wandering ghosts, sought Martin's lapels again.

"The mangier killed Mark Jackson. It . . . it . . . oh God, it might get out! We can't let it out! We can't . . . we . . . oh—" He began to scream, a crazy, whooping sound that rose and fell in jagged cycles.

Martin tried to hand him another drink but Hunton knocked it aside. "We have to burn it," he said. "Burn it before it can get out. Oh, what if it gets out? Oh Jesus, what if—" His eyes suddenly flickered, glazed, rolled up to show the whites, and he fell to the carpet in a stonelike faint.

Mrs. Martin was in the doorway, clutching her robe to her throat. "Who is he, Rog? Is he crazy? I thought—" She shuddered.

"I don't think he's crazy." She was suddenly frightened by the sick shadow of fear on her husband's face. "God, I hope he came quick enough."

He turned to the telephone, picked up the receiver, froze.

There was a faint, swelling noise from the east of the house, the way that Hunton had come. A steady, grinding clatter, growing louder. The living-room window stood half open and now Martin caught a dark smell on the breeze. An odor of ozone . . . or blood.

He stood with his hand on the useless telephone as it grew louder, louder, gnashing and fuming, something in the streets that was hot and steaming. The blood stench filled the room.

His hand dropped from the telephone.

It was already out.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46487096)

***

"Susan" copyright 1993 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

This work appears online via special arrangement with the the author, Harlan Ellison. You can thank him by visiting the HERC Store. Copying or distributing any part of this piece for personal use, commercial use, or any other use you can come up with is strictly forbidden. Breaking this rule will result in the author coming down on you like the proverbial Hand of God or, barring the author finding out, your being forced to spend 15,000 years in Purgatory watching the same three episodes of "Perfect Strangers".

Susan

As she had done every night since they met, she went in bare feet and a cantaloupe-meat-colored nightshift to the shore of the sea of mist, the verge of the ocean of smothering vapor, the edge of the bewildering haze he called the Brim of Obscurity.

Though they spend all their daytime together, at night he chose to sleep alone in a lumpy, Volkswagen-shaped bed at the southernmost boundary of the absolutely lovely forest in which their home had been constructed. There are the border between the verdant woods and the Brim of Obscurity that stretched on forever, a sea of fog that roiled and swirled itself into small, murmuring vortexes from which depths one could occasionally hear something like a human voice pleading for absolution (or at least a backscratcher to relieve this awful itch!), he had made his bed and there, with the night-light from his old nursery, and his old vacuum-tube radio that played nothing but big-band dance music from the 1920s, and a few favorite books, and a little fresh fruit he had picked on his way from the house to his resting-place, he slept peacefully every night. Except for the nightmares, of course.

And as she had done every night for the eight years since they had met, she went barefooted and charmed, down to the edge of the sea of fog to kiss him goodnight. That was their rite.

Before he had even proposed marriage, he explained to her the nature of the problem. Well, the curse, really. Not so much a problem; because a problem was easy to reconcile; just trim a little nub off here; just smooth that plane over there; just let this big dangle here and it will all meet in the center; no, it wasn't barely remotely something that could be called "problem." It was a curse, and he was open about it from the first.

"My nightmares come to life," he had said.

Which remark thereupon initiated quite a long and detailed conversation between them. It went through all the usual stages of good-natured chiding, disbelief, ridicule, short-lived anger at the possibility he was making fun of her, toying with her, on into another kind of disbelief, argument with recourse to logic and Occam's Razor, grudging acceptance, a brief lapse into incredulity, a return to the barest belief, and finally, with trust, acceptance that he was telling her nothing less than the truth. Remarkably (to say the least) his nightmares assumed corporeal shape and stalked the night as he slept, dreaming them up. It wouldn't have been so bad except:

"My nightmares killed and ate my first four wives," he had said. He'd saved that part for last.

But she married him, nonetheless. And they were extremely happy. It was a terrific liaison for both of them. But just to be on the safe side, because he loved her very much, he took to sleeping in the lumpy Volkswagen bed at the edge of the forest.

And every morning--because he was compelled to rise when the sunlight struck his face, out there in the open--he would trek back to their fine home in the middle of the forest, and he would make her morning tea, and heat and butter a muffin, or possibly pour her a bowl of banana nut crunch cereal (or sometimes a nice bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon or brown sugar sprinkled across the surface), and carry it in to her as she sat up in bed reading or watching the Home Shopping Channel. And for eight years she had been absolutely safe from the nightmares that ripped and rent and savaged everything in sight.

He slept at the Brim of Obscurity, and he was a danger to no one but himself. And whatever means he used to protect himself from those darktime sojourners, well, it was an armory kept most secret.

That was how they lived, for eight years. And every night she would go barefoot, in her shift, and she would follow the twenty-seven plugged-together extension cords--each one thirty feet long--that led from he house to his night-light; and she would come to him and kiss him goodnight. And they would tell each other how happy they were together, how much every moment together meant to them, and they would kiss goodnight once more, and she would go back to the house. He would lie reading for a time, then go to sleep. And in the night, there at the short of fog, at the edge of the awful sea of mist, the nightmares would come and scream and tear at themselves. But they never got anywhere near Susan, who was safely in her home.

So as she had done every night since they had met, she followed the extension cords down through the sweet-smelling wind-cooled hedges and among the whispering, mighty trees to his bed. The light was on, an apple ready to be nibbled sat atop a stack of books awaiting his attention; the intaglio of a tesseract (or possibly a dove on the wing) lay in the center of a perfectly circular depression in his pillow where he had rested his head. But the bed was empty.

She went looking for him, and after a time she found him sitting on the shore of fog, looking out over the Brim of Obscurity. But she heard him crying long before she saw him. The sound of his deep, heartfelt sobbing led her to him.

And she knelt beside him, and he puts his arms around her, and she said "I see now that I've made you unhappy. I don't know how, but I can see that I've come into your life and made it unpleasant. I'm sorry, I'm truly sorry."

But he shook his head, and continued to shake it, to say no...no, that isn't it...you don't understand.

"I'm so sorry..." she kept saying, because she didn't understand what it meant, his shaking his head like that.

Until, finally, he was able to stop crying long enough to say, "No, that isn't it. You don't understand."

"Then what are you crying about?"

He wasn't able to tell her for a while, because just trying to get the words out started him up all over again. But after a while, still holding her, there at the Brim of Obscurity (which, in an earlier time, had been known as the Rim of Oblivion), he said softly, "I'm crying for the loss of all the years I spent without you, the years before I met you, all the lost years of my life; and I'm crying that there are less years in front of me than all those lost years behind me."

And out in the roiling ocean of misty darkness, they could both hear the sound of roving, demented nightmares whose voices were now, they understood, less filled with rage than with despair.

"Susan" by Harlan Ellison, copyright 1993 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

In case you missed the warning about copying or distributing this piece at the beginning, just don't do it, okay.

Okay?

Please send comments, queries, or tattling to webmaster@harlanellison.com.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5352536&forum_id=2Reputation#46487101)