Dark Terrors 3 (3 page)

Free dirt, he thought. My God what a damn fool night.
Free dirt!

At 2 o’clock he heard his wristwatch ticking softly.

At 2:30 he felt his pulse in his wrists and ankles and neck and then in his temples and inside his head.

The entire house leaned in the wind, listening.

Outside in the still night, the wind failed and the yard lay soaking and waiting.

And at last . . .
yes.
He opened his eyes and turned his head towards the window.

He held his breath. What? Yes? What?

Beyond the window, beyond the wall, beyond the house, outside somewhere, a whisper, a murmur, growing louder and louder. Grass growing? Blossoms opening? Soil shifting, crumbling?

A great whisper, a mix of shadows and shades. Something rising. Something moving.

Ice froze beneath his skin. His heart ceased.

Outside in the dark, in the yard.

Autumn had arrived.

October was there.

His garden gave him . . .

A
harvest.

* * * *

Ray Bradbury
is, without doubt, our most distinguished living fantasy writer. Cutting his literary teeth in the memorable pages of
Weird Tales
in the 1940s, his early stories from that pulp magazine were reprinted in the Arkham House collection
Dark Carnival,
published in 1947. Known principally for his short fiction, he has sold his work to all the major magazines in the intervening fifty years, and his many tales of science fiction, fantasy and horror have been widely collected.
The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The October Country, A Medicine for Melancholy, I Sing the Body Electric
and
Long After Midnight
are just a few of the evocative titles that hint at the equally atmospheric prose to be found in Ray Bradbury’s timeless fiction. He is also the author of several classic novels, including
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Halloween Tree
and, more recently,
Death is a Lonely Business
and
A Graveyard for Lunatics.
His screenwriting credits include
Moby Dick
(for John Huston) and
It Came from Outer Space,
and since 1985 he has adapted his own short stories for
The Ray Bradbury Theater.
‘I took a couple of years off, and did sixty-five teleplays for my TV series, plus a couple of screenplays,’ says Bradbury. ‘But I wanted to get back to my root system - because I started as a short story writer when I was twelve. I had a lot of ideas put away, just old scribbled notes I started going through.’ The result was a number of new short stories written during the last year or so, including ‘Free Dirt’, which have been collected in
Quicker Than the Eye.

<>

* * * *

Poppy Z. Brite

Justin had read
Dandelion Wine
seventeen times now, but he still hated to see it end. He always hated endings.

He turned the last page of the book and sat for several minutes in the shadows of his bedroom, cradling the old thumbed paperback, marvelling at the world he held in his hands. The hot sprawl of the city outside was forgotten; he was still lost in the cool green Byzantium of 1928.

Within these tattered covers, dawning realization of his own mortality might turn a boy into a poet, not a dark machine of destruction. People only died after saying to each other all the things that needed to be said, and the summer never truly ended so long as those bottles gleamed down cellar, full of the distillate of memory.

For Justin, the distillate of memory was a bitter vintage. The summer of 1928 seemed impossibly long ago, beyond imagining, forty years before blasted sperm met cursed egg to make him. When he put the book aside and looked at the dried blood under his fingernails, it seemed even longer.

An artist who doesn’t read is no artist at all,
he had scribbled in a notebook he once tried to keep, but abandoned after a few weeks, sick of his own thoughts.
Books are the key to other minds, sure as bodies are the key to other souls. Reading a good book is a lot like sinking your fingers up to the second knuckle in someone’s brain.

In the world of the story, no one left before it was time.
Characters in a book never went away; all you had to do was open the book again and there they’d be, right where you left them. He wished live people were so easy to hold on to.

You could hold on to
parts
of them, of course; you could even make them part of yourself. That was easy. But to keep a whole person with you for ever, to stop just one person from leaving or gradually disintegrating as they always did ... to just
hold
someone.
All
of someone.

There might be ways. There had to be ways.

Even in Byzantium, a Lonely One stalked and preyed.

Justin was curled up against the headboard of his bed, a bloodstained comforter bunched around his bare legs. This was his favourite reading spot. He glanced at the nightstand, which held a Black & Decker electric drill, a pair of scissors, a roll of paper towels, and a syringe full of chlorine bleach. The drill wasn’t plugged in yet. He closed his eyes and allowed a small slow shudder to run through his body, part dread, part desire.

There were screams carved on the air of his room, vital fluids dried deep within his mattress, whole lives sewn into the lining of his pillow, to be taken out and savoured later. There was always time, so long as you didn’t let your memories get away. He had kept most of his. In fact, he’d kept seventeen; all but the first two, and those he didn’t want.

Justin’s father had barely seen him out of the womb before disappearing into the seamy nightside of Los Angeles. His mother raised him on the continent’s faulty rim, in an edging-towards-poor neighbourhood of a city that considered its poor a kind of toxic waste: ceaselessly and unavoidably churned out by progress, hard to store or dispose of, foul-smelling and ugly and dangerous. Their little stucco house was at the edge of a vast slum, and Justin’s dreams were peppered with gunfire, his play permeated with the smell of piss and garbage. He was often beaten bloody just for being a scrawny white boy carrying a book. His mother never noticed his hands scraped raw on concrete, or the thin crust of blood that often formed between his oozing nose and mouth by the time he got home.

She had married again and moved to Reno as soon as Justin turned eighteen, as soon as she could turn her painfully awkward son out of the house.
You could be a nice-looking young man if you cleaned yourself up. You’re smart, you could get a good job and make money. You could have girlfriends,
as if looks and money and girlfriends were the sweetest things he could ever dream of.

Her new husband had been a career Army man who looked at Justin the way he looked at their ragged old sofa, as leftover trash from her former life. Now they were both ten years dead, their bones mummified or scattered by animals somewhere in the Nevada desert, in those beautiful blasted lands. Only Justin knew where.

He’d shot his stepfather first, once in the back of the head with his own Army service pistol, just to see the surprise on his mother’s face as brain and bone exploded across the glass top of her brand-new dinner table, as her husband’s blood dripped into the mashed potatoes and the meatloaf, rained into her sweating glass of tea. He thought briefly that this surprise was the strongest emotion he had ever seen there. The sweetest, too. Then he pointed the gun at it and watched it blossom into chaos.

Justin remembered clearing the table, noticing that one of his mother’s eyes had landed in her plate, afloat on a thin patina of blood and grease. He tilted the plate a little and the glistening orb rolled on to the floor. It made a small satisfying squelch beneath the heel of his shoe, a sound he felt more than heard.

No one ever knew he had been out of California. He drove their gas-guzzling luxury sedan into the desert, dumped them and the gun. He returned to LA by night, by Greyhound bus, drinking bitter coffee and reading at rest stops, watching the country unspool past his window, the starlit desert and highway and small sleeping towns, the whole wide-open landscape folding around him like an envelope or a concealing hand. He was safe among other human flotsam. No one ever remembered his face. No one considered him capable of anything at all, let alone murder.

After that he worked and read and drank compulsively, did little else for a whole year. He never forgot that he was capable of murder, but he thought he had buried the urge. Then one morning he woke up with a boy strewn across his bed, face and chest battered in, abdomen torn wide open. Justin’s hands were still tangled in the glistening purple stew of intestines. From the stains on his skin he could see that he had rubbed them all over his body, maybe rolled in them.

He didn’t remember meeting the boy, didn’t know how he had killed him or opened his body like a big wet Christmas present, or why. But he kept the body until it started to smell, and then he cut off the head, boiled it until the flesh was gone, and kept the skull. After that it never stopped again. They had all been boys, all young, thin, and pretty: everything the way Justin liked it. Weapons were too easy, too impersonal, so he drugged them and strangled them. Like Willy Wonka in the Technicolor bowels of his chocolate factory,
he
was the music maker, and
he
was the dreamer of dreams.

It was a dark and lonely revelry, to be sure. But so was writing; so was painting or learning music. So, he supposed, was all art when you penetrated to its molten core. He didn’t know if killing was art, but it was the only creative thing he had ever done.

He got up, slid
Dandelion Wine
back into its place on his crowded bookshelf, and left the bedroom. He put his favourite CD on shuffle and crossed his small apartment to the kitchenette. A window beside the refrigerator looked out on a brick wall. Frank Sinatra was singing ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’.

Justin opened the refrigerator and took out a package wrapped in foil. Inside was a ragged cut of meat as large as a dinner plate, deep red, tough and fibrous. He selected a knife from the jumble of filthy dishes in the sink and sliced off a piece of meat the size of his palm. He wasn’t very hungry, but he needed something in his stomach to soak up the liquor he’d be drinking soon.

Justin heated oil in a skillet, sprinkled the meat with salt, laid it in the sizzling fat and cooked it until both sides were brown and the bottom of the pan was awash with fragrant juices. He slid the meat on to a saucer, found a clean fork in the silverware drawer, and began to eat his dinner standing at the counter.