Monstrous Affections (37 page)

“Give it to me, if you won’t. It won’t . . .” he coughed “. . . it won’t
take a moment. And I’ll give it right back.”

Rupert looked at the dog. Back at the old man. “The gun doesn’t
belong to me,” he said. “I can’t.”

“Please, kid.”

Rupert stood straight, lowering the gun to his side, and stepped
out of the room.

“I can’t,” he said.

The Waite sisters and Wallace had made it as far as the porch. When
Rupert came out, Nancy commented on the smell and Joan said,
“Well?”

“There’s no body,” said Rupert.

“I knew it!” said Nancy. Wallace looked at his feet.

“But there’s a fellow in there,” said Rupert. “That’s maybe what Wallace saw.”

“Someone lives in
there
?” said Joan.

“He’s not well,” said Rupert. “He told me to get off his property.”

“What about the dog?” said Wallace.

“Here’s the gun,” said Rupert, and handed the Webley over, butt
first. “Take it back home. I won’t tell the Captain you took it.”

Wallace snatched the gun back and held it close to his chest. He
looked over Rupert’s shoulder, and back at Rupert. “What about the
dog?” he said again.

Rupert just shook his head. Wallace took a step toward the house
and stopped and turned around.

Joan Waite put her arm over Nancy’s shoulder and held her
close. “I can hear it,” said Joan, and Nancy said she could too: “It’s
everywhere.” But Rupert couldn’t hear anything — and neither could
Wallace, although he strained to.

On 24
^th
September, 1939, the town had a dance for Wallace Gleason
and some others, at the Fenlan Rotary Hall. That summer, Wallace
had signed up in the 1
^st
Canadian Infantry Brigade. He was to ship
out to Belleville for his training — and from there, perhaps a boat
down the St. Lawrence and all the way to England.

Rupert attended reluctantly. He had not yet made up his mind
to enlist and had been seeing less of Wallace and the Gleasons the
past few years in any event. But his brothers were going — Paul, the
second-eldest, had shipped out in the summer, and the whole family
had gone to his party — so Rupert relented. He put on a jacket and
tied his tie, slicked down his hair and perched on the wheel-well in
the back of the Ford.

It was a warm night for September, and they threw the doors to
the hall open, so the fiddle music wafted through the twilit streets
almost to the edge of town. Autos were parked two deep along the
sidewalk, and everything was bathed in the orange glow of electric
lanterns strung along the sides of the hall, and over the main entry
hung a banner: “IN THE ARMY NOW.”

“Paul should have waited,” said Leonard as they passed beneath
it and into the dance. “What a send-off!”

The Storey boys split up after that: Leonard, to lift a glass of beer
with some fellows he knew from the reopened sawmill; Philip, to get
a closer look at the fiddler. Rupert spotted the Captain, a widower
two years now, so sitting by himself, watching as his son Wallace
and a town girl raised dust on the dance floor.

“Why, Rupert Storey!” said the Captain. “It’s been some time!
How’ve you been keeping?”

Rupert sat down and brought the Captain up to date. He had
been accepted at the University of Western Ontario, and expected
to be starting classes in a week, and hoped to gain admittance to
the medical school there eventually. He allowed as he might also
enlist, as Wallace had, but wanted to see how higher learning suited
him first. The Captain stopped him before he could be accused of
babbling.

“One way or another, you’re leaving town,” he said. “Good,
though we’ll miss you. But you’ll find your way. That’s what young
men do.”

The conversation cut short when Helen and her husband arrived.
She being six months with child, Rupert offered her his chair
immediately. She smiled hello and patted his hand and told him he
was a gentleman. Rupert thanked her and excused himself.

It seemed as though the whole town was crowding into the
Rotary Hall. Rupert wasn’t fond of crowds, and kept to the periphery.
He was too young for beer and not much of a dancer, so he set up
near the punch bowl. Wallace greeted him briefly there between
dances — clapped him hard on the shoulder and produced a steel hip
flask of rum. Rupert took a dutiful swig and Wallace took one too.
Then he nodded, hit Rupert’s shoulder once more and headed back
to the dance floor where his girl was waiting.

It wasn’t long after that that Rupert spotted Nancy Waite
approaching the punch bowl. She was wearing a long green frock,
and her blonde hair was pushed back with a white ribbon, holding
an unlit cigarette high as she danced and shimmied through the
crowd. Rupert found a box of matches in his pocket, and by the time
she arrived he had one lit and ready to offer her. She blinked and
laughed and leaned into the flame.

“I was coming for the punch,” she said, and Rupert poured her
one of those too. They clinked glasses and sipped their punch and
Rupert told Nancy about his university plans. “I’m going to school
too,” she said, “in Kingston. With Joan. In a year. I hope.” She set
down her glass and crossed her fingers.

“Are you going to ask me to dance?” she asked.

He smiled and dipped his head. “I’m not very good at dancing,”
he said.

But she didn’t give up, and finally he did ask her.

They didn’t dance for very long, just barely a song, before Nancy
admitted defeat. “I’ll never doubt you again,” she said. And as they
left the dance floor, Rupert thought:
That’s it
. But Nancy surprised
him.

“It’s hot in here,” she said and she was right.

Ducking through the thinning edge of the crowd, they made
their way through one of the side doors and into the parking lot that
backed onto a stand of trees. The music grew quieter — quiet enough
that Rupert could make out the chirping of crickets. He pulled the
matchbox from his pocket, but Nancy shook her head and took his
hand instead.

“Do you remember,” she said, turning to face him, her eyes
themselves seeming to dance, “what we did that day?”

Rupert felt a small twist in his gut, and his nostrils flared at a
half-remembered smell, and he started to look away.

But with her free hand, Nancy touched the nape of Rupert’s
neck — and she stood on her toes — and she drew his mouth close to
hers — and Rupert just said, “Yes.”

When he kissed her, she tasted of everything.

Nobody writes a decent story by themselves.

These stories, decent and otherwise, wouldn’t exist without the
wisdom of the members present and past of the Cecil Street
Irregulars workshop and the Gibraltar Point sf workshop; without
the guidance of ChiZine’s editors/publishers Brett Alexander Savory
and Sandra Kasturi most recently, and editors Don Hutchison,
Michael Rowe and Robert Morrish earlier in the game. And they’d
be no good without family. My parents Lawrence and Olga offered
nothing but love and support in a long sequence of thumbs-up to
these stories; if they wondered about the content, they — mostly —
kept it to themselves. My brother Peter read, and reads, them
dutifully. My long-lost cousin Joe tracked me down just last year,
and unwittingly spurred me on to write “The Webley.”

It is true. Nobody writes a decent story by themselves.

“
The Sloan Men
” originally appeared in
Northern Frights 2
,
Mosaic Press, 1994

“
Janie and the Wind
” originally appeared in
Cemetery Dance
#38,
Spring 2002

“
Night of the Tar Baby
” originally appeared in
Northern Frights 5
,
Mosaic Press, 1999

“
Other People’s Kids
” is original to this collection, 2009

“
The Mayor Will Make a Brief Statement and Then Take Questions
”
originally appeared in
ChiZine
#33, July-September 2007

“
The Pit-Heads
” originally appeared in
Northern Frights 4
,
Mosaic Press, 1997

“
Slide Trombone
” is original to this collection, 2009

“
The Inevitability of Earth
” originally appeared as “Ground Bound”
in
On Spec
, Spring 1999

“
Swamp Witch and the Tea-Drinking Man
” originally appeared in
Tesseracts Eleven
, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2007

“
The Delilah Party
” originally appeared in
Cemetery Dance
#56, 2006

“
Fly in Your Eye
” originally appeared in
Horrors: 365 Scary Stories
,
Barnes & Noble, 1997

“
Polyphemus’ Cave
” originally appeared in
Queer Fear 2
,
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002

“
The Webley
” is original to this collection, 2009

David Nickle lives and works in Toronto, Ontario in the company of
his partner Karen Fernandez, and not far from an old filling station
where his grandfather John Nickle briefly pumped gasoline in the
1930s. David was born somewhat later, in 1964.

Since then, he has authored numerous short stories and one
published novel,
The Claus Effect
, with Karl Schroeder — all while
cultivating an unfortunate singing voice and a tragic affection for
the music of Tom Waits.

He is not finished yet.