Night & Demons (58 page)

Rose Lunkowski reseated herself gracefully on a chair in front of the heavily draped windows. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Sergeant?” she said with a thin smile that did not show her teeth. “There is much we would like to know before you are gone.”

“Sure,” Morzek agreed, tracing a mottled forefinger across the pigmented callosities on his face. “Not much to tell. The night after Stevie got assigned to my platoon, the dinks hit us. No big thing. Had one fellow dusted off with brass in his ankle from his machine gun blowing up, that was all. But a burst of AK fire knocked Stevie off his tank right at the start.”

“What’s all this about?” Richmond complained. “If he was killed by rifle fire, why say a grenade—”

“Silence!” The command crackled like heel plates on concrete.

Sgt. Morzek nodded. “Why, thank you, Mr. Lunkowski. You see, the captain there doesn’t know the bullets didn’t hurt Stevie. He told us his flak jacket had stopped them. It couldn’t have and it didn’t. I saw it that night, before he burned it—five holes to stick your fingers through, right over the breast pocket. But Stevie was fine, not a mark on him. Well, Christ, maybe he’d had a bandolier of ammo under the jacket. I had other things to think about.”

Morzek paused to glance around his audience. “All this talk, I could sure use a drink. I killed my bottle back at the Federal Building.”

“You won’t be long,” the girl hissed in reply.

Morzek grinned. “They broke up the squadron, then,” he rasped on, “gave each platoon a sector of War Zone C to cover to stir up the dinks. There’s more life on the moon than there was on the stretch we patrolled. Third night out, one of the gunners died. They flew him back to Saigon for an autopsy but damned if I know what they found. Galloping malaria, we figured.

“Three nights later another guy died. Dawson on three-six . . . Christ, the names don’t matter. Some time after midnight his track commander woke up, heard him moaning. We got him back to Quan Loi to a hospital, but he never came out of it. The lieutenant thought he got wasp stung on the neck—here, you know?” Morzek touched two fingers to his jugular. “Like he was allergic. Well, it happens.”

“But what about Stefan?” Mrs. Lunkowski asked. “The others do not matter.”

“Yes, finish it quickly, Sergeant,” the younger woman said, and this time Richmond did catch the flash of her teeth.

“We had a third death,” Morzek said agreeably, stroking the zipper of his AWOL bag back and forth. “We were all jumpy by then. I doubled the guard, two men awake on every track. Three nights later, and nobody in the platoon remembered anything from twenty-four hundred hours till Riggs’s partner blinked at ten of one and found him dead.

“In the morning, one of the boys came to me. He’d seen Stevie slip over to Riggs, he said; but he was zonked out on grass and didn’t think it really had happened until he woke up in the morning and saw Riggs under a poncho. By then, he was scared enough to tell the whole story. Well, we were all jumpy.”

“You killed Stefan.” It was not a question but a flat statement.

“Oh, hell, Lunkowski,” Morzek said absently, “what does it matter who rolled the grenade into his bunk? The story got around and . . . something had to be done.”

“Knowing what you know, you came here?” Mrs. Lunkowski murmured liquidly. “You must be mad.”

“Naw, I’m not crazy, I’m just sick.” The sergeant brushed his left hand over his forehead. “Malignant melanoma, the docs told me. Twenty-six years in the goddam army and in another week or two I’d be
warted
to death.

“Captain,” he added, turning his cancerous face toward Richmond, “you better leave through the window.”

“Neither of you will leave!” snarled Rose Lunkowski as she stepped toward the men.

Morzek lifted a fat gray cylinder from his bag. “Know what this is, honey?” he asked conversationally.

Richmond screamed and leaped for the window. Rose ignored him, slashing her hand out for the phosphorous grenade. Drapery wrapping the captain’s body shielded him from glass and splintered window frame as he pitched out into the yard.

He was still screaming there when the blast of white fire bulged the walls of the house.

THE WAITING
BULLET

A lot of things happened to me in 1971. The most important was that I got back to the World on January 14 (returned from Viet Nam, that is); but a few weeks after that an army buddy introduced me to Karl Wagner, and I renewed my acquaintance with Manly Wade Wellman, whom I’d met shortly before heading for Nam. Friendship with those two writers caused me to pay more attention to my own writing than might otherwise have been the case, but their range of interests also broadened mine.

When Manly moved to North Carolina, he met the musician and folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Lunsford introduced Manly to Madison County in the Smoky Mountains. John, the wandering balladeer of Manly’s most famous series, was born on Drowning Creek in the Sandhills (where Manly was living when he wrote that first story), but his adventures all take place in a recognizable version of Madison.

In 1971 an independent company bought the rights to film
Who Fears the Devil?,
the collection of John stories. (The result was released, to the extent that it was released at all, under a variety of titles. My tape is titled
The Legend of Hillbilly John.
Six of the seven weeks of filming took place in Arkansas, but the first week in October 1971, was shot in Madison County. The Wellmans, the Drakes, and Karl Wagner went up to watch.

As a result of Nam, I had a very good camera (a Nikon F) with which I took a great number of pictures on the trip. Almost none of them are of any merit whatever. Instead of shooting people at the close range suitable for my 52mm lens, I have dozens of pictures of (say) Hedge Capers, the male lead, walking across a footbridge a hundred yards away. I got one good image of Sharon Henesy, the female lead, and a couple decent ones of Hedge Capers between takes.

My memory turned out to be a lot more valuable, however: I saw and heard a lot of things that stuck with me to this day. “The Waiting Bullet” came out of those memories.

I sold four stories to Arkham House, but August Derleth’s death in 1971 ended that market. Trying desperately to sell to the few other SF/fantasy markets which existed then, I used Viet Nam/Cambodia as a setting (with some success), and I wrote “The Waiting Bullet” (probably in early 1972) as a folklore-based fantasy set in Madison County.

I wasn’t satisfied with the result and filed the story in a drawer without polishing it into final form. I did that with about two-thirds of the stories I wrote at the time (and with all my attempts at novels). That would have been the end of it had not Stu Schiff in 1997 asked me for a story for the final issue of
Whispers
magazine.

I discuss elsewhere the importance of
Whispers
to me and to the horror field in the ’70s and ’80s. I wanted to do a story for Stu, but I was very busy writing novels under contract.

Then I thought of “The Waiting Bullet.” Stu had begun
Whispers
when the Army transferred him to Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville, some sixty miles south of where Manly, Karl and I lived in Chapel Hill. The four of us discussed writers and artists; we helped with one another’s work and created our own. We were all individuals, but our close association made us individually greater that we would have been without the support of the others.

I revised “The Waiting Bullet” and sent it to Stuart. Rereading it recalls to me a time that fantasy writing was bright and new again after decades of eclipse.

The early ’70s were bad in my head and bad in many ways in my life as well. (America didn’t welcome her Nam vets back with open arms.) That said, the period made me a professional writer.

“The Waiting Bullet” with its attention to closely observed detail is part of the scaffolding on which my future writing career was built.

* * *

T
he air was as crisp and clear as mountain air was supposed to be, but the water in the pine-shaded spring was shudderously cold. Ribaud swore as he plunged his arm in up to the elbow, sure there was a better way to spend Sunðday morning than clearing debris out of the water system of the cabin he was renting. He had to clean the filter if he wanted coffee, though.

God knew he did not need the coffee to wake him up now.

He straightened and tossed a handful of wet pine-straw downslope toward the cabin. The sky was bright, but the sun had not yet risen above the rim of the hollow. White mist hung in the air.

Ribaud’s shoulders felt tight in the denim jacket; he shrugged, trying to loosen them.

That did not help. His flesh tingled all over. He had read something recently about running water . . . .

Or perhaps it was just that he had spent too much time alone since he left graduate school to work on his novel.

Ribaud frowned, a little angry with himself for feeling uneasy. The filter was clear now, so it was time to make coffee. He started back toward the cabin.

Somebody walked out of the front door.

The stranger was only a hundred yards away. He looked so much at ease that for a disoriented instant, Ribaud thought the mistake must be his own, that the cabin below was not the one he had been renting for the past month.

The stranger was heavyset and of medium height. He wore a flannel shirt with broad red and white checks, and he had not bothered to tuck the tail into his dark slacks before stepping out of the house. He stretched nonchalantly and took a deep lungful of air.

Ribaud was certain that he had never seen the man before.

A vagrant breeze rustled the pines. The stranger glanced absently up the hillside, then sauntered around the side of the cabin toward the woodpile.

Ribaud blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing. “Hey, buddy!” he called, his voice shaky with indecision. “Hey there!”

The stranger paid no attention. As he turned the corner, Ribaud saw that the back of his head was bald and unpleasantly ridged with dull white scar tissue.

Was the fellow a nut of some kind? The mountains must have them, too . . . . Was this somebody who had lost his hair and his mind in an accident, but whom the locals saw no reason to commit since he had not murdered anybody yet?

While Ribaud hesitated, the stranger reappeared around the corner with an armload of firewood. The billets were chopped to length, not sawn. There were only sawn logs in Ribaud’s woodpile.

The stranger’s lips were pursed. Ribaud thought he could hear someone whistling “White Silver Sands” off-key.
Three steps from the door, the stranger whirled around with a look of ghastly disbelief on his face. Logs spilled to the ground in bouncing confusion. He lunged for the portal, but in midair he stumbled and slammed
against
the side of the cabin.

The stranger’s right hand scrabbled across the rough boards, feeling for a purchase. Slowly, painfully, he
turned
his face toward the spring. Only the ebbing strength of his right arm held his torso upright. A shattered artery had soaked the front of his shirt bright carmine.

The man’s eyes glazed as his right arm buckled. His body slumped full length in a tangle of firewood.

Wind sighed in the pines.

Ribaud ran toward the cabin, his mind lumpy with what he had just watched. When he was only a step or two away from the hideously flaccid corpse, it vanished with a ripple in the air.

The cabin remained as Ribaud had left it. The door was closed, and the firewood had vanished with the stranger who dropped it.

Ribaud stopped. He began to tremble. There were no tracks in the dirt but his own, and no sign of blood.

He looked back up the hill. The sun had risen to the lower branches of the pines around the spring. The breeze stirred the needles gently, to no purpose. No other living thing was visible.

Still trembling, Ribaud entered the house. Water was rushing from the tap he had left on. The single room was just as it had been half an hour before, when Ribaud began to walk up the hill.

Lying beside the typewriter was the slim book Ribaud had glanced through the night before,
Ghost and Ghoul,
by an archaeologist named Lethbridge. The pages rustled as Ribaud thumbed through to find the line he remembered from an account of a ghost seen near a mill:
There often seems to be some kind of pressure built up, possibly by running water, at the point from which the ghost was seen.

Ribaud had seen a ghost, or . . .

Or he could not think of a better explanation. He was sure there must
be
a better explanation, but he did not know where to go for it.

Mountain society is notoriously closed. Besides, Ribaud had come here to escape his acquaintances, not to make new ones. He knew almost none of the local people better than to nod to in the street on one of his infrequent visits to the county seat.

Various possibilities went through Ribaud’s mind as he sat before his typewriter, in the cabin’s only chair. At last the sparing drink he poured himself from the pint bottle decided him.

He had gotten the bonded whiskey the week before, under the counter of a little cross-roads grocery and gas station a few miles up the road. That the owner, Parry, had sold the liquor to him—the county was dry—showed that he had accepted
Ribaud to some extent.

There was no one better for Ribaud to ask about what he had seen.

Recapping the bottle, Ribaud took the keys to his Mustang off the nail by the door and strode outside. He looked to see if there was a splash of blood on the weathered boards of the sidewall.

There was not.

The snake-track highway which ran alongside a tributary of the French Broad River forked three miles from Ribaud’s cabin. One branch led down to the county seat; the other ran south toward Asheville. Between the forks stood a low rectangular building. The clumsily painted sign over the door in one of the short walls proclaimed Parry’s.

There were two gas pumps in front. Parry’s Ford was the only vehicle in the parking strip along the Asheville road, but a car on blocks peeked from behind the store. A sapling grew through the engine compartment.