Tales from the Nightside (17 page)

“I don’t care,” he shouted. “I don’t care!”

The corner was nearly finished. She hummed, knowing her fingers would stop in just a minute. Then tie. Bite. And she gathered the cloth to her chest and breathed deeply the musty mausoleum odor of the house. Then she dropped the spectrumed satin into the chest with the others. One day, she thought, she would sew herself a new dress of a thousand colors and be young again. But there was one more town...

She locked the chest with a pass of her hand.

And the light went out.

“Hey, we’d better clean this up before your mother gets home.”

Eric looked at the still bubbling pop spilled all over the tiles and he nodded. His arms felt leaden, his legs began to stiffen, and the stuffing in his head wouldn’t go away. Caren prodded him again, and he ran toward the stairs, didn’t hear her warning yell until it was too late. His foot slid in one of the puddles and in trying to wave his arms to keep his balance, he pitched face forward into the corner with the lamp.

Caren paled when he finally turned around, groaning, and she screamed when he dropped his hands from his face and smeared all the blood that ran from his lips.

A mockingbird hidden in a broad-crested elm sang to banish the red eye of the sun. A woman called anxiously from a narrow back Porch, a boy answered with a shout and ran laughing up Hawthorne Street, forgetting as he did not to step on the cracks. A dog rooting in the gutter snarled uncertainly at the not-quite-shadows of a hazy dusk. A speeding car backfired. A cat prowled.

The wind keened and gathered black clouds. The trees hissed and showed faint white. And the moon had no chance to bring a peace to the night.

Martin White was tired. Tired of the failures, the hints, the bitterly long hours of fruitless searching. So tired, he was near enough to despair to be tempted to give it all up before he drove himself weeping to the edge of screaming. He rubbed a heavy hand over his face, trying futilely to dismiss an insistent drowsiness that stung his dark eyes faintly and blurred his vision at the burning edges. He ignored the coarse two-day stubble on his prominent jaw, and did not seem to feel the perspiration that welded his shirt to his back in spite of the tiny black fan that spun weakly on the sill behind him. Beyond the screen, July shimmered over the front yard, weighted and humid, threatening to dissolve the nightblue walls. After a moment of helplessness, then, he decided to finish one more chapter before giving it up, but when every sentence on every page read the same and meant nothing, he sighed an impotent curse, closed the book and rose to his feet, leaning against the chipped and battered desk for support. He stared dumbly at the dust jacket and shook his head.

"Sorry, Stoker," he said to the time-worn cover, "but I don't think I can make it tonight." He closed his eyes, waiting, opened them and grinned wryly. "Nope, I'm afraid not."

He yawned, shook himself, shuffled down the short hall to his bedroom, stiffly exaggerating his walk to loosen his muscles before he slept. Without turning on the light, ignoring the faint yellow glow of the still-burning desk lamp, he stripped and let himself collapse onto the unmade bed.

Where he waited patiently for the dream, and the promises it made him.

The first time it had come was two months ago. He found himself standing in a level of absolute darkness he couldn't believe was possible, was real. When he'd awakened he wanted to scream, but he was too excited; and the second time, the third, the fourth and the fifth, he had been in the same unimaginable someplace, yet increasingly aware that he was expecting something to happen and terrified because he hadn't yet discovered what it would be.

He wanted to believe it was at last what he'd been groping for, but didn't until the darkness came while he was awake.

He was in his classroom, aimlessly shuffling papers after dismissing his last class and wondering what the high schools would ship him next term. His eyes closed in weary relief... and he was in darkness again. Only the darkness. But now he was convinced this was the way to find her.

He shifted, kicked at the sheets until they fell to the floor, and slept. While a light behind his eyes drifted and ran, merged from red to yellow to gold to black. He was in a room without dimension or boundary, and he floated/sat on a nebulous ebony with cool air to breathe though he choked for the lack of it while his neck tightened into cords, his head trembled in the effort to relax, and his throat burned with words that crushed against his teeth and drew blood from unbroken lips. He drew his knees to his chest and locked his hands around his shins. He was walking, but there was neither heat nor cold, movement nor quiet; but he knew she was there, had to be there, and called her plaintively to hurry, to give to him what she had given to the others. Suddenly there was a crash, a booming, resounding explosion that thundered into a roar, and when he snapped open his eyes...

...he found himself at his desk, his pen lying at his feet. A slight predawn breeze pushed mud-brown curtains against his naked back, and he jumped at their touch. Blinked. Breathed deeply as he stared at the blank sheet of paper on the desk's cracked glass top. Two others were lying crumpled on the floor.

“Damn,” he said with a tentative grin. "Damn." She had brought him here; he knew it. Finally, after reading all the books on the shelves several times over, she had heard his silent calling and had come to him, to guide him.

But she was still at a distance, and he glared at the books.

"Give her up," he said softly, intensely, "give her up. You can't keep her from me forever. I'm joining the club, and you can't stop me."

Mary Shelley, Guy Endore, Bram Stoker, leather-bound and silent
while Martin laughed and strutted into the bathroom to take a quick shower.

Beaumont and Bloch, Lovecraft and Leiber, tattered and yellowed
while he sang a tuneless melody of a woman beautiful beyond description and the light she would bring to his starving eyes, and the words she would conjure for his inkless pen.

While Saki and Dunsany stared blindly at the red rising sun.

It was well past noon when he awoke again, too refreshed and excited to be disappointed when an hour passed at his desk without producing a word. Soon enough she would contact him, this muse of the others; and meanwhile he bustled about the tiny six-room ranch cleaning and waiting. A quick canned supper, another hour of staring, and he was ready to throw in the towel when a telephone call reminded him of a party invitation he had unthinkingly accepted some days before. He hovered by the cradled receiver, unsure, apprehensive, with guilty glances toward his study door. At last, however, he decided that the relaxation would do him good, a chance to unlimber his mental processes and flex his imagination without the self-inflicted pressure that pilfered his sleep.

He dressed for the part. Turtleneck shirt, brown corduroy jacket, black slacks, and barely shined loafers. It was a stereotyped image, but one he enjoyed. The only thing missing was a well-used pipe.

By ten o'clock he was at the Bensons' home, ringing the doorbell and already wiping moist hands on his sides. Linda was his cheerleader, his patron, constantly stroking his ego and damning those who thought his talent was missing. "This is Martin T. White, the author," was her standard introduction to strangers, but it wasn't those he didn't know that he worried about; it was his friends and their well-meaning comments he had come to fear. If it wasn't for Linda, he would have stayed locked in his home.

And once inside, with a frosted glass in his hand, the ordeal began.

"Hey, Marty, how's it going? Still beating down those editors?"

"Well, Martin, still drumming up business for the old muse? Just remember, old boy, the formula for success: perspiration to inspiration, nine to one."

"Hey, White, when you make that first sale, you going to have a party? I won't hold my breath, but give me a call."

Martin grinned. Nodded. Refilled his glass.

There were faces, not people. Surefire plots with sly pleas for acknowledgment. Two ghost stories he had heard from the same mouths at the last party. Hints and suggestions from tired writing manuals and tired writing teachers. Gossip about Linda and her husband, Ted. Gossip about Linda. About Ted. About him. Someone dropped an ice cube down a woman's cleavage, and instantly he was besieged to include the incident in his next, his first, his whatever book.

He was ready to surrender, to drink himself into a stupor that would blot out the noise, when he recalled someone's mentioning his search for the muse. Instantly he was heartened. Their muse was an obscenity, distilled in alcohol and spoken in small type; but his, the real flesh-and-ink guide to his genius, was pure, beautiful, and shouted in capitals across a universe-wide marquee.

He was standing in the kitchen rinsing out his glass and smiling at his superiority over the plebian hypocrites when suddenly, without warning, the room went dark.

"No," he whispered harshly. "Damn, no, not here. Please, not here!"

He raced out the back door, realized he was still carrying his glass and threw it away, not hearing it smash on the side of the house.

Down Hawthorne Street.

A part of him noticing there was no moon.

Into his study, flinging himself into the chair and grabbing at his pen and the ream of paper. He took a deep shuddering breath... and a hot-cold wind wailed through his long hair, ripped at the skin around his throat, making no sound as he gazed unblinking into the nothing that buried him weightlessly while he crouched, naked, on swollen hands and blistered knees listening for her voice and hearing only a volley of thunder cascade through his chest. A bubble of spittle quivered at the comer of his mouth while mute echoes, deafening in their dumbness, competed with the rasp of his lungs to fill the void. A flash, then, of blue-white fire colder than ice, and he was thrown back onto his haunches...

...and heard the storm breaking over the house. Automatically, he reached behind him and pulled down the sash, switched on the fan, and turned to the top sheet of paper. It was blank, but he grinned. Blank, but he knew he was ready. She was coming. To him. To his pen.

He lit a cigarette and swaggered over to the bookcase, deciding to give himself some last-minute insurance with a booster reading. Just in case. With elaborate concern he scanned the collection of anthologies and novels, seeing each table of contents without opening a cover, searching with a sudden, disquieting apprehension for the bait he needed.

"Come on, my lovelies," he crooned to the spines, "which one of you is going to guide me tonight? Who's going to tell me what she's like? I don't have to know what she looks like, you know; but it would be nice to be able to picture her before she comes." His fingers darted, plucked, replaced, tapped his brow. "Come on, folks, don't be bashful. And for crying out loud, don't be so modest! After all, it was your combined geniuses that brought me this far, wasn't it? Come on, tell me what she looks like. Tell me how beautiful she really is."

The shelves were silent. He punched at the floor.

"Damnit, who the hell do you think you are? Do you really think you idiots can keep her from me?"

He snatched at a book, tossed it over his shoulder, and grabbed for another.

“Mrs. Radcliffe, you of all people should be glad that Gothics are all the rage. Too bad, though, because they're mutants, you know, hideous, monstrous travesties of every honest fear man ever had."

Another book, another toss.

“Mr. Machen, did you know that you and your kind have been called old-fashioned? Out-of-date and worn in a worn, cynical world. Poe, an ass; Hawthorne a pansy."

He glowered and swept a hand over the shelves, emptying them to his feet. "All of you. Dead. You need me, damnit, to make fear work again. You need me! Tell me! What does she look like? How do I find her?"

A sudden spate of bullet rain against the pane startled him into dropping his forgotten cigarette. He froze, looked stupidly at his trembling hands and was horrified. Immediately he crushed the smoldering butt under his heel and scuttled back to his desk, afraid to touch the books scattered on the floor, fearful they would desert him when he needed their help the most. And after what seemed like hours, he pulled open the center drawer and stared mournfully at the pile of rejection slips lying bleakly inside.

Nine years, he thought, nine years of nothing.

Hey, Marty, you old dog, how's the Pulitzer Prize looking this year? You got your speech all made up?

With a practiced hand he scooped up the papers and dumped them without ceremony into the left-hand drawer, noting dully as he did so that he would soon have to switch to the other.

Youre a writer, huh? No kidding. That's nice, you know? But what else do you do, Mr. White? For a living, I mean.

"Perspiration, inspiration," he muttered angrily. "A decade is damned long enough for a man to sweat. God knows there's enough foul horror in the world. Why the hell—" and he slammed the drawers shut. "Why the hell can't I write about them?"