Tales from the Nightside (18 page)

There was a correspondence course he failed to complete; a trip to the castles on the Rhine, Rhone, and Danube that took six years of his savings. Weekend flights to New England in desperate search of spectral Arkham, spring vacations in Haiti, Christmas in rural England, and a cold white dawn at Stonehenge. Midnights walking the streets in storms. And a year ago, the beginning of the collection that walled his study, reading and examining, hunting for a clue to the authors' ability to write eloquently about the unspeakable, darkly about the commonplace; over and over and over again until he had memorized nearly every florid, majestic, purple, and bitter bitten paragraph. Nightmares. Sweat. The sounds of blood dripping whenever he turned a page.

An aunt died, a raise in salary, and he redecorated every room in house in every color of darkness he could find or create. The doors sprung heavy locks. The windows grew thick drapes that prevented the sunlight from fading black carpets, from admitting the day and keeping the air still.

But the words he had done did the worst to him. Worst by staying just out of reach, like the tip of a breeze, taunting him like so many harlots berating an impotent, cursing him from thick and thin brown envelopes efficiently and swiftly returned with his name and address neatly centered, neatly printed. They laughed, jeered, rearranged themselves to obscure the content from everyone but himself; and he cried out for understanding, vowed revenge on those who deliberately misunderstood, reveled in showers of self-pity, and haunted the summer/autumn/winter/spring parties for the Woman, and the Key.

Martin choked on a sob when the blood-weight of nine years threatened to crush him.

Hey, Mr. White, I'm told you're a... a writer? Well, listen, have you heard the one about the chubby vampire who managed a blood bank? No? Well, it seems that this girl came in one day...

The light bulb flickered. There was no wind, but the air moved. Martin reached for his pen. Waiting.

Really, Martin, don't you think you should try to write things that have... well, a moral? I mean, honestly! You should know that people just aren't scared anymore. Really!

Thunder and lightning born together, and the wet rush of the storm carried a faint ghost of laughter from across the street. Martin sat motionless, his eyes wide as if in shock. The pen moved without conscious direction, and he looked fearfully, gratefully at the bookcase, at the volumes he had thrown to the floor. But Matheson and Sloane made no move to comfort him.

Doesn't it interfere with your teaching, Mr. White?

Did you say horror stories, Mr. White? How... how quaint.

This course I was telling you about, Marty, the prof said you got to have a hook. You got a hook, White?

He yanked page after page from beneath the flow of black ink until his hand began to cramp and forced him to slow down. Slow down, and stop. Perspiration ran down his cheeks and soaked his collar. The fan had stopped. He took a breath, held it, blew it slowly out, and wrote again, ignoring the stinging smoke from the cigarette dangling from his mouth. He neared the climax. Laughed. Tears brimmed. Nearer.

No fooling, you really a writer? Never heard of you.

Suddenly, as if a hand had punched at his chest, he slumped back and the pen fell to the desk. Panic strangled him. His fingers tried to grasp but failed to hold the pen now rolling away, to the floor.

"No” he said quietly. Then, louder: "No, damnit, you can't stop me now!"

The room, house, street, were silent.

His voice rose to a wail, a moan, while rain dripped from the eaves and vanished into mud.

He hesitated, then dropped to the floor, scrabbling through the books randomly, opening and reading, forcing disjointed passages to jolt into his mind. Feverishly he grabbed, tore, read, wept, until the last page lay shredded at his feet.

He closed his eyes tightly, and clenched his fists against his thighs.

I need you, he pleaded silently. I... I can't finish, not without you.

And he was in a place not a time, nor a color.

A cat, owl, woman-girl screeched. Blood ran, water ran, white greyed, red glowed, and a thousand-towered castle rose and fell in stagnant green waters that loomed above scarlet mountains coated with wolves that flew like bats on broomsticks of lightning. An axe fell, guillotine hummed, knife whistled, stake thudded, and Martin smiled, holding out his arms as a road came and went beneath his naked feet. Suns came up, clouds, caves, homes of gingerbread, streets, paths, trails of thorns. There marched dolls with pink pins, men on jackals, and an out-of-step parade passed, parted over him, through him... and he was alone.

With a white-robed man who held worlds of choirs and hells of crowds in each massive hand, with golden dirty hair and his smile blinded.

"You're not the one!" Martin shouted angrily.

"You're right," the man said, sang, laughed, lamented.

Another man, short, ugly, fiercesome, a black halo and violet cloak his only dress.

"No, damnit, neither are you," Martin sneered.

"Right," the man said softly, almost sadly.

Martin whirled.

A woman, at last the woman, whose beauty crippled and gave him strength, with roses and ivy and hemlock at her breasts, and deer and hyenas cavorting at her feet. Symphonies and chantings, ditties and solemnities.

"Yes," Martin gasped. "I've been waiting for you."

"No," the woman wept. "No, not me."

Martin spun around, his arms wide to clasp, but he was alone again; and a sudden snap of thunder brought him back to the study. He was sprawled on the floor, his head toward the door, and the torn pages of his books had fallen snowlike over his chest.

"Oh, my God, please," he said in a monotonic moan. "Don't leave me now. Please, where are you?"

In spite of the thunder, there was fog.

In spite of the lightning, there was darkness.

And when Martin rolled to his stomach, there was a shadow in the corner.

“Here," It said. "We've been waiting."

***

November, and an aged slate sky; a wind snapping across the fields like a bullwhip and cracking around a golden brown house that squatted warmly on the grey landscape. Aaron, huddled in a winter-worn and crimson jacket, was slumped, seemingly relaxed, against the jamb of the open front door, his hands flat in his pockets. His eyes were narrowed against the wind, and they shifted quickly along the partially wooded horizon, blurring the Dakota spruce and pine to a green-and-grey smear of almost preternatural fear. Behind him the house was empty, and silent. There was only the wind and an occasional wooden creak.

He shivered.

Suddenly an explosive gust caught him unprepared and shoved him off-balance; a magazine was blown to the floor in the living room, and a shade snapped against glass. Reluctantly he closed the door and cut off the warmth from his back. His lips twisted into a half-smile. A good thing Miriam's not here, he thought as his mind mimicked her laughing scold: Aaron Jackoson, what do you think we are—Eskimos? Just look at my curtains blown all over, and the cold, Aaron, the cold... He grinned, shook his head, and closed his eyes briefly to allow her face to flash before him reassuringly. The wind gusted again, and his smile faded. Come home, Miriam, he thought (nearly prayed), come home soon—the boy frightens me yet.

Then he resettled himself to wait, arms folded and pressed tightly against his chest. He squinted into the cold, his eyes moving, moving as they had once been trained to do, watching and waiting

...

...under a multigreen canopy of broad leaves, twisted vines, and knee-high, waist-high brush beside the paths he and his men rarely used as they climbed for hours through the bugs/sweat/heat/dirt world. A ragged clearing ahead where the village so often visited was hidden, and the smoke-skinned, half- naked Montagnards who gave them the news that the enemy had long since fled—all save one who, this time, belonged to them, not the soldiers. Water, then, with iodine tablets to kill the bacteria, and orange flavoring to kill the taste. While he watched the jungle and his men relaxed, finally. And the boy—eight, perhaps nine- stood by a black patch of earth where several men were racing the sun, digging what looked to be a grave. A shout...

...and Aaron blinked and watched a slight figure break from the trees and zigzag swiftly across the field, arms waving wildly in greeting. He grinned and, pushing himself away from the house, limped heavily toward the fence as grass crackled sharply beneath his feet. He shivered and wondered how the boy had managed to adapt so rapidly to the four seasons so radically different from the hot and not-so-hot of the mountain jungles.

At last the boy reached the yard and with a melodramatic gasp draped himself over the faded white rail, his face darker, but not red, from exertion.

“Hey, Dad.”

"Hey, yourself."

"Boy, am I... bushed?"

Aaron nodded. "Bushed, pooped, beat, tired... in fact, you look like all of them rolled into one.” He was tempted to ask where his adopted son had been, and thought better of it. "Come on inside, David, and get yourself warm. Your mother'll kill me if she finds I let you catch cold the minute she decides to go visiting.”

The boy was thirteen and still quite short (would never be much taller), and as he dashed back to the house ahead of his father, his long straight black hair whipped his shoulders and the air, while Aaron watched carefully for hints of the past until he realized what he was doing and scolded himself silently for behaving like a damned fool. The boy, he insisted to his shadow, was an American now. But he could not help the growing feeling that, without Miriam, David thought of him only as the lieutenant who took him away. He glanced back at the trees and shut the door.

"Sit down, Dad," David called from the kitchen. “Til make you some hot tea. Did mother call today?"

"Yes, I'm afraid she already has," he answered. "About ten, ten-thirty. You were out with Pinto, I think."

"Nuts."

Aaron laughed and, after shucking his coat, stretched out on the sofa, letting the room draw the cold from his skin to die in the dark glow of the beams and paneled walls. And everywhere, the scent of Miriam.

Then he heard a cup shatter, and he sighed when David, none too quietly, began muttering to himself. "Hey, in there," he shouted. "We speak English in this house, remember?"

The boy poked his head out of the kitchen and grinned broadly. "Sorry, Dad, but that's all I remember anymore."

"The swearing?"

"But, Dad, they're the best kind, don't you know? I heard the GIs use them all the time."

There was a sharp silence before David finally giggled and thrust out an open hand. "Look, Dad, I was only counting. I don't remember any more than that, honest." He waited a moment, staring, then frowned and disappeared.

Now that's got to be a crime, Aaron thought, recalling all the tedious, impatient hours he had spent scraping together enough of the tribe's language to make himself, and his mission, understood; there were still a few isolated words and phrases that returned to him when he pressed, yet the boy had forgotten a lifetime. So he said. Once, when Aaron had been feeling particularly moody over his crippled leg, he had asked David if he minded being away from his old home, toppled through a sargasso of red tape and interviews lnto a country and life-style as alien to the boy as the jungle was to Aaron. David had smiled, a little softly, and shook his head. But the black eyes were expressionless; they always had been since the death of his father.

"Hey, Dad! Quit daydreaming, please? This stuff is hot."

Aaron smiled and took the steaming cup from the offered tray. David sat cross-legged on the rug, watching intently as Aaron tasted the tea and nodded his approval. "Your mother," he said, "will be jealous."

David finally returned the smile, then turned his head toward the bay window as if he were plotting the darkening sky, listening for the invisible wind. He squirmed. Coughed. Aaron amused himself with the boy's impatience as long as he could; then, softly, "Pinto must be starving. Is he on a diet or something?"

And the boy was gone. To a pony named Pinto, horse enough for a youngster who would never be tall, not even average. They had both arrived on the same day, and five years later they were inseparable. Wild, Aaron thought. Both of them.

The telephone shrilled. Aaron grunted away a cramp that knifed his mine-shattered leg as he headed into the hallway and picked up the receiver.

"Jackoson, that you?"

Aaron winced. "Yes, Mr. Sorrentino, it's me."

"Damned good thing. Want to tell you those wolves are back again. Went after two of my rams this morning. Saw them. Big as horses they were. Chased them into the woods, I did." Right to my place, Aaron thought bitterly, thanks a lot. "I got a shot at them."

"You what?"

"Said I got a shot at them."

"Damnit, Sorrentino, my boy was playing there today. You know he always—"

"Did I hit him?" The voice was singularly unconcerned.

"Christ, no! If you had, do you think I'd be—"

"Then don't worry about it, Jackoson. I'm a perfect shot. I hit what I aim at. That kid—"

"My son."

"—won't get hurt, don't you worry about that. But one thing, Jackoson... I, uh, don't want to make any trouble, you understand, but I wish you would straighten out your kid about where your property ends. Him and that damn pony scare hell out of my sheep."

"If I didn't know you better, Mr. Sorrentino, I'd be tempted to think that you were somehow trying to threaten me."

A raucous laugh and a harsh gasping for breath. Aaron wanted to spit at the phone. "Just wanted you to know, Jackoson, don't get so worked up. You soldier boys get excited too easy."

"I just don't like the tone of your voice, Sorrentino."

"So sue me," Sorrentino said, and hung up.

Aaron breathed deeply and grabbed the edge of the hall table. "I could kill you so easily, Mr. Franklin Sorrentino," he said to the wall. "So goddamned easily."