HAZMAT

& Other Toxic Stories

by

Lawrence Watt-Evans

HAZMAT & Other Toxic Stories

Published by Misenchanted Press

Contents copyright © 1988, 1991, 1992,

1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2008,

2012, 2016 by Lawrence Watt Evans

Cover design by Lawrence Watt-Evans

CONTENTS

Introduction

Hazmat

The Worst Part

Playing for Keeps

Back to the Land

For Value Received

The Cat Came Back

Dead Babies

Upstairs

Parade

A Public Hanging

Hell for Leather

The Great Ritual

Beneath the Tarmac

What the Cat Dragged In

Dead Things Don't Move

When Hell Froze Over

Grandpa's Head

Jim Tuckerman's Angel

Impostor Syndrome

Stab

Slash

~~~~~

Introduction

I grew up reading science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. My father loved science fiction, and enjoyed mysteries and good fantasy, so our house was full of the stuff.

Not horror, though. Dad didn't like horror. Some of it crept in anyway, one way or another – often because it was written by an author (Ray Bradbury, for example) who my parents considered a science fiction writer – but that only amounted to perhaps a dozen or so of our thousands of books.

I realized as a kid, though, that I liked horror, even if Dad didn't. And later on I realized that my mother loved horror, but hadn't been buying it because she didn't want to annoy my father and we had plenty of other stuff to read.

So I checked horror stories out of the library, and bought horror comics (such as they were in the Comics Code Approved 1960s), and watched horror movies on TV when I could. Once I was old enough to drive I even saw a few of those movies in the theater.

And once I was an established writer, I began thinking about writing horror...

Well, actually, I had been thinking about it for a long time. I wrote my first horror story for a class assignment in fifth grade, lifting much of my plot from the Vincent Price movie “The House on Haunted Hill.” But I only started thinking about writing horror professionally in the late 1980s, when I had already published a good bit of fantasy and science fiction.

At the time horror was booming, particularly the subgenre known as “splatterpunk,” so it seemed like a good idea to get in on it, and I tried, but alas, I was behind the curve. By the time my first horror novel, The Nightmare People, saw print, the boom had gone bust.

But I had tasted blood, and all through the 1990s I wrote short horror stories for various markets.

Around the turn of the century, though, I ran out of steam. My mood changed, and horror was less appealing. There weren't as many markets anymore, and due to health problems I wasn't writing much short fiction of any kind, so I pretty much stopped. I had unfinished stories lying around, and a complete but unsold story or two, but I had lost interest. They stayed unfinished and unsold.

At that point I had been thinking for years that I should put together a collection of my short horror stories. I wanted to call it Toxic Stories. Then I started writing “Hazmat,” and decided it should be Hazmat & Other Toxic Stories.

But I needed to finish “Hazmat” first, obviously, and... well, I'd stopped writing horror. So for the next fifteen or sixteen years, I never got around to finishing it.

But finally, in March 2016, I did. Which meant I could assemble that collection.

And here it is.

This is not all my short horror. I haven't included any stories that are in any of my other collections. That means no vampire stories, because I collected all those in In the Blood back in 2011. It means a few others, such as “Real Time,” aren't here, since I'd included them elsewhere – they fit neatly into other genres, in addition to horror.

And there were a couple of stories that I decided just didn't deserve to be here, for one reason or another.

But this is most of it. Nineteen older stories are reprinted in this collection, and two new ones, “Hazmat” and “Slash,” are published here for the first time. (I never tried selling those two anywhere else; it just wasn't worth the trouble. If a market had come looking for them... but none did.)

These stories were not all written as straight-up horror; a few were even intended as humor. Still, they are among my most disturbing creations. They all have a definite dark side, even the funny ones.

I hope you'll enjoy them.

– Lawrence Watt-Evans

Takoma Park, 2016

~~~~~

Hazmat

Jennie didn't hear the crash or the sirens, but when she got off the late bus at the corner she could see the flashing lights in the distance, blue and red and yellow, on the highway behind her house. If the sun had been shining she probably would never have seen them, but the rain had only just stopped and the skies were still dark and threatening, so that the lights were plainly visible.

She knew her mother was expecting her inside, and she didn’t want her to worry, but she wanted to see what was happening, and it would only take a few minutes, so she dropped her school-bag on the porch and ran on around to the back yard.

Her parents hated the highway; they complained about it all the time, and Jennie always said she didn't like it either, but the truth was that she found it fascinating. At night she would watch the cars from her bedroom window, the lines of red and white lights flowing by in either direction, the white turning red as they passed. During the daytime, when she played out back, she would sometimes stop just to listen to the steady rumble of traffic, the trucks and cars streaming by endlessly.

Where did they all come from, where did they all go, what were all those people who drove them like? Did they have families, and children, and homes?

She ran down the slope, and hopped from tussock to stone to cross the ditch; she could hear voices on the embankment ahead, and the colored lights were much brighter now. A raindrop splashed in the puddle beside her; apparently the storm was not over at all, but had merely paused.

The mesh fence lifted up easily – it wasn't supposed to, Jennie knew, but it always had. She squatted down and slipped underneath.

Then she paused and looked back at the house. If her mother saw her on the other side of the fence she would scream, and she'd call the highway department and have the fence fixed, and Jennie would be grounded for weeks. As it was, her mother was always worrying about a truck missing the curve and rolling down into their yard, and her father had been writing letters demanding that a proper sound-barrier wall be built.

There was no sign of her mother.

She began to climb the embankment; it was steep enough that she had to go up on all fours, hanging onto the clumps of grass and the tough brown weeds.

She could hear engines running, and tires hissing on pavement, and men shouting to one another. Something was dripping down from the shoulder, something brown, trickling down into the grass, just a foot or so away; she leaned over and sniffed at it.

It had a funny smell – not oil or gasoline or anything she recognized. She reached out a finger and poked at the dirt, deflecting the stream.

A drop splashed onto her finger, and she quickly wiped it on the grass. Most of the stuff came off, and it wasn't hot, it didn't sting or anything. She looked critically at her finger, then shrugged and resumed her climb.

A moment later she peered up over the edge of the embankment and saw the accident.

A big silver and red tank truck had turned over, impaling itself on the guard rail just a few yards from where she crouched. The brown stuff had leaked from the tank; there was a pool of it half on the pavement, half on the shoulder.

All around it was a broad empty space; the highway had been closed off, with flares and sawhorses and blinkers making a big ring around the overturned truck. Around the markers was another ring, of vehicles and uniformed men – police cars, fire trucks, rescue trucks, tow trucks.

None of them ventured near the wreck, though; they all hung back. Then, as Jennie watched, she saw two men in baggy protective suits and soft helmets emerging from one of the surrounding trucks, carrying some sort of fancy equipment that they held out in front of them, as if to ward off danger, as they stepped into the circle.

Jennie wondered what was going on; she followed the curve of the marked-off area around, and realized she was well inside the circle it would have formed had the arc been continued. The circle was not complete, though, because nobody had extended it down the steep slope of the embankment.

This, she knew, was not the usual way of handling overturned trucks; she felt a twinge of fear, and took another look at the tanker.

There was a yellow stripe down the side; a guardrail post had punched into it. There were big black letters on the stripe, but she couldn't read them because of the angle.

There were two diamond-shaped signs on the back of the truck, the end nearest her; those she could make out more clearly. One had scraped on something. That one bore a design of interlocked rings and a word starting with BI and ending in ZARD; the middle portion was illegible.

The other warning sign was still clear – sideways, but clear and legible.

It said HAZMAT.

Jennie blinked. What did “hazmat” mean?

Whatever it meant, it sounded dangerous, and she didn't like the look of any of this, and her mother would be waiting for her. Besides, the rain was picking up. She had been looking for a little excitement, but this was scary, not exciting. It was no fun at all.

She turned and began half-climbing, half-sliding back down to the ditch. She ducked under the fence and scampered up to her own yard, then ran across, out the driveway, and back around to the front door.

“Was the bus late?” her mother asked, when she stepped in.

“No,” she said, “I just walked slow.”

“In the rain?” Her mother looked up from the newspaper.

“Well, it wasn't raining, mostly,” Jennie explained. “It just now started again.”

Her mother glanced at the fat drops rattling against the windows. “Oh,” she said. “How was practice?”

“Okay,” Jennie said.

“Good,” her mother answered. Then she returned her attention to the paper.

Jennie threw her bag and jacket in the hall closet and hurried up the two flights of stairs to her room in the attic. She threw herself on the bed and stared out her window.

The lights were still flashing, and she could see the overturned truck and all the surrounding equipment; people were running back and forth, hunched against the rain. No one entered that inner circle without a protective suit, but there were at least a dozen people in suits now, some of them with shovels and buckets, some hauling a big tank on wheels. A group of three was applying a patch to the hole in the tank's side; she couldn't see how they were fastening it. Most of the rest seemed to be trying to collect the brown stuff that had leaked out, scooping it into buckets, shoveling up the dirt that had partially absorbed it, working quickly before the rain could dilute and spread it.

There were even more police cars than before, and traffic had backed up as far as she could see – the southbound side of the highway was completely blocked, and the police were setting up barricades on the northbound side, as well.

Jennie looked at her finger, a bit worried, but it seemed all right. The brown stuff was gone; there was just the faintest little red spot where it had been.

She'd wiped it off in time, she was sure.

She forgot about it and watched as the clean-up continued.

#

The rain had stopped. The southbound lanes were still blocked, but traffic was being directed across the median; one of the northbound lanes had been separated out and was carrying southbound traffic for a few hundred yards, until it could cut back across the median beyond the accident.

Some of the emergency vehicles were gone. A crane had arrived, righted the tank truck, and departed. The men in protective suits had finished their clean-up – but only after a team had carried in a jackhammer and torn up the pavement where the spill had been. Jennie's parents had heard the hammer while eating supper, and her father had gone into another of his tirades about how he hated living so close to the highway.

Jennie had eaten her dinner, watched TV, played a few videogames, and now she was getting into her nightgown, watching out the window as she did.

Her right forefinger was itching; the skin was reddish from the first knuckle to the tip, and was starting to peel in one spot – the spot where the brown stuff had touched her. It didn't actually hurt, but she wasn't happy about it.

“Hazmat,” the warning sign had said, and there had been that thing like four circles arranged in a triangle.

She settled the hem of her nightgown into place and started toward the bathroom to brush her teeth. Then she changed direction and bounced down the stairs.

Her father was in his room, grumbling to himself as he pawed through a bureau drawer looking for something.

“Daddy?” she called.

He looked up. “Yes, Jennie?”

“What's hazmat?”

He straightened up and turned to face her. “What's what?”

“Hazmat,” she said. “I saw it on the side of a truck.”

“Spell it.”

“H, A, Z, M, A, T.”

“Oh!” he said. “That's not a word; it's an abbreviation.”

“What's it stand for?”

“Hazardous Material,” he said. “What kind of a truck was it?”

“A tank truck. Like the one that tipped over on the highway.”

Her father glanced in the direction of the highway. “Is that what all the fuss was about over there?”

She nodded. “You can see from my window,” she said.

He grunted. “Well, you stay away from anything that says Haz Mat on it,” he told her, pronouncing it as two separate words.

“Yes, Daddy. There was another sign on it with a funny symbol.”

“What'd it look like?”

“Like... like three circles in a triangle, except where the corners of the triangle would be there were breaks in the circles, and they were thicker in the middle, and there was a fourth circle on top, in the middle.”

Her father needed a moment to puzzle this out, but after a few seconds he said, “I think that's the biohazard symbol.” He anticipated her next question. “Biological hazard. Germs, or something.”

“Oh,” she said, unhappily. She looked down at her finger and bit her lip.

“Something wrong?” her father asked.

She remembered what he had said last time he'd seen her playing near the highway. “No, Daddy,” she said. “I think I'll wash my hands.”

“All right,” he said. “And don't forget to brush your teeth.”

“I won't. Good night, Daddy.”

“Good night, sweetheart.”

She washed her hands. She washed them thoroughly, with two different kinds of soap, and she scrubbed hard with the scratchy old washcloth that she didn't like but which generally got things cleaner.

Then she went to bed, but her finger still itched, and the redness was spreading to the rest of her hand.

#

There were brown spots on the sheets, ugly brown stains, and Jennie knew they were where her right hand had rested during the night. The whole hand was red and swollen now, the red reaching halfway to her elbow, and the skin of her forefinger was peeling away in thick white flakes. Pale fluid was starting to ooze from the flesh beneath. The hand throbbed with dull pain; the finger itself had gone completely numb.

She no longer worried about getting in trouble for where she had been; she screamed, “Mommy!”

Someone called something downstairs, but Jennie couldn't make it out. She ran to the door and leaned out over the stairwell, shrieking, “Mommy!”

She heard a rattle, and footsteps, and then her mother was there on the stairs, looking up at her. “What is it?” she asked.

Jennie held out her hand, wordlessly.

Her mother sucked in air, shocked. “You need a doctor,” she said. “Get dressed, while I call.” She turned away.

Jennie nodded and tried to obey, but when she pulled a sleeve over her right hand she screamed at the pain, and she couldn't bring herself to fasten the buttons.

When she had her clothes more or less on, and her nightgown was a puddle of fabric on the carpet, she started to throw herself on the bed – and then stopped at the sight of the brown stains.

They were spreading.

She backed away from the bed, whimpering, and started down the steps. She couldn't hold the railing, which was on the right.

At the bottom, in the second floor hall, she could hear her mother's voice talking on the phone downstairs. She sounded upset.

That made Jennie even more frightened; if her mother was worried, then it was serious, not just some normal childhood thing like chicken pox.

She looked at her hand; brownish stuff was starting to seep from her finger where the skin had peeled away, where the pale fluid had been just a moment before. It looked uncomfortably like the brown stuff that had come from the truck. She gave a small, terrified squeak and hurried on down the next flight of stairs.

#

“I've never seen anything like it,” the emergency room doctor, Dr. Williams, said, staring at Jennie's hand – or rather, at what had been Jennie's hand just hours ago. Now it was an oozing, misshapen mass of brownish-red flesh, most of it covered with a thick layer of brown goo. Bone protruded from the five lumps that had once been fingers; the flesh had been eaten away.

Jennie could no longer move her hand or her fingers, could no longer feel anything more than a few inches below the shoulder. She couldn't stand to look at her right arm at all; mostly she just kept her eyes shut, squeezing out tears of terror and pain.

Her shoulder ached, and her chest and face felt hot, and there was a faint, dull throbbing where Dr. Williams had, within minutes of seeing her, shot her arm full of every antibiotic he had available.

They had asked her how it started, and she'd told them about the tank truck, but they hadn't done anything about it; Dr. Williams had been too busy with his needles and salves, trying to slow down the spreading damage.

They had not been able to get Jennie’s shirt off; the sleeve’s fabric was stuck to her arm, and any attempt to tear it free resulted in screaming agony.

“I'm going to see if I can find out what was in that truck,” Dr. Williams said, “but unless they've got some kind of miracle, I think the whole arm will have to come off.”

Jennie's mother sucked in her breath, but Jennie pursed her lips, took a glance at the ruin of her hand, and nodded.

“Hurry,” she said.

#

They were going to cut off her arm.

This wasn't some TV show, like “Agents of SHIELD,” or like the end of “The Empire Strikes Back,” where they would just put on a robot one and she'd be as good as new. This was real life, and her arm was going to be gone, she'd just have an empty sleeve pinned up to her shoulder like that man she saw on the bus once, or the guy on “Dancing with the Stars.” She'd be like that for the rest of her life.

But if they didn't cut it off, she was going to be dead, like that cat that got run over, or the squirrels on the highway. Sometimes people talked about dead kids going to Heaven, but Jennie didn't think she believed that stuff, and wasn't in any hurry to find out. Dying was scary, even scarier than letting them cut off her arm... if cutting off her arm would work.

The way that stuff spread, just that one little tiny spot turning into this – wouldn't it already be all over, inside her? Wasn't it already too late?

She whimpered. She was going to die, she knew it.

Her mother was standing there watching, and not saying it would all be okay, and that was as frightening as anything else, because her mother always said it would be all right, even when Jennie couldn’t see how – but this time she wasn’t saying it; when Jennie whimpered she just bit her lip and stared at her daughter.

And she wasn’t picking Jennie up, wasn’t hugging her, and Jennie knew why – she didn’t want to touch the brown goo. Jennie looked down at the shirt she had never managed to button all the way up because her right hand had hurt too much.

She could see her chest, the pale skin damp with sweat – and the little brown spots that seemed to be spreading as she watched.

Cutting off her arm wouldn’t help. It was too late.

“Mommy?” she said.

Her mother looked at her, followed her gaze down to those spots on her chest, and gasped. “Jennie,” she said helplessly.

Then Dr. Williams was standing in the door, but not entering the room.

“It’s a failed bio-weapon,” he said. “There are scientists on the way, experts on the stuff.” He stared at Jennie. “Be brave, honey.”

“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” she asked. Her breath seemed to hurt her throat, and her chest felt tight.

“I don’t know,” Dr. Williams said. He turned to her mother. “Is there anyone else we should call? Was there anyone else in the house this morning?”

“Her father – he had just left for work when we... when...”

“Brothers? Sisters? School?”

“She’s in third grade.”

“The scientists,” Jennie said. “Can they fix it?”

Dr. Williams started to say something, then stopped. He shook his head. When he spoke again he sounded angry, as if he was trying to control himself and couldn’t quite do it.

“They want to see what it looks like,” he said. “What it does. But they have no idea how to stop it.”

“So I’m going to die.” It was not a question this time, but Dr. Williams nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“They want to watch me die.”

He nodded again.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” her mother said. Jennie could see tears on her cheeks. She looked as if she was trying to control herself and not doing it, too, but where Dr. Williams looked angry, Jennie’s mother looked sad.

Jennie felt tears on her own cheeks, mixing with sweat. She held out her arms, the left still normal, the right a misshapen horror. “Mommy!” she cried.

And without thinking, her mother came forward and hugged her.

Jennie closed her eyes as they embraced, then opened them to see brown goo on her mother’s jaw where Jennie’s right arm had touched.

Jennie saw her mother’s eyes widen with horror as she realized what they had done.

Jennie thought she should probably say she was sorry, but the words would not come.

She was going to die, she didn’t need to be sorry for anything anymore. She was going to die.

But at least she wouldn’t die alone.

end

~~~~~

The Worst Part

Sometimes he tried to tell himself that the wait at the gate was the worst part. Why they called it a gate at all, he wasn't sure – the damn thing wasn't a gate, it was a tunnel, and the combination made him think of the gates of Hell.

That was all too appropriate an image--a tunnel down into the Hell of an airliner's cabin, with its sadistically-narrow seats, its fetid pressurized air, the hard, ugly plastic everywhere.

The wait wasn't really the worst part at all. It was bad, it was very bad, but the worst part...

Well, it just kept on getting worse. The long, horrible wait in that dreary holding pen, strewn with other people's newspapers, and then the march down the tunnel like prisoners into their cells, squeezing through that right-angle right turn where the crew greeted everyone with their phony smiles and where, off to the left, he could see into the cockpit, could see all that ominous black machinery with its colored lights, obviously too complex for anyone to actually understand and control properly.

And then down the aisle, waiting while people stuffed heavy luggage into the overhead compartments, standing there sweating and stinking of fear while those idiots blithely tried to jam in as much as possible, so that it could all fall down on him later, and then they'd bend themselves into their horrid little seats and let him past, so that he could find his own horrid little seat and squeeze himself into it.

Grope for the seatbelt, near panic for a moment when one side seems to be missing, visions of bouncing around the cabin, head battering against the reading lights and attendant call buttons, as the plane veers and swoops. Then find the belt, buckle in, and worry about whether he'll be able to get it open again, ever, or whether he'll sit there, trapped and struggling, while the cabin fills with smoke, with flame, with water, while the other passengers all slide out to safety and he sits there, strapped down and waiting, and they don't hear his screams over their own relieved laughter...

And his knees hit the seat in front of him, his head doesn't fit comfortably on the headrest, half the time they're flying the attendants block the aisle with their silly drink cart so he can't reach the lavatory or the exit if there's an emergency.

And the take-off, the engines screaming so that it hurts to think, the wing deforming itself as he watches out the window, what if those flaps come loose, can those little metal struts really hold it all together at six hundred miles an hour, my God, six hundred miles an hour, how can anything hold together, how can anyone control it, at that speed?

Six hundred miles an hour, thirty thousand feet up, that's six miles up, six miles with nothing but empty air below them, nothing holding them up but those bits of metal, those hydraulic struts that hold the wings together, the wings he can see bouncing and shimmying like diving boards that someone's just used for that six-mile plunge, the wings that could tear off or fall to pieces at any moment, and the plane would turn and plummet earthward, falling six miles out of the sky, six miles would give him time to watch, to think, to see that he was going to die, he'd have all the time he needed to think it over, he'd be able to see the ground screaming up at him, and he wouldn't be able to do a thing, he'd be strapped in his seat while the plane was in freefall, like the biggest damn roller coaster you ever saw going down a six-mile drop, only there's no curved rail to swoop him back up, he'll go down and down and down until he hits the hard earth, and his neck snaps and his bones break and his blood sprays across several counties, they'll be picking pieces of him out of cornfields and hedges, and everyone will read the newspapers and see just another statistic and they'll never think of the shock of impact, the incredible pain, the burned black flesh when the jet fuel ignites.

And if the wings hold up, if the pilot doesn't go mad and dive just to see how big a crater he can make, if the pilot doesn't die of a stroke and send them diving, if the engines don't explode, if the fuel doesn't spill away into the air as a toxic cloud settling over the countryside and leaving them powerless, if the whole thing doesn't catch fire from the friction of that incredible six-hundred-mile-an-hour speed and smother them all in smoke, if the pressurization doesn't fail and leave them all gasping in unbreathably thin air, eyes bugging out and hands clutching throats as they suck at air that isn't there, drowning in near-vacuum like fish out of water... if none of that happens, then they'll reach the airport where they're to land, and they'll drop down out of the sky deliberately, falling down through those six miles of nothing and trusting the plane and the pilot to catch them at the last minute and land them safely on the runway, not to plow into a building somewhere; they'll hit the ground still traveling two hundred miles an hour, and those engines that have been screaming for hours will suddenly roar into reverse, sucking in everything as they try to stop the plane's headlong rush to disaster, and the tires will squeal and shudder as they scrape along the tarmac, and he'll sit helplessly in his seat, his life in the pilot's hands, waiting for the impact with the terminal, with another plane that's on the runway by mistake; waiting for a tire to blow, a strut to fail, for the plane to buckle sideways and drive wreckage in through the window at him.

And that was the worst; after that, it would be over, the panic would subside, his stomach would relax--he might need to vomit, he had once or twice--and he would get off the plane only shaking slightly, and he'd tell himself that there, it wasn't really all that bad, he'd tell his friends that he was okay, he didn't like flying but it was no big deal, there was nothing to be scared of. He knew all the statistics, the facts, the reasonable, rational attitudes, and he would convince himself that he believed them, that they applied to him, that he could fight down his fear and control it.

He knew that his fear wasn't rational, not really, and he was a rational man. He'd relax and he'd forget how awful it was, he'd forget and he'd agree to do it again, he'd buy a ticket to fly somewhere else, and then when it was too late to back out he'd start remembering again, the panic would start to gnaw at his belly, his throat would dry and tighten, and rationality would fall away, he'd know that he was going to die this time, that this would be the plane that fell flaming from the sky, and it would be worse than ever before, every time it was worse, every time he told himself he was over his fear and every time it was worse.

But every time he forgot that, forgot what it was like and agreed to fly again, and that brought him back here, right where he was, sitting at that gate to Hell, Gate C3 for Flight 1108, his palms sweaty and his fingers shaking as he tried to control his fear. He looked down at them, tried to will them to be still, to be steady and calm and brave.

“Jack?”

He looked up, startled, and his eyes wouldn't focus at first.

“Jack Hartman? Is that you?”

“Sharon?” The neatly-attired young woman in the dark-green skirt and jacket stood in front of him, looking down at him, a purse hung from one shoulder and an overnight bag held in front of her; he blinked up at the heart-shaped face with its uncertain smile.

“It is you!” she said, and the smile became steadier. “Jack, it's been years!”

“Yeah,” he said, vaguely aware that he should smile back, that he should have said something clever, or at least semi-intelligent, rather than the single stupid monosyllable. He should have given some sign that he recognized her and remembered her and was glad to see her.

He couldn't; he was too full of fear, too busy worrying about his impending death, his certainty that his plane would crash.

“Are you all right?” she asked, the smile vanishing; she dropped the overnight bag and sat down in the seat beside him, leaning toward him.

“I'm okay,” he said.

“You're pale,” she said. “I mean, white.”

“I'm okay,” he insisted. “I just don't like flying, and I get nervous waiting.”

“Oh,” she said, and the tone of her voice wasn't the derision he feared, but it wasn't comforting, either, it was simply puzzled. He started to turn away, then stopped himself; that would be unforgivably rude. She was trying to be helpful, she was concerned about him; it wasn't her fault if she didn't understand something as irrational as his fear of flying.

“So what are... how are you?” he managed to say.

“Oh, I'm fine. Are you sure you're okay?”

“I'm fine, really – just don't like flying.”

“But you – you were never scared of anything, Jack; you're afraid of flying?”

The look her in eyes took him back a dozen years, to high school, when he and Sharon's older brother Greg had been pals, teasing Greg's kid sister at every opportunity, but she'd still hung around, staring at Jack with admiring eyes.

That admiration was still there.

He stared at her, amazed and glorified; if he'd ever thought about it at all he'd thought it was just a little-girl crush, that she must have outgrown it long ago, but here she was, a grown woman, looking at him with that same wide-eyed intensity.

No one had looked at him like that in years.

“It's been a long time,” he said.

“Oh, I know,” she said, “It's been too long! I kept asking Greg to write to you, or call you, you know, just to keep in touch, I didn't think I should do it myself, you know how that is...” Was she blushing slightly? He almost thought she was.

“I should've written myself,” Jack said.

He didn't really mean it; he and Greg had drifted apart, and neither of them had been much interested in staying in touch once Jack moved away. Some friendships lasted, some didn't, and his friendship with Greg had been one he outgrew.

But Sharon obviously hadn't outgrown her interest.

He started to ask what she was doing here, then stopped himself. What else would she be doing at an airport gate with an overnight bag? She was waiting for a plane – for the same plane he would be riding.

They would be flying together – maybe they could arrange to sit together. That would be...

That would be horrible. He would be white-faced and gasping for air, and she would be laughing at him. She'd see him for the coward he was, and that admiration would leave her eyes forever, his goddamned phobia would do what years of separation had not.

But maybe her presence would help. Maybe he could hide it, fight down his fear; after all, for several seconds, while he looked at her face, he had managed to forget that he was waiting to board the airplane that would carry him to some horrible humiliating death.

And maybe...

“So you don't mind flying?” he asked.

“Oh, I love flying!” she said. “Watching the ground fall away, sailing through the sky – I love it!”

Hardly a fellow sufferer, he told himself mockingly. “I don't,” he said. “Bad food, cramped seats – I hate it.”

“Oh, that's silly, it's not so bad,” she said. She blinked. “Oh, is that what you meant, about not liking it? I thought it scared you!”

He forced a smile, and said nothing.

“I should've known you weren't scared,” she said. “You were never scared of anything. What are you doing now, anyway? Are you married?”

She blushed again, he was almost certain – she must have realized just how blatant her interest was.

“No,” he said. “Not at the moment. What about you?”

“Never,” she said.

“I remember you worked at that drugstore; you still there?”

“Of course not! I have a real job now!”

They chatted, and for first seconds, then minutes at a time he forgot his fear. Color came back to his face; his hands didn't shake as he adjusted himself in his seat, as he patted her hand. While she told him about decorating her apartment on the cheap he found himself thinking that maybe this time, maybe this time, he could hide his fear, maybe if he had her beside him to talk to he could forget about fire and smoke and falling and asphyxiation.

And maybe when they landed he could ask her out somewhere, if he hadn't made a fool of himself on the flight.

“Now boarding, rows 16 through 23,” the PA announced, and Jack groped reluctantly for his briefcase; Sharon snatched her overnight bag out of his way.

Together they walked toward the entrance to the jetway, still talking; at the door she stopped, and he stopped as well, assuming that she must be sitting in one of the rows further forward, the rows that hadn't been called yet. A momentary surge of panic flooded through him at the thought that they would be separated on the plane, that she would not be there beside him to help him stay calm, but would see him when he burst out screaming in terror.

Surely, though, they could trade seats around somehow. He knew that if she was beside him, the flight wouldn't be so bad.

At least, not until the crash.

“All seats, now boarding,” came the call.

“I guess I'd better say goodbye,” she said, stepping back, away from the gate.

He stared at her, thunderstruck. “Aren't you coming?” he croaked.

“Oh, no!” she said. “I wish I was.” She giggled. “I'm sorry, I guess I didn't explain. I'm just here to meet Greg – his plane's delayed, it'll be arriving over there in another twenty minutes or so.” She pointed at another gate, Gate C5.

“But the overnight bag...”

“This?” She hefted it. “Oh, this is Greg's; it got checked onto an earlier flight by mistake. I'm sorry, I should have explained. Goodbye, Jack; write sometime, why don't you?” She was receding, somehow, backing away from him, and he was drifting down into the jetway, down through the gates of Hell, toward the plane that would carry him to fiery destruction, and he could not turn back, could not reveal himself to be a coward to her as he watched her carried away from him, lost forever. He could feel the blood draining from his face, could feel his hands trembling more than ever. His last hope was walking away.

She turned and waved.

“Have a good flight!” she called, smiling.

And that was the very worst part of all.

end

~~~~~

Playing for Keeps

Carefully, Jason leaned out the open window and peered about. The moon was half full, providing him with plenty of light to see that the side lawn was smooth and empty, the hedge dark and unbroken. Nothing moved, nothing was out of place.

He pulled his head back in and listened for a moment. He heard nothing but crickets and his own breathing; his parents and his kid sister were, he was sure, sound asleep.

The coast was clear.

Cautiously, he climbed headfirst out the window onto the porch roof, then pulled himself down the sloping asphalt shingles on his belly. At the edge he reached down and grasped the corner pillar, then gradually worked his feet around, crab-fashion, until he was able to swing his left leg down onto a foothold in the gingerbread.

From there it was easy; he slid the other leg around and shinnied quickly down the pole to the railing, and dropped from there down behind the bushes.

The bushes rustled more than he liked, and he froze for a moment, staring out at the vacant lawn gleaming silver in the moonlight.

The way was still clear. He was out of the house, free to roam. He could slip down to the pond and catch himself a frog without his parents knowing a thing about it.

He gazed critically at the wide back yard, and decided that it was too open, too visible. He would find another route, rather than cutting straight across all that lawn.

The hedge that ran along the boundary with the McPhersons’ yard would provide cover. He could follow it to the back corner, then make a short dash to the trees, and from there to the pond it was all woods.

A dash across the side yard, the long creep down the hedge, another dash, and the woods. It would be easy. It would be fun, too, as if he were a soldier dodging bullets or something. He crept out from behind the bush, looked quickly to either side, and ran.

A dozen steps and he was across the lawn, diving for the shelter of the hedge’s shadow. He landed on his knees and elbows with his nose inches from the leaves, leaves that looked dead black in the pale light.

He glanced back at the lawn just in time to see the shadow stretch out across the grass.

Horrified, he looked up.

A figure loomed over him, shadowy black, tall, taller than seemed possible, its head bloated and misshapen. He gaped up in surprise. He fought down the urge to cry or scream as a gaunt hand reached down toward him.

The hand grabbed him by the back of his collar and hauled him upright, then yanked him clean off his feet. He dangled helplessly.

“Guess what, kid,” a deep, deep voice said. “I’m the boogey man.”

He wanted to say something smart, something scathing, in reply to this terrifying stranger, but all he could manage was, “No, you’re not; there isn’t any boogey man.”

Teeth glinted as his captor smiled. “Maybe you’re right, boy; maybe I’m not. But I might as well be. Now, you must be Jason Price; why don’t we go see hat your parents think about you being out at this hour?” He casually lifted the struggling boy over the hedge and marched up the street, Jason still dangling from his hand.

From his altered angle Jason could see his foe more clearly; he was no longer a mass of empty shadow. The weird bloating of the head was really just a battered wide-brimmed felt hat; the teeth were flat human teeth, the eyes dark and smiling, the hands large, but just hands, with only five fingers apiece. He was just a man, whoever he was.

They reached the street and turned left, toward Jason’s house, and Jason demanded, “Put me down; I’ll walk from here.”

“I don’t think so,” the other replied; he marched on.

“You’re ruining my shirt,” Jason complained.

His captor shrugged. “That’s too bad.”

He turned and marched up the front walk, strode smoothly up the porch steps, and with the boy still dangling from his right hand, rang the bell with his left.

There was a long moment’s wait, and Jason heard banging and voices within. The porch light flashed on and his father opened the door, wearing his old bathrobe.

“What is it?” he said, blinking.

“Mr. Price?” the self-proclaimed boogey man said. “I believe this belongs to you.” He held Jason up to the light.

“Jason?” Price gaped, then remembered himself. “Oh, of course. Thank you, Mr. Crowley. Where’d you catch him?”

“Oh, I happened to be behind the hedge next door when he climbed down the porch.”

“Oh. Well, thank you; put him down, I’ll take care of him now.”

“All right.” Crowley lowered Jason roughly, not quite dropping him. “He’s all yours for now, Mr. Price.”

“Thank you, Mr. Crowley.”

“Just remember,” Crowley said with a broad smile, “the third time I keep him.”

Price managed a feeble reflection of the other’s grin. “Of course.” He grabbed Jason’s arm and hauled him into the house. “Good night, Mr. Crowley; thanks again.”

Crowley tipped his hat and stood, smiling, as Price closed the door.

As soon as the latch clicked into place, Jason demanded, “Who’s that guy? What was he doin’ back there?”

“Never mind who that is, Jason; what the Hell were you doing outside at this hour?”

“Aw, Jesus, Dad, I just wanted to go down to the pond and catch some frogs when there wasn’t anybody else around to scare ‘em off!”

“Well, you’ll have to find some better time to do it than the middle of the night! Don’t you know it’s dangerous running around in the dark? You could get arrested, or attacked. You’re lucky it was Mr. Crowley who found you, and not some pervert!”

“How do you know Crowley’s not a pervert?” Jason countered.

“Well, if you must know, he’s the new security patrolman for the block; the Neighborhood Council hired him last month.”

“So what business is it of his if I go catch frogs?”

“That’s one of the things we’re paying him for, to make sure you kids don’t go running around at all hours, so we don’t have teenagers screwing in the woods back there.”

“What’s that got to do with me? I’m only eleven!”

“And that’s too damn young to be running around at two in the morning!” Price bellowed.

Jason sensed he wasn’t going to get anywhere by arguing his right to roam free at night. “I still think Crowley’s a pervert!” he said, trying a different tack.

“We checked him out, boy, don’t you think we didn’t – and if he is a pervert, that’s all the more reason for you to stay in at night the way you’re supposed to, so he won’t catch you again!”

Jason couldn’t think of an answer to that; he shut up and stared at his father in silence defiance.

He wasn’t actually punished, just sent back to bed. He watched his father close and lock the window, then stamp out and close the door. He sat in bed, thinking, and it was a long hour before he finally slid down and fell asleep.

The following night he stayed inside, but spent two hours crouched at the window, watching the yard, watching the MacPhersons’ yard, studying every detail of the hedge in between, leaning over to stare at the woods far off to the right.

He saw no sign of Crowley, but he didn’t risk climbing out; he had seen no sign of Crowley before he was caught, either.

The next day, at school, one of the kids mentioned “the boogey man,” and Jason was surprised to hear that half a dozen of his friends knew about Crowley’s presence. In fact, some knew considerably more than he did.

“He’s six foot five, my dad says,” Bill Jenkins told him. “Six foot five, and he weighs a hunnerd and sixty-five pounds, but he’s strong enough to pick a kid up and carry him like he weighs nuthin’.”

Jason nodded agreement. “He’s strong, all right.”

“He lives in the top floor apartment at that place on Elm, the one with that tower on the corner, and he sleeps all day and only comes out at night. He was like that anyway, that’s why they hired him.”

“Maybe there’s something wrong with him, so he can’t stand the sun,” Sam Hessen suggested.

“Maybe he’s really the boogey man, like he says,” Jim Fairleigh said.

“There ain’t any boogey man!” Jason said.

“How d’you know?” Jim countered.

“There just ain’t,” Jason insisted. “He’s like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, something the grown-ups use to get kids to behave.”

“Well, this Crowley guy sure is strange, whether he’s the boogey man or not,” Bill said. “He tells everybody he’s the boogey man.”

“I think he’s a pervert,” Jason said.

“Naw,” Bill said. “They wouldn’t hire a perv!”

“How would they know?”

“Well, he ain’t never been arrested, I heard my dad tell my mom that. Clean record, he says.”

“If he’s really the boogey man they wouldn’t have caught him,” Jim pointed out.

“There ain’t any boogey man,” Jason insisted.

“Where’d they find him?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” Bill replied. Nobody else volunteered any more information.

Jason mulled it all over, and after he had given it sufficient thought he announced to his friends, “I’m not gonna take it.”

“What aren’t you gonna take?” Sam asked.

“I’m not gonna take this Crowley character or any of his boogey man crap. It’s a free country, ain’t it? Who’s he to tell me I can’t take a walk in the middle of the night if I want?”

“He’s just doin’ what our parents want, that’s all,” Joe Kimball said. “I don’t think it’s his idea. I kinda think he likes kids, from what I seen; he’s always makin’ jokes and smilin’, talkin’ about how he’d like to keep ‘em.”

“Well, I’m not gonna take it,” Jason insisted.

“Suit yourself,” Bill said with a shrug, “but I’m not gonna argue with him.”

The bell rang, putting an end to the conversation.

That night Jason watched out his window again, very carefully, starting the moment his bedroom door was closed. He saw no sign of Crowley anywhere. He waited and watched.

The moon was two-thirds full, the sky was clear, and Jason saw no sign of Crowley. He heard the crickets chirping, an occasional frog calling faintly to him from the pond.

Finally, at half past two, he slid out the window onto the porch roof and made his way to the ground.

From the bushes by the porch he stared critically at the hedge. That had been his mistake, he decided, going to the hedge. Crowley might be lurking there right now, and even if he weren’t he could sneak along the other side and Jason wouldn’t be able to spot him.

If he were to go straight across the back lawn, though, Crowley wouldn’t have anywhere to hide, and Jason didn’t think he was the sort who would chase a kid halfway across town. No, Jason told himself, Crowley was an ambusher; it went with the calm smiling style.

With that in mind, he slipped out from behind the bushes and headed straight back toward the trees, across the open expanse of lawn.

As he passed the back corner of the house something grabbed the back of his shirt, and he was snatched up into the air.

“Guess what, Jason,” that deep voice said. “It’s the boogey man, and I’ve got you again.”

Jason was furious; how could he have been caught so easily? He thrashed, kicking, and tried to drive his elbow back into Crowley’s chest.

Crowley did not bother with subtlety; his left hand flashed out as his right twisted, and his long bony fingers clamped around Jason’s throat.

“Stop it, boy,” he said.

Jason struggled for another few seconds, then stopped as his air supply ran out. The grip loosened.

“Listen to me, Jason,” Crowley said. “I don’t want any of this from you. I caught you where you had no business being, outside at this hour; now you behave yourself, or you’ll get a lot worse than anything you’ve got from me yet.”

The voice was flat and deadly, and Jason believed it completely. He put up no further resistance as the rest of the scene was acted out much as before. He was carried helplessly to his front porch, the doorbell brought his father, and Price and Crowley exchanged polite words, Crowley smiling all the time. He was then left in his father’s custody.

This time he didn’t talk back or argue; the memory of that grip on his throat was too fresh. He nodded quietly and went back to bed when his father had finished yelling.

The next day, however, the pain and fright had faded, and his indignation had begun to mount. How had Crowley dared to treat him like that? He was an innocent child, not some kind of axe-murderer trying to escape. His parents were paying their fake boogey man to protect them, not to manhandle their children. What if his larynx had collapsed? He’d seen that happen on a doctor show on TV, and the person had almost died, and they had had to cut her throat open and stick tubes in.

He told himself that he should have complained, should have said something to his father. Why hadn’t he?

Well, he decided, it wasn’t Dad’s business; this was between him and Crowley. He’d handle it on his own. He was almost twelve now, old enough to take care of himself.

Besides, he wasn’t sure that his father would believe him. A glance in the mirror showed no bruises or other marks on his neck.

He thought about it for the rest of the day, making plans, and that afternoon, while he was at Sam’s house and Sam was in the bathroom, he snuck into Sam’s older brother Al’s room. He knew that Al had what he wanted; he’d seen him show it off once, and had seen where he put it afterward.

It was right where he had seen it before. He stuck it in his pocket and hurried back out of the room before he was caught.

That night it rained, and Jason stayed inside. He woke up briefly around three and glanced out the window, and thought he saw something tall and dark moving across the lawn. Before he could focus on it it was gone; he stared futilely for a few minutes, then went back to bed.

The rain lingered through the following day and night, but the day after that was sunny and warm, a lovely spring day.

Night arrived, and Jason watched television disinterestedly as he pretended to do his math homework. Finally, at ten-thirty, his mother turned off the set and shooed him upstairs.

He lay awake in bed, waiting.

At one, he rose and dressed silently, then fished his stolen prize from its hiding place in his bureau drawer. With it safe in his pocket he crossed to the window and opened it.

The night air was cool and fresh, the singing of the crickets soothing, but Jason wasn’t concerned with that. He stared out at the lawn, studied every foot of the hedge, peered at the back corner of the house.

He didn’t see Crowley, but he had no doubt that the tall dark man was out there, waiting.

He hoped he was out there. He intended to show this Mr. Crowley that Jason Price wasn’t just a rag doll you could throw around as you pleased.

He climbed out onto the porch roof, made his way to the ground, and without preamble marched boldly out across the lawn.

Crowley reared up from behind the hedge, his shadow falling across Jason so suddenly that the boy started. Jason’s hand dove into his pocket.

Crowley stepped through the hedge with a hissing of branches against cloth, and strode purposefully toward Jason.

“Not this time, Mr. Boogey Man!” Jason said as he whipped out the switchblade and pressed the button.

Crowley didn’t say a word; he just kept coming, one slow deliberate step at a time.

That wasn’t in the plan; Jason had thought that Crowley would stop at the sight of the knife shining silver in the moonlight, would stand back frightened, and Jason had planned out a little speech, telling him that he couldn’t bully Jason Price. But Crowley wasn’t stopping.

He finally came to a halt one step away from Jason, staring down at the boy from the black shadows of his decrepit hat.

“Get away from me!” Jason said, brandishing the knife.

Crowley reached out with both hands, reached out and hooked his fingers into the front of Jason’s shirt. He hooked his fingers into the fabric and clenched them into fists, and started to pick Jason up off the ground.

“No!” Jason shouted; he stabbed wildly.

Crowley gave a little grunt as the knife was jammed into his belly, and the world froze for the two of them.

Jason stared in utter horror at his hand, at the short little slit he had cut in Crowley’s flannel shirt, and at the gleaming steel blade that joined the two, the blade that was sunk three inches into Crowley’s flesh.

He hadn’t meant for this to happen. He had just committed murder. He had stabbed a human being, stuck a knife into a man.

All he had wanted to do was scare the man, the way the man had scared him. He hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. He was a good boy, not a trouble-maker or a delinquent.

He was going to jail, and the other prisoners, the real murderers, would beat him and do whatever the terrible things were that men did to each other, and he might be stabbed himself, might feel the steel biting into him and his blood spilling out hot and red. He stared in fascinated revulsion at the knife, at the gleaming steel blade embedded in Mr. Crowley’s belly.

He realized, at last, that the blade was clean. There was no blood.

The hands tightened on his shirt and yanked upward, and the moment of frozen time was broken and gone. The knife pulled out of the flesh, and still no blood flowed. Instead Jason smelled burning, hot and metallic, and saw a wisp of black smoke curling up. The tip of the switchblade was black where it had gone in.

His eyes moved up across Crowley’s chest to his face, a face that was somehow changed from what it had been, as if a mask had come off. The tall figure grinned, and a dusky red glow showed between jagged teeth. His eyes gleamed dark green around slit pupils.

“Guess what, Jason,” that deep and terrible voice said. “I really am the boogey man.” The grin widened, the red glow brightened.

“And the third time, I keep you.”

end

~~~~~

Back to the Land

The house stood alone on the side of the hill, shaded by great oaks, a thousand feet back from the road at the end of a long driveway that had once been graveled, but was now just mud. The roof and the porch sagged, like swaybacked horses; the shutters, most of them still functional, were closed and latched across every visible window but two, one upstairs and one down, that Matthew placed as the front bedroom and the parlor.

Here and there clapboards hung by one end, or had fallen away completely, and no paint remained anywhere, only the bare gray wood.

The yard was mostly weeds and kudzu now where the lawn had once been; the forsythia, untrimmed, had grown into great twiggy arches on either side of the porch.

Matthew stared at the place through the autumn drizzle that misted the windshield, and wondered how his mother could stand living there.

Of course, she had never lived anywhere else; perhaps she didn't realize how badly off she was. She had been born in that house, in the front bedroom where she now slept, and where she intended to die. She had borne her children in that same room, in the same bed where she now lay; she had refused to tell her husband when she went into labor, lest he insist on taking her to the hospital in town. Even her wedding had taken place in that house, downstairs in the parlor, the room behind one of those still-unshuttered windows, because she had insisted upon it. Her husband, his father, had wanted a church wedding, where he could show off his bride, but she had refused. She had made a home wedding a condition of their engagement.

Matthew had grown up in that house, with his sisters, but he had had no compunction about leaving it. He had loved it, but not the way his mother had, and he had left it, as she would not, so long as she still lived. He'd been delighted to move away, first to college, and then to his job in Atlanta.

This was the first time he had been back in almost five years, and he was horrified at how much the place had deteriorated.

It had needed paint the last time he saw it, and the roof had been sagging, but he didn't remember it being anywhere near as bad as this. Could five years make such a difference in a house that had stood for over a century?

Behind the house he pulled his Dodge onto the sparse grass beside Mary's aging Toyota; beyond it sat Becky's Chevy pick-up. Mother's ancient black Ford occupied the end of the driveway by the shed, where the barn had once stood.

They were all here, then, all of them together for the first time since his father's funeral.

He sat for a moment, hoping the rain would stop completely, but it continued to fall; he opened the door and climbed out.

The rain was so thin that it wasn't worth hurrying; if he did he might slip in the mud and fall, so he just walked briskly across the driveway to the kitchen door. As he did he noticed there was a third unshuttered window back here, the one over the sink. It hadn't been visible from the drive.

He opened the screen door and knocked, then stood, avoiding the familiar drip from the low spot on the eaves, and waited.

When nobody responded, he knocked again.

This time he heard footsteps, and when they had marched across the bare wood of the kitchen floor he heard the knob rattle. The door swung open and he stepped in.

It was Becky who had admitted him.

“Hello, Matthew,” she said, stepping back to make room for him, “Come on into the parlor, we've got a fire in the stove.”

“Thanks, Becky.” He stamped his feet to loosen the mud, then wiped them on the threadbare mat before following his sister.

Mary was there waiting in the shadowy dimness, perched on the faded velvet of the antique settee, leaning toward the heat of the Franklin stove.

She couldn't be cold, though, Matthew thought; the room was stifling hot, the air thick with the moisture that seeped in through every crack.

He wondered if the roof was actually leaking anywhere yet.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Dying,” Mary snapped. “What did you think?”

Matthew glared at her. “I mean, how bad is she?” he said. “I know she's dying, but how is she right now? Conscious? Will it be hours, days, weeks?”

“I'm no doctor,” Mary said angrily, sitting up straight.

“She drifts in and out,” Becky said, still standing. “She'll be conscious one minute, asleep the next. The doctor said it could be any time, but he'd be surprised if she lasted another week.”

Matthew nodded. A lump had formed in his throat.

“Would you like to see her?” Becky asked.

Matthew nodded again. “Yeah,” he said.

Becky led him upstairs, to where the frail old woman lay in her bed beneath a mound of lace-trimmed quilts and comforters, wrapped up despite the heat.

Matthew shuddered at the thought that the cold they were trying to keep out wasn't any ordinary chill; it was the chill of the grave.

He stepped up close to the bedside, while Becky hung back.

The face on the pillow was pale, not a normal pallor, but as if all the colors had faded away, as if the face were an overexposed image, a bleached-out copy and not really his mother at all. The skin was drawn tight across the bone, and her breath rattled in and out unevenly.

“Mamma?” Matthew said.

The half-closed eyes opened and stared, unfocused, at the ceiling. Matthew leaned over the bed.

“It's me, Matthew,” he said.

The dry lips worked, regaining a trace of color as she moistened them with her tongue.

“Mattie,” she said, her eyes almost focusing now.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” he asked. “Anything at all?”

“'m fine,” she said.

“Would you like to go to the hospital in town, Mamma? I'm sure they could make you comfortable there...”

“No.” She took a deep, rattling breath, then said, “No hospital. Born here, lived my whole life in this house, by God I'll die here and be buried in my own land!”

“No, Mother, the county won't allow that, but we'll bury you in the cemetery in town next to Dad...”

“No!” She lifted her head, eyes wide and staring. “You bury me here! This land's been my life, given me everything, and I'm going to stay right here!”

“But...”

Becky came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Don't worry, Mamma,” she said, “whatever you want. Matthew's just got here, he don't know what we got planned.”

Their mother's breath came out in a rush, and she dropped back onto the pillow. “Good,” she rasped.

Matthew stood staring at her for a moment, groping for words, but then he felt Becky tugging at his arm. He turned and let her lead him out of the room and back down the stairs to the front hall, beside the locked, never-used front door with its two panels of frosted and etched glass.

“Don't argue with her,” Becky whispered.

“But we can't bury her here...” Matthew began.

Becky shook her head. “I didn't say we would – but why tell her that? Let her die thinking she'll stay here; let her be happy about it.”

Matthew frowned, unhappy at the idea of lying to his mother, but then he glanced up the stairs and remembered how pitiful she was, how weak. He felt tears starting.

Becky was right.

“Okay,” he said. “I won't argue with her.”

“Good.”

“Can I go up and look at her again?”

“If you want. Sit with her as long as you like; just don't upset her. I thought you could sleep in your old room at the back; you just go tuck yourself in there when you're ready.”

Matthew nodded, and climbed slowly back up the stairs, afraid that by the time he got back to his mother's bedside it would be too late, that she would already be dead and his last words to her would have been an argument.

When he entered the room she was so still that he stopped, certain his fears had been realized – but then her eyes opened. She turned her head and looked at him.

“The land won't let you take me away,” she said clearly.

“All right, Mamma,” he said.

She closed her eyes again.

He fetched a chair and sat at the bedside; after awhile she raised a bony hand from beneath the coverings, and he took it in his own hand. Neither of them spoke.

They didn't need to talk. He was tired from the long drive, and she was tired from her long illness, and they didn't need to talk.

They sat there as the last light faded from the sky outside. A small bedside lamp was on, but the room was dim, the corners lost in shadows. The only sound was his mother's uneven, rasping breath.

He sat silently, thinking and remembering, hoping that she wasn't in pain, wishing that she could be healed, could be young and strong again. He remembered her as the absolute authority when he was a little boy, the loving figure whose word was law; he remembered her moving about her kitchen with deliberate efficiency, never hurrying but somehow always having the family dinner ready sooner than expected. He remembered her lack of interest in his schooling – until he became interested in learning, whereupon she devoted herself to seeing that he studied, that he got into college.

He thought of other mothers he had known, none of them like her.

He thought of the women he had dated, tried to imagine them raising children, and for the most part failed.

And he remembered his mother tending the land – weeding the garden, pruning the fruit trees, directing the men who bushhogged the back ten, working in the cornfields. That was the one thing that could take her away from her children, the one thing she did only for herself.

The surest sign of how sick she had been, he thought, was how overgrown the lawn had become.

And then he woke up, suddenly aware that he had dozed off and that something had startled him awake. He blinked and sat up.

Nothing seemed wrong. No one else was in the room; his mother was still lying peacefully in the bed, and he was still holding her hand. The sky outside the window was as black and empty as if nothing beyond the house existed at all. Everything was still.

Too still. She wasn't breathing.

And, he realized, her hand was already cold.

He pulled his fingers away and felt her cheek and forehead.

He couldn't define exactly how he knew so certainly, exactly what the difference was, but she was unmistakably dead. Whatever had made her his mother, a person, and not just an object, was gone.

“Becky?” he called. He got to his feet, stiff from sleeping sitting up, and realized he had no idea how long he had been there, or what time it was. He glanced at his watch.

3:34 a.m.

He debated with himself as to whether he should wake his sisters. They would want to know that their mother was gone, but in the middle of the night like this? Couldn't the news wait until morning?

He hadn't been here when their father died – that had been a much quicker thing, and he hadn't made it home in time. Was there anything that had to be done right away, anyone who had to be notified?

He couldn't think who or what might matter at this hour.

The best thing to do, he thought, was to go get some rest. Nothing he did would matter to his mother any more; she didn't need anything now.

Becky had said to use the bed in his old room. His suitcase, with his pajamas and clean clothes, was in the trunk of his car – it wasn't worth fetching it at this point, he could do that in the morning.

He leaned over and kissed his mother's cool, dead cheek.

“Goodbye, Mamma,” he said.

He straightened up and looked down at her.

He might never see her again; in the morning there would probably be people from the funeral home, maybe some doctor to make it official, and then they'd take her away, and he'd never see her again.

Something creaked, somewhere downstairs.

He glanced at the door, startled. “Becky?” he called.

No answer.

It must have just been the house settling, he thought. There had been creaks sometimes when he was a boy. His concrete and steel apartment in the city didn't creak, but this place was tired old wood. Of course it made sounds sometimes; he'd forgotten, that was all.

Wood creaked again, a long, drawn-out sound, and Matthew looked about uneasily. Surely, the house hadn't made noises like that when he was a boy?

Was there someone downstairs?

Moving as quietly as he could, he crossed to the bedroom door and peered out into the hall.

It was dark, the only light coming from behind him; he could faintly see the floral pattern in the wallpaper as black splotches on dark grey, and he found himself thinking it looked unhealthy, like bloodstains or mold, as if the house, too, was sick or dying.

Something rumbled. Thunder?

But he heard no wind or rain, and the sound had seemed to come from below him somewhere.

This was all too much for him – waking up in the middle of the night to find his mother dead, and the house making strange noises. He didn't want to deal with it.

But he couldn't just go to bed. And he couldn't bring himself to wake up Mary or Becky – what if the noises were just his imagination, just the normal settling sounds, maybe distant heat lightning, magnified by the late-night silence?

He would go downstairs, he told himself, and sit for awhile. Maybe he could figure out where the sounds were coming from.

The stairs were dark; the light switch was down the far end of the passage, at the head of the stairs. He shuffled forward into the darkness, moving slowly in case there were some old toy or forgotten shoe lying in his path; he didn't want to trip.

Wood groaned, the low, painful sound of heavy timbers under massive pressure, and he stopped dead in his tracks.

“Becky?” he said again, quietly. He stood still and listened intently.

He heard a faint susurration, a shifting, sliding, brushing sound, like wind-tossed leaves scraping the clapboards. Wood creaked again

The house almost sounded as it might during a storm – but there was no storm. He heard no wind in the eaves, no rain on the roof – only the house.

This was ridiculous, he told himself. He forced himself to march briskly forward into the gloom, and groped for the light switch.

He found it, and warm yellow light burst from the blackened brass bowl above the stairs. The dark stains on the walls were transformed to faded red flowers and dull green leaves, and the steps appeared at his feet, solid wood beneath worn green carpet.

A drink, he thought. He needed a drink. His mother had just died; didn't he need a drink?

He marched down the stairs and through the darkened parlor – his mother had always kept the liquor in the cupboard above the silver.

He was on the kitchen threshold when the loudest, longest sound yet came, one that combined a deep rumble with the groaning of wood and a series of sharp snapping sounds; the floor shifted under his feet, and he caught himself against the doorframe.

Earthquake!

It had to be that. He had never felt a real earthquake, but what else could it be? The floor had moved beneath him!

An earthquake here, in the Kentucky hills?

There'd been the Maysville quake back in the '80s, when he was away at college, and there was that big one back in the early nineteenth century, but now?

Well, why not? At least that would make sure everyone around here remembered the night Esther Kittridge died.

“Matthew?” someone called.

“Down here,” he replied. He decided his drink could wait; the quake must have wakened Becky, and she'd want to know what was going on. He headed back through the parlor.

The floor jerked, and he almost lost his balance again.

Aftershock?

Except it seemed to continue; after the initial jerk there was a steady vibration, and he could hear a dull grinding noise from beneath the floor.

He met both his sisters at the foot of the stairs.

“What's happening?” Becky asked.

“What about Mother?” Mary demanded.

“Mamma's gone – I don't know exactly when, I'd fallen asleep, but... well, she's gone.” He glanced up at the door of the front bedroom.

Mary tightened her lips, and Matthew thought he saw the gleam of tears in her eyes, but she said nothing.

“What's that noise?” Becky asked.

“I don't know,” Matthew replied. “I thought maybe it was an earthquake.”

Becky's eyes widened. “Shouldn't we get outside, then?”

Wood creaked and popped somewhere.

“You're right,” Matthew said, turning to look at the front door.

“But what about Mother?” Mary said, an edge of hysteria in her voice. “We can't leave her in here alone!”

Matthew turned and stared at his sister.

“Mary,” he said gently, “Mother is dead.”

“I'm not leaving her.”

Matthew glanced helplessly at Becky, who shrugged.

Then the floor shifted under them all, and Matthew barely caught himself against the wall. Becky grabbed the newel post, and Mary the bannister.

Wood groaned, something cracked, and plaster dust sifted down from somewhere above.

“Come on,” Matthew said. He lurched over to the front door and grabbed at the knob.

It wouldn't turn.

He found the bolt and slid it open, looked for another lock and found none, but still the knob would not turn. He looked the door up and down, but could see no obstruction. He heard a faint scratching, but could not see how that might have anything to do with the door's reluctance.

“It won't open,” he said. “It must be rusted solid from disuse.”

“Then we'll go out the back,” Becky said. “That's where the cars are, anyway.”

Matthew nodded, and he and Becky hurried through the parlor and into the kitchen. Becky flipped on the light; Matthew grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and pulled.

The door didn't move.

Startled, Matthew looked at it, and saw that the frame had twisted and broken from the house's movements, wedging the door solidly in place. “Damn,” he said. He turned to the window over the sink.

There he stopped, staring in astonishment.

Becky came up beside him and stared as well.

The light from the kitchen was not spilling out through the glass to be lost in the darkness of the yard; instead it shone on rich black earth, packed against the windowpane, and sliding slowly upward.

“Is that mud?” Matthew asked. “How can it move up like that?”

“It's not mud,” Becky said. “It's earth. And it isn't moving up. We're sinking.”

“What?”

She didn't bother to answer; she didn't have to. He could see it for himself. He could feel it, as well, now that she had pointed it out.

The house was sinking, slipping down into the earth.

“The earthquake did that?”

“If it was an earthquake,” Mary said from behind them, startling them both. Matthew whirled to face her.

“What else could it be?” he demanded.

“It could just be the house sinking,” Mary said. “Maybe nothing else shook; maybe it's just the house. I saw it in the parlor window, the same as you see it here – it's sinking.”

“It must have been built on a fault or something,” Matthew said.

“Or maybe it's the land, claiming us all,” Mary said. “Maybe it's the land making sure we don't take Mother away. She spent her whole life here, and it wants her to stay.”

“That's ridiculous,” Becky said. “You make it sound like the land's alive, Mary.”

“Mother thought it was.”

“It's the earthquake,” Matthew insisted. “That's all.”

“Whatever it is,” Becky said, “shouldn't we get outside?”

Matthew looked at the window; the soil now covered its full height, and was still moving upward. “How?” he asked, his voice unsteady. “Dig?”

“Upstairs,” Becky said, pointing.

Matthew felt suddenly stupid for having missed the obvious. “Come on,” he said, trying to cover his idiocy.

Together, walking quickly, the three siblings made their way back through the parlor and up the stairs. Around them the house continued to creak and groan, the earth outside to scrape and hiss against the clapboards. At the top of the stairs Matthew hesitated.

“The shutters are closed everywhere but Mamma's room,” Becky reminded him.

“Right,” Matthew agreed. He led the way down the passage to the front bedroom.

As they approached, though, he slowed with every step. His mother was still in there, he realized, and irrational childhood terrors stirred in the back of his mind. A dark house at night, a dead body...

What was waiting in the room at the end of the passage? He looked through the open door and saw the great rearing shadows thrown by the little bedside lamp, black smears of darkness across the warm golden light.

Would there be flies crawling on their mother's face? He wasn't sure he could take that. Would she have begun to decay, to turn from his mother into something bloated and dark and horrible?

But she hadn't moved, hadn't changed; at first glance she might still have been asleep. Had her mouth fallen open a little further? Had her color worsened?

Maybe – but there were no vermin, no gruesome discolorations, no foul odors. She lay undisturbed, and the room smelled of dust and old fabric.

“Mother,” Mary said, almost whimpering. She pushed past Matthew and walked to the bedside, moving with a strange, jerky step, an apparent unwillingness, almost as if something were dragging her across the room. She bent over the body.

Becky followed her, and stood behind Mary for a moment, looking over Mary's shoulder.

Matthew watched for a moment as his sisters paid their respects, then turned to the window. He blinked in surprise, then stepped closer, to make sure the poor light wasn't playing tricks on him.

The shutters were closed.

This had been the only upstairs window that was not shuttered; he had seen it from the outside as he drove up, and again from inside.

They must have come unhooked and swung shut, he told himself. The vibration had done it, the shaking from the earthquake. Nothing else made any sense.

They wouldn't be latched, though, and they must swing freely. He knew some of the shutters on the house were jammed, latches and hinges rusted; the shutters on the back storeroom had been nailed shut, twenty years before.

But these shutters had been open a few minutes earlier, he was certain.

He hurried across and pried at the latch on the window sash; it wouldn't move.

“Oh, shit,” he said – then glanced guiltily at his mother, as if she might come back from the dead to chastise her son for using such language.

“What's the matter?” Becky asking.

“It's stuck,” he said.

Before Becky could say anything more, for once acting on his own without her advice, he picked up a heavy silver-backed hand mirror from atop the dresser and swung it at the window like a hammer.

Glass shattered spectacularly; Mary looked up, shocked.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Getting us out of here while we still can,” Matthew replied, as he swung the mirror back and forth like a duellist's sword, smashing away shards of glass and crumbling century-old window putty. The hot, stuffy air of the bedroom rushed out, and cool, moist night air spilled in through the opening – along with the smell of damp earth.

The wooden divider between the panes of the lower sash did not break when he whacked at it with the mirror, so he stepped back and kicked at it, snapping it.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Mary shrieked. “Can't you... this is Mamma's bedroom! Stop it!”

Matthew looked at her, startled. The fact that she had slipped and said “Mamma” instead of “Mother” told him how upset she was.

“Sorry,” he said, a bit shamefaced. He dropped the battered mirror back on the dresser, then crunched across the broken glass to the window. He reached out and pushed at the shutters. They opened only slightly before scraping to a stop. Matthew peered out through the inch-wide crack between them.

He was looking out at ground level, as if from a basement; the shutters were blocked at the bottom by thick turf. As he looked, a small clod of dirt rolled in through the crack, tumbling onto the windowsill. An earthworm followed it.

The ground rumbled, and wood creaked; the shutters twisted slightly under the upward pressure of the earth, so that the crack between them widened at the top.

“If we're going out this way we're going to have to hurry,” he said.

“What about Mother?” Mary asked, her calm restored.

“I don't know,” Matthew said. “Should we try to bring her out? It won't be easy.”

“No,” Becky said, “what good would it do?”

“We can't just leave her here, to be buried alive!” Mary said, horrified.

“She's not alive, Mare,” Matthew said gently.

“She always wanted to be buried here at home,” Becky said.

“But we can't just leave her!” Mary repeated.

“Why not? We have to get out of here! Come on!”

Wood cracked loudly, and one of the shutters snapped back into its closed position, forced by the rising earth. Matthew jumped at the sound, and turned to stare at the ruined window.

Becky stepped up beside him. “I'm not sure we can get out that way anyway,” she said.

“We'll have to smash the shutters,” Matthew agreed.

“And then dig.” The level of the ground, which had been perhaps three or four inches above the sill when Matthew first tried to force the shutters open, was now halfway up the lower sash and still rising.

“This is insane,” Matthew said. “How can this be happening? I never heard of an earthquake going on and on like this. And how can the house just be sinking straight down? It hasn't even tilted!”

“I think maybe we better find another way out,” Becky said, as the other shutter was pushed firmly back into place.

“What, up the chimney? The flue can't be more than eight or nine inches across.”

“The attic, maybe?”

“There aren't any windows in the attic.”

“Can't we just smash a hole somewhere?”

Matthew nodded. “I guess,” he said. “Where's the splitting maul?”

Becky grimaced. “In the shed out back.”

Wood groaned. A trickle of black earth spilled in through the shutters onto the broken glass that littered the floor.

“I think we better just get up there and try, even if we have to use our bare hands,” Matthew said.

Together, the two of them hurried down the passageway to the unlit back bedroom. There, one shadowy wall held two identical doors – one that led to a closet, the other to a steep, narrow stairway to the attic, steps of bare wood between walls of ancient wooden lath.

They both knew what it looked like; both had been up there countless times. Matthew remembered the hot, dry air of the attic, the summer sunlight seeping dimly in under the eaves and through cracks in the gable walls, turning everything brown and warm...

But the sun wasn't up yet. The stairwell was utterly black.

It occurred to Matthew that it was a miracle the power hadn't gone out; the lights in the hallway and the front bedroom were still working.

The attic didn't have any lights.

“Is there a flashlight or a candle somewhere?” he asked.

“I think so,” Becky said. She opened the top drawer of the bureau that stood between the attic door and the closet, and fumbled through old handkerchiefs before bringing out a thick stump of candle and a book of matches. She lit the candle and held it high.

Matthew's shadow, huge and black, preceded him up the attic stairs.

The place was smaller than he remembered, and the smell had changed; now it reeked of damp decay, of mildew and rot. The old steamer trunks that lined either side were black and gray, with ugly stains discoloring them. He had to duck under the tie-beams; the roof was only high enough for him to stand upright in the center portion.

That roof looked distressingly solid, though. The wood was old, and blackened with tar; here and there metal points projected through where roofers had used unusually long nails.

“Look!” Becky said, pointing.

Matthew looked and saw it, up near the central roofbeam, at the roof's highest part – a wooden square.

A trap door – their way out. It was meant, perhaps, for clearing snow off, not that it snowed much around here, or for cleaning the gutters; whatever its purpose, it was their way out.

The house shook.

Matthew could reach up and touch the lower part of the trap door, but he couldn't just push it open; together, he and Becky hauled one of the steamer trunks over. He climbed atop it, braced both hands against the trap, and shoved.

It didn't yield.

“It's stuck,” he said. “Maybe they shingled over it – I don't remember ever seeing it from the outside.”

Becky looked around for a tool, and spotted an old plank, perhaps eight feet long, that lay on the floor behind where the steamer trunk had stood. She set the candle down on another trunk, then slid the plank free and passed it up to Matthew.

He hefted it, then drove it up at the trap, using it as a battering ram.

The trap gave slightly, and Matthew heard the sound of tar paper tearing; the trap was shingled over. Fortunately, the shingles were in sorry shape. “Give me a hand,” he said.

He held the plank near the middle of its length, while Becky put both hands under its lower and, and together they drove it upward again.

“Keep pushing!” Matthew shouted, as he felt the shingles move.

They both stumbled, and Becky fell across the trunk, when the trap door finally burst open. Cool air poured in. They could hear the dislodged hatch cover skidding down across the sloping roof.

Matthew boosted Becky up and out, then jumped up, catching himself on the lower edge of the opening. Becky grabbed at his shirt and pulled, and one of his flailing feet managed to catch the nearest tiebeam to provide a further impetus.

In a moment he was clambering out onto the roof, looking around in amazement. The clouds had dispersed and the moon was up, shedding a faint glow across the yard that allowed him to see what was happening.

He and Becky were kneeling on the roof of the house, on the gritty asphalt shingles, but they were only a few feet above ground level – and sinking, even as he watched. The house was vanishing into the ground beneath them.

Nothing else was disturbed at all. The cars were just where they had been left, the shed stood where it always had. The one odd feature, other than the house's absence, was the electric line – it came in from a pole in the back yard, and had always hung in a graceful black curve between the pole and the corner of the house.

Now the wire was stretched taut, a straight line from the top of the pole down to corner of the house, a corner that had dropped about twenty feet.

“Where's Mary?” Becky asked suddenly.

Just then the electric line snapped; the wire whipped up, spraying yellow sparks wildly for a moment, then fell lifelessly to the ground.

Matthew turned back to the trap door and shouted, “Mary! Are you in there?”

The candle was still burning, and he could see the attic clearly, but the lights would be out in the rest of the house now. He tried to imagine Mary down there, alone in the dark with their mother's corpse, and shuddered.

“Mary, the attic!” he bellowed. “We're outside! Hurry!”

“Hurry!” Becky shrieked.

Startled, Matthew turned and saw why Becky sounded so desperate – the eaves had reached the ground, and the first scatter of black earth was spilling into the gutters and onto the shingles of the roof.

He heard movement below – not just the steady grinding and rumbling, not the groaning of straining wood, but a human sound, footsteps or something dropped.

“Mary!” he shouted into the hatchway.

“I'm coming,” his sister's voice replied unsteadily.

And then she was in the attic, he could see her. She climbed up on the steamer trunk, and a moment later he and Becky were pulling her up and out.

Together, the three of them ran for the cars. They jumped from rooftop to solid ground, across a yard-wide expanse of churning black earth.

“That was no earthquake,” Becky said, as they watched the house vanish completely beneath the seething black soil.

“Mamma's still in there,” Mary said, dazed.

“She wanted to be buried here,” Matthew said. “Now she is.”

“We aren't going to dig her out?” Becky asked.

A heavy rumble sounded.

Matthew shook his head. “I don't think the land will let us,” he said.

Becky nodded, and Mary let out a little moan.

Matthew stared at the emptiness where his childhood home had stood, then grimaced. “At least this way we won't be fighting over the furniture,” he said. “I guess I'll be taking a room at the motel on Route 12; anyone care to join me there for coffee?”

Then he turned away, and climbed into his car.

In the east, the first traces of dawn were beginning to show.

end

~~~~~

For Value Received

A cloud of dust arose as Nathan carefully opened the ancient book. He trembled with fear and anticipation as he turned the crumbling pages, searching for the spell he wanted.

He had spent long years in careful study before determining exactly which book of the thousands of grimoires and arcana held the genuine formulae for summoning the Devil, but at last he had that one nameless, blasphemous volume in his unsteady hands.

This was the moment of decision – did he really want to do this? Did he want to give up his soul to an eternity of Hell in exchange for earthly pleasures?

Yes, he decided, he did. All those years of being pushed around, of watching the big bastards around him enjoying life while he had nothing but pain – he wanted some payback. He wanted to be healthy. He wanted to be rich enough that his size and looks didn't matter. He wanted to live long enough to see his tormentors buried. He didn't particularly want to hurt anyone – just to gloat over them a little.

And as for losing his soul, while he'd always been a loser, he hadn't exactly been an angel; the chances were good he'd be damned anyway, in the end. He turned his attention to the page and read through the detailed instructions – written, he knew, in the blood of murdered virgins by an insane monk of the seventh century. He pored over them, memorizing every warning, every hint, as well as the ritual itself.

At last, when he was sure he hadn't missed anything important, Nathan removed his clothes, drew the elaborate diagram in chalk on the floor of his rented room, lit the seven black candles at the appropriate points, and recited the long, almost unpronounceable incantation while performing the unmentionable rites the book described.

At first it seemed that the results were all that he might have asked for. The temperature in the room dropped to well below freezing, but before he had seen more than a single breath emerge white and frosty it soared to sauna heat; the thin twists of smoke from the candles thickened to a swirling funnel cloud that filled the chalk diagram from floor to ceiling; the room grew dim, and eerie laughter echoed uncannily from the walls. A towering, misshapen form appeared amid the smoke, standing in the center of the pentagram.

Nathan stared.

The apparition stood nine feet tall, and was covered with matted red-brown hair; a pair of nasty-looking horns scraped the ceiling, and its eyes glowed golden. It was vaguely human, vaguely goatlike in form; it stood on two crooked legs, and spoke in tones that made Nathan think of steam engines at full throttle.

“See my secretary,” it said.

Then it vanished, much more abruptly than it had appeared, and was instantly replaced by an attractive young blonde, standing nude in the pentagram, her hair tied back in a bun, wire-frame glasses on her nose, a pad and pencil in her hands.

“May I help you?” she asked.

Nathan stared, at least as disconcerted by this second apparition as he had been by the first, but in response to an impatient glare he finally stammered out, “I was trying to summon the devil.”

She nodded briskly. “Yes, you have the correct formula, though it's one we don't use much any more, but I'm afraid Lucifer is a very busy entity, and you don't seem to have an appointment; just what was it you wished to speak to him about?”

“I... I wanted to sell my soul, like in the stories, and be rich and famous and live for centuries...”

“Oh, you want Sales,” she said. “Could you hold, please?”

Then she was gone, and Nathan stared at the empty pentagram. The candles were still burning, the smoke still swirling, and she had said to hold, so he stood, staring foolishly, uncomfortably aware that he was naked himself.

This was not how he had pictured it. This wasn't like anything from the old stories; this was more like his everyday life, wading through red tape and spending hours on hold. This was what he had hoped to get away from by selling his soul – he wanted to be rich and powerful enough that no one would ever dare put him on hold.

He was tired of being small and scared and sick, tired of being pushed around, tired of growing old, and he'd been desperate enough to try anything.

Well, if this worked, it would be worth one more runaround.

A man appeared in the pentagram, a tall man in a pinstripe suit; he smiled a huge, toothy smile, and Nathan thought the teeth looked more numerous and more pointed than human teeth ought to.

But then, who said he was human?

“I'm sorry to keep you waiting,” the apparition said. “How may I help you?”

“I wanted to sell my soul,” Nathan said, a little more confidently this time.

“Ah, yes.” He nodded sagely. “Lilith mentioned that, I think. Well, you've come to the right place; that's my business. We can give you the best deal you'll find anywhere.” He smiled again, and even essayed a small laugh. Nathan managed a rather sickly grin in return; if anyone else were in the business of buying souls, Nathan didn't suppose he'd be dealing with these... people?

Whatever they were, they had a reputation for swindling their clients; he needed to be very careful.

“I want a long life,” he began, “a hundred years or more of perfect health, and vast wealth, and all the women I want...”

The salesman, his smile replaced by a somber expression, held up a hand; Nathan stopped.

“Mr., ah...”

“Nathan Runkel.”

“Thank you. Mr. Runkel, while we do want to keep our customers happy for as long as they live...” He paused significantly and flashed another quick grin. “While we do want to please our customers, I say, we're running a business, not a television giveaway show. Unless there's something very unusual about this soul you're offering, I doubt very much that we'll be able to meet those terms.”

“Um... I thought a human soul was supposed to be infinitely precious...”

The salesman smirked. “Really, Mr. Runkel – take a look at the world around you.”

Nathan had done plenty of that over the past forty years; he didn't have to ask what the salesman meant.

He should have expected this, he told himself bitterly.

“All right,” he said, “What can I get for my soul, then?”

The salesman pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Well, I don't know exactly, offhand; you see, we don't really pay for your soul exactly, it's really more in the nature of a mortgage, a guarantee that we'll wind up with possession of it upon your eventual, um... termination. So the value of that guarantee of title depends not only on the intrinsic strength and worth of the soul in question, but also upon how much equity we may already hold in it, and how long we'll have to wait for delivery. Quite frankly, our equity in most souls is already fairly extensive – every time you benefit from any of our services, we acquire additional shares. Hardly anyone bothers to deal direct any more, yet our income is at almost unprecedented heights.”

Nathan blinked. This did not sound good at all. “All right,” he said again. “So how much... um... how much is the remaining equity in my soul worth, then?”

“Well, I'm afraid I'm not familiar with your particular case, Mr. Runkel – you're not one of my regular clients. But if you could hold on a moment, I'll connect you to Accounting.”

Before Nathan could protest, the salesman had vanished.

The wait was quite brief this time; Nathan had hardly had time to start cursing when a troll appeared, stooped, ugly, and holding a huge, old-fashioned ledger. It wore a flowered vest and a filthy beard that dragged on the floor.

“Name?” it demanded.

“Nathan Runkel,” Nathan answered.

The troll muttered, dropped the ledger with a crash, then squatted and hauled the massive volume open. It pulled a pair of pince-nez from its vest pocket, perched them on its gigantic nose, and began turning pages.

Nathan stood, waiting apprehensively.

Maybe he would settle for living to ninety or so, and just being rich enough that he never had to work again, and maybe a small harem.

“Any relation to the Grossmeyer-Runyons?” the troll demanded.

“I don't think so,” Nathan replied, jarred out of his hopeful calculations.

“Too bad.”

Another moment passed in near-silence, the only sounds the rustle of turning pages and the creak of floorboards as the troll shifted its weight.

“Runkel,” the troll muttered. “Silly sort of name.” It paused, studying a page, and asked, “Ever live in Zimbabwe?”

“No.”

“Too bad.” A lumpy finger ran down a page. “Nathan Runkel, you say?”

“That's right.”

“Middle name?”

“Barnaby.”

The troll glowered at him. “You might have said so earlier.” It flipped back several pages, then asked, “Born?”

“July twentieth...”

“'Yes' will do.” It jabbed a finger at the page. “Got it. Did you want record to date, net value, or prospectus?”

“Uh... net value, I guess.”

“In what?”

“Um... dollars?”

“What kind of dollars?”

“U.S.”

The troll muttered to itself for a moment, then announced, “Seventy-eight dollars and eleven cents.”

Nathan's mouth fell open. “Is that all?”

“Yep.” The troll grinned horribly. “You want it in anything else? Lifespan, personal favors, what-have-you?”

That sounded promising. “Lifespan?” Nathan asked.

“Seventeen hours, thirteen minutes – we can triple that if you're comatose.”

“What good is that?” Nathan asked bitterly.

The troll shrugged. “Day might come when you'll appreciate living an extra seventeen hours,” it said.

“What about women?” Nathan asked hopelessly.

The troll considered that. “Well,” it said, “We can arrange for an under-age girl of ordinary looks to develop a crush on you for three weeks, or get you a one-night stand with a slightly-drunk housewife.”

“Don't bother,” Nathan said in disgust. “Is that really all my soul's worth?”

“It's a tough world,” the troll said with a shrug. “And hey, you've got no complaint; lots of folks out there we wouldn't pay more than about ten bucks.”

“I can believe that,” Nathan said. “You mean like some of those bastards I work with.”

The troll nodded. “The ones who aren't already working for us,” it said.

Nathan blinked.

“Working for you?” he said.

“Well, sure,” said the troll. “The money's never in the production end, you know; it's always the middlemen who get rich.”

“Middlemen?”

“Sure. The people who drive other people to Hell.” The troll shrugged. “A lot of them are volunteers, working for nothing, but we have plenty on staff, too – at thirty percent commission you can do all right.”

“Thirty percent.” Nathan stared, thinking.

All those bastards who had abused him over the years, driven him to anger and despair – some of them got paid for it. They got money, and longer lives, and women...

No wonder it was always the brutes who got the girls. No wonder nice guys finished last.

“That everything?” the troll asked. “You want me to give you back to Sales?”

“No,” Nathan said slowly. He chewed his lip, then asked, “These people who work for you – is there any kind of training program or anything?”

“Sure.” The troll waited.

“All right, then,” Nathan said, “give me Personnel.”

end

~~~~~

The Cat Came Back

Michael's throat felt tight and heavy, and he tried to swallow but couldn't quite manage it. His eyes were wet with tears as his father lowered the cardboard box into the hole by the back fence.

His two younger sisters were crying and not trying to hide it, but Michael was eleven and he didn't want to cry like a little kid. He kept his mouth tightly closed.

He still couldn't stop a couple of drops from rolling down his cheeks.

“Goodbye, Bootsie,” Ashley said. “You were a good cat.”

Michael wasn't sure about that, really. He had liked Bootsie, and the cat had been a part of the family, but he wasn't sure he would have called Bootsie a good cat. Right up to the end, Bootsie had sometimes mistaken people's legs for scratching posts; he had ruined expensive furniture, knocked glassware off shelves, and left dead squirrels and chipmunks on the front porch.

But he had also been a big, friendly cat, with a purr you could hear clear across the family room. He was always ready to curl up on your lap and be petted. His fur was soft and sleek, and stroking it felt wonderful. He was black, with white feet and a white patch on his face, and could look elegant and noble when he wanted to.

“That was one reason we originally named him after an emperor,” their mother had mentioned once, when Michael had commented on how regal Bootsie looked.

“You mean his name wasn't always Bootsie?” Michael had asked, startled.

“No,” his mother had said, “we translated it from Latin to English when you were little, because you couldn't pronounce Caligula. Caligula is Latin for Bootsie.”

“There was a Roman emperor called Bootsie?” Michael had asked.

His mother had nodded. “One of the very worst,” she told him. “And that was another reason we named him that -- when he was a kitten he was the worst nuisance I ever saw. A real little monster.”

Michael could believe it -- but he couldn't remember it. Bootsie had been a full-grown cat by the time Michael was born.

And now he was dead.

It wasn't all that surprising for a thirteen-year-old cat to die, but Bootsie hadn't even been sick. He'd just slowed down enough that after years of trying, Brutus, the dog next door, had finally caught him.

Brutus was supposed to be kept chained up in the backyard, but he got loose fairly often, and terrorized all the cats in the vicinity.

The cats had good reason to be frightened. Michael swallowed again at the memory of finding poor Bootsie dead on the lawn, with the dog still standing over him.

Michael's father straightened up and picked up the shovel.

For a moment they all stood, not moving, not saying anything. Then, with a sigh, their father started filling in the hole, and Michael and the girls shuffled away, drying their tears.

It was going to be strange, not having Bootsie around.

Well, Michael corrected himself, maybe it wouldn't be that strange. After all, Bootsie had wandered off a few times.

But he had always come back after a few days, his tail held high and the tip waving back and forth.

This time he wouldn't be coming back.

#

Michael lay awake in bed until almost midnight that night staring at the ceiling. He was tired, but he couldn't get to sleep. The wind was blowing hard, rustling the trees and groaning around the eaves, and he kept thinking he heard Bootsie out there, meowing to be let in.

At last, he fell asleep.

He slept late the next day -- school wouldn't start for another week, but the summer activities program had ended the previous Friday, so there was no reason to get up at any particular time.

He was still eating breakfast when the doorbell rang. His mother answered it, and talked quietly to whoever was there. Michael poked at his cereal, thinking about Bootsie, and paid no attention to anything else until he heard his name called. He looked up. His mother was standing in the doorway.

“What?” he asked.

“I said, have you seen the Marstons' dog this morning?”

“No,” Michael said. “Why?”

“Mrs. Marston says he's missing.” She turned away again.

Michael resisted the temptation to say, “Good.”

A moment later his mother closed the door and said, “When they got up this morning the doghouse out back was empty, but they just thought he'd gotten loose again.”

“The way he did when he killed Bootsie,” Michael said.

“Yes,” his mother answered. “And they thought he would come home again after a couple of hours, but he hasn't turned up yet, and they're getting worried.”

“I haven't seen him,” Michael said. He turned back to his cereal, hoping that the dog was gone for good.

“Well, he'll probably turn up soon,” his mother said to no one in particular. “I hope he doesn't hurt any other cats.”

That last comment made Michael feel guilty about not wanting the dog to come home. He didn't care about the stupid old dog, especially after what he did to Bootsie, but Michael didn't want any other cats to be hurt.

He finished his breakfast and wandered outside, with no particular plans. He sort of hoped he would find Brutus somewhere, so he could stop worrying about the neighborhood cats, but he had no idea where to look. He peered up the street, and down, and didn't see any dogs.

He noticed the spot on the lawn where Bootsie had died -- the grass was a bit torn up. His throat tightened. He turned away and walked off, not really thinking about where he was going.

The next thing he knew he was in the back yard, walking toward Bootsie's grave.

It was easy to see where the cat had been buried; Michael's father had tried to get the grass back in place, but hadn't quite managed it, and a lot of loose brown dirt had been left scattered around the site.

This morning, though, it seemed even messier than Michael remembered, and he went to take a closer look.

There was more of a hump than there should be. Michael remembered his father smoothing it all down, but now there was a big bulge in the lawn. And the sod was partly rolled back.

Something had been digging there.

Michael felt a hot anger boiling up inside him as he realized what must have happened. Brutus had got loose and had come over here to dig at poor Bootsie's grave! Even after Bootsie was dead, that horrible dog wouldn't leave him alone!

Michael was furious as he ran to the grave. He pulled up the strip of sod and tried to straighten it.

Then he looked down, and dropped the sod.

He stared for a moment, then ran back inside to get his mother.

She came to look; so did Mrs. Marston.

But it wasn't until Michael's father got home that night that anyone touched the grave again.

Michael's mother had explained what happened, how Michael had found Brutus dead under the strip of sod.

“He must have been digging there, and the hole fell in on him,” she said, not really sounding as if she believed it.

Michael's father looked puzzled. “I don't see how that could kill him,” he said.

But he got the shovel, and everyone went out into the backyard to see.

Michael's father lifted away the sod, then used the shovel to dig away the dirt on either side and uncover Brutus' body. Then he reached down to pick up the dead dog.

He heaved, but the body didn't come, and Michael's father blinked in surprise. “Something's holding him,” he said. “He must have got trapped somehow, and smothered.”

He let go of the dog and cleared away more earth. Michael heard cardboard tearing -- the dog must have gotten down as far as the box Bootsie was buried in. He shuddered at the thought.

Michael's father picked the dog up again, but something was dangling from its neck. Then his father lifted the dog higher, and everyone could see what had caught and held Brutus, what had killed him. Michael's eyes widened with shock.

Bootsie's dead body hung from the dog's throat. The cat's teeth were locked in Brutus' neck, and the dog's blood was smeared on Bootsie's fur.

end

~~~~~

Dead Babies

Allie's baby was coming, wasn't any doubt of it as her water had broke, so I put her in the truck and jumped in myself. My hands was trembling so hard I could hardly turn the key, but I got it started somehow and backed it out the driveway so as not to take the time to turn it around, and I clipped one of the posts at the end of the driveway but I didn't stop. I got us out on the road and put 'er in first and tore across the ford so fast the water was spraying twenty feet on each side.

“Bill, take it easy,” Allie said as I upshifted. “Won't do us no good to hurry if you put us in a ditch somewheres.”

I saw that she was right, so I tried to slow down and watch the road as we passed Miller's Grocery and turned onto the pavement, but every so often she'd breathe funny, give a little gasp or something, and every time she did that I'd look over at her and my foot would just tromp down a bit more on the gas.

About halfway to town I remembered that I should've called the doctor and told him to meet us at the hospital in Lexington, but I wan't about to go back to do that, and there weren't exactly a lot of pay phones on Becket's Fork Road, so I figured I'd stop by Doc Everett's house in Dawsonville and tell him in person, as it wasn't more than a mile or two out of our way.

But by the time we hit the blinker at the south end of Main Street in Dawsonville Allie was gasping and sort of heaving up from the seat every minute or so, and I wasn't any too sure we were going to make it to the hospital anyways – that was a good twenty-five miles yet, and the interstate didn't cover but half of it. So when we stopped in front of the Everetts' house I went around to her side and got her down out of the truck and I walked her up to the door of the house and rung the bell.

A woman answered, and I asked her where the doc was, and she said, “Why, he's still in bed.”

It was gone seven by then, but some folks do sleep in late, so I didn't wonder too much, I just asked, polite as I could, “Could you wake him, please? I think it's an emergency.”

“Of course,” she said. “Wait right here.”

And she closed the door.

Allie sat down right there on the porch, gasping.

A moment later the door opened again, and the woman said, “You just come right on in.” She showed us in and turned us sharp right in the foyer there, into a smallish room like an old-fashioned parlor, and sat us down on a fancy couch, then went to fetch the doctor. We sat there, and I noticed this weird nasty smell, and I hoped it was from the house, all the medicines and stuff, and not from something wrong with the baby.

A minute later Doc Everett came in in his bathrobe with his doctor's bag. He took one look at Allie and shooed the woman and me out and closed the door behind us.

So there we were in the foyer, and I looked around and saw a telephone on a little table and a big fancy mirror on the wall, but there wasn't nowhere to sit except maybe the stairs. There was a big sliding door across from that little parlor, and I sort of looked at it hopefully, I guess, because the woman looked at it, too, and said, “We can't go in there, I'm afraid; the baby's asleep and I don't want to wake him.”

Well, right then I wouldn't have minded playing with a baby, what with our own about to be born by the look of it, but I didn't want to be rude, and besides, the woman seemed a little on edge, sorta, so I didn't say that. I said, “How old is he, Mrs. Everett?”

“Oh, it's Miss Everett,” she said, all flustered. “Laura Everett. I'm Doctor Everett's sister.”

“Bill Sellers,” I said, holding out a hand. I figured it might not be a real good idea to inquire as to just whose baby it was that was sleeping, if Miss Everett weren't married, and besides, there was something about her made me think I didn't want to have too much to do with her, so after we shook I just leaned against the wall a little and waited.

I waited for what seemed like hours. We didn't talk; Miss Everett seemed sort of caught up in herself, the way some people get, and not much interested in me, and I didn't see any call to bother her.

That nasty smell was still there, so I knew it was the house. I wondered what it was, but I didn't ask; I figured it wouldn't be polite to mention it.

I could hear Doc Everett's voice from the parlor, too low to make out the words, and sometimes I could hear Allie answering him, or making sounds. I waited for the sound of the baby crying.

It didn't come. Instead, finally, I heard Allie scream.

I jumped up off that wall, and took a look at Miss Everett, but she wan't doing a thing, she was just standing there.

I knocked on the door. “What's going on in there?” I called.

I could hear Allie crying, and I opened the door without waiting for any by your leave.

Allie was sitting on the couch with her dress all rucked up, and there were bloody towels piled on the floor, and... and other things. Before I got a good look Allie wailed, “The baby's dead! Bill, our baby's dead!”

“I'm afraid so,” Doc Everett said. “Listen, I really think we had better get your wife to the hospital; would you tell my sister to call an ambulance?”

I sort of froze for a moment, trying to take it in, but then I turned and went back out to the foyer, and there was Miss Everett dialing the phone.

“I heard what he said,” she told me.

And then it was just waiting, and trying to comfort Allie and not to look at the poor little dead thing there on the towels, until the ambulance came. I rode in the back with Allie, and Doc Everett followed in his car.

They kept Allie for observation, they called it, and sent her home with me the next morning.

Somewhere in there, I don't remember when, I asked Doc Everett what had happened, and he told me that the baby had got tangled in the cord and strangled while it was being born, that it happens sometimes and there wasn't anything he could do, it was too late by the time he saw what was happening.

It wasn't until after I brought Allie home that she asked what had happened to the baby's body, and I realized I didn't know.

Wasn't an easy question to ask anyone, neither.

Finally, though, I called Doc Everett, and he told me he'd sent the body to Tuchman's Funeral Home, seeing as that's the only one in town and he didn't figure we'd be wanting to go to Lexington for it.

Allie wanted to see it, before she made any plans for the burying, so I called up Tuchman's and asked if that'd be possible, and Henry Tuchman, on the other end of the line, sorta cleared his throat and said how it would be possible, all right, but he sure wouldn't advise it, as the baby didn't look too good, what with being strangled.

I'd gotten a look at it back at Doc Everett's place, and I hadn't thought it looked so bad as all that, but I told Allie what he'd said, and she broke out crying again, and I don't know what I told Henry but I got off the phone and tried to comfort her, which didn't do either of us a damn bit of good.

That afternoon Henry called back, and asked if we'd want to make the funeral arrangements or whether he should just take care of it, as he figured we were pretty broke up. Allie overheard, and she said we'd be right there to look at the baby and make the plans.

That didn't sound good to me, but she wan't taking any argument on it, so off we went.

At the funeral home, there was Henry Tuchman with his mournin' face on, which made him look more like a pompous asshole of a salesman than like anything decent, and he showed us to a room where this little coffin was set up on a table that Henry called a bier, and there were a few flowers around it.

I asked Henry, “Who picked it?” 'Cause I'd always heard that funeral homes are practically like auto showrooms, with a dozen different models of coffins and all that shit.

“Doc Everett chose it; he's volunteered to cover some of the costs for you, seein' as he knows the two of you han't got all that much set aside.”

Now, I knew I ought to be grateful at that, but I wan't, as it seemed damn pushy to have put up that money and picked out that box without asking us first. I was trying to think of something to say about it that wouldn't sound too bad when Allie said, “Open it.”

Henry blinked at us and said, like some goddamn Englishman on TV, “I beg your pardon?”

“Open the box, Henry,” I said. “We want to see our baby.”

Henry got all upset at that. “You really don't want to, Bill,” he said.

“The hell we don't.”

“The coffin has been sealed,” he said.

“That's bullshit. Unseal it.”

“I can't.”

I was beginning to lose my temper. I'd been standing around feeling helpless while other people did everything, at the doc's house and the hospital and all, and it wan't goin' down well.

“Henry,” I said, “you told me on the phone this mornin' that we could see our baby, and now we want to see our damn baby.”

“If you insist,” Henry said, “I can have the coffin unsealed for a private viewing. If you could come back in an hour?”

I'd had enough. “Open the damn thing now, Henry,” I said.

“I can't, Bill,” he said. “Honest.”

I might've cooled down at that, 'cause he looked as if he meant it, but Allie wasn't having it.

'Bout two years back, after that idiot Jim Bryce raped the Miller girl down on Greenman's Creek, Allie got worried about crazies, so she got herself a .38 revolver and I showed her how to use it, and after that she'd carry it in her purse as a regular thing. I hadn't given it a thought in months – until she pulled it out and stuck the barrel under Henry Tuchman's nose.

“I am not leaving this room,” she said, “until I see my baby. If you don't open that coffin right now, Bill's gonna get a wrecking bar from the truck and bust it to flinders.”

Henry just sort of stared, and wan't saying anything sensible, and I figured maybe I could save us all some trouble. I didn't know just what all this talk of “sealing” was, so I went and took a look and it looked to me like that coffin just would open right up if you pushed the latch.

So I did, and it did.

Son of a bitch was empty.

I sort of stared at it for a moment, trying to figure it out, and I was still doing that when Allie came up beside me and saw it was empty and pointed the gun at Henry again and shrieked, “Where is she?”

Henry threw his hands in the air like Allie was trying to rob him. “I don't know,” he said, “I swear I don't! Doc Everett never brought her, told me to fake it, same as he does any time a baby dies.”

I stared at him and said, “And you do it?”

“He pays me,” Henry said. “Pays good.”

“Jesus God, Henry,” I said, “you mean Doc Everett's been stealing dead babies?”

Henry nodded. “Been doin' it for years.”

“What for?” I asked.

Henry shrugged and started to say he didn't know, but he didn't have the words out when Allie asked, “Did he kill my baby? So he could take her?”

Henry blinked at her like a startled owl.

“I don't know,” he said. “I never thought about it.”

I hadn't thought about it either, never would have thought of it, but once Allie asked that I saw how it might be, the doc wanting dead babies for God knows what, and there's our baby right in his own house, no one around to see if he just loops the cord over and tugs...

I felt sick.

“Come on,” I told Allie, “we're gonna go see the sheriff.”

“No, we aren't,” she said.

“Why the hell not?” I wanted to know. “Stealing dead babies is a crime!”

“Of course it is,” she said, “but who do you think the sheriff's gonna believe, a nineteen-year-old farm kid and his hysterical wife, or the doctor who's been lookin' after this town for the past twenty years?”

I could see how she had a point, but I wan't too sure it was that important – there'd be evidence, wouldn't there?

“So what do you want to do about it?” I asked.

“We're going to Doc Everett's house, and we're going to get our baby back,” she said. “And Henry, I swear to God, if you call to warn him we're coming, I'm going to shoot you dead if it's the last thing I ever do.”

I was beginning to regret ever teaching Allie how to shoot, about then, but it was done, and she was the one with the gun, and I hadn't even left my .22 in the pick-up's gun rack.

“Nobody's gonna do any shooting,” I said. “We'll get this straightened out. Come on.”

She headed for the door, and I paused just long enough to tell Henry, “All the same, don't you call that son of a bitch.”

I drove, and Allie sat there with the .38 in her lap. I wished she'd put it away, but she didn't and I wan't about to argue with her. We'd been married long enough that I knew better than to mess with her when she was in a mood like that.

The whole way down Main Street I was thinking about what Doc Everett might want with dead babies. Did he do some sort of experiments on them? Did he sell 'em for parts? I'd heard there was cosmetics made out of unborn babies; maybe newborns were close enough.

It made me feel sick again, thinking about it.

It was getting on to five o'clock when we pulled up in front of the Everett house, but I saw there wasn't a car in the driveway.

“He's not home yet,” I said, pointing.

“Then we wait,” Allie said.

I was almost ready to argue about it when I heard a car coming, slow, and I looked up and there was Doc Everett's blue Olds coming down Main Street.

The doc saw us there and waved, and when he pulled into the driveway he got out and came over toward us. Allie kept the gun down out of sight, and we tried to look like nothing was troubling us.

Then when he was about to lean in the window, when he was saying, “What can I do for you folks?” Allie stuck the gun in his face.

“You can give me back my baby, you bastard,” she said.

He got this astonished look on his face and took a step back. “Your baby's dead, Mrs. Sellers,” he said. He turned to me. “You tell her, Bill.”

“We know the baby's dead, Doc,” I said, “but we want the body.”

“Well, it's at Tuchman's Funeral Home...”

“No, t'ain't,” Allie said, pulling back the hammer on the revolver. “You kept her. And if you don't start telling us why, I might just think you killed her.”

Doc Everett threw up his hands – guess that's something everyone's picked up from TV or something. “I didn't kill her!” he said.

“Then why'd you take the body?”

“For my sister!”

Allie lowered the gun a little. “What?” she said. She sounded mighty puzzled, which was about how I felt.

Doc Everett took that as a good sign, that she'd lowered the gun, though to me all it meant was she was pointing at his gut instead of between his eyes and I wan't sure I wouldn't rather have it over quick than get gut-shot, but he lowered his hands a bit, too. “For my sister,” he said.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “What the hell would your sister want with our baby? She's got her own, don't she? And alive?”

Allie threw me a surprised glance at that, and the doc shook his head. “No,” he said. “She don't. Doesn't.”

“Bill, Miss Everett ain't married,” Allie said, “and I never heard tell she had a baby.”

I was beginning to wonder if I was going crazy. This was all so weird. “She said she did,” I insisted.

Doc Everett nodded. “She thinks she does,” he said. “Laura... Laura's not right.”

“First I've heard of it,” Allie said.

“Well, it's true,” Doc said. “Not for five years. Not since the baby died.”

“So there was a baby?” I asked.

He nodded.

“There was?” Allie was pretty startled by that. She'd been keeping up on the gossip around Dawsonville since she was thirteen, but I guess she'd never heard this one.

“Stillborn,” Doc said. “Never had a chance. Probably just as well. But Laura couldn't take it.”

I glanced at Allie, but if she thought Doc was saying anything about her, she didn't pay any mind to it.

“We'd managed to keep it all quiet – she never went out much, and she carried small, and I performed the delivery right here at home, so no one ever knew,” Doc explained. “When he was born dead, I figured it was a blessing, and I buried him in the back yard and thought that was an end to it.”

“It wasn't?”

He shook his head. “Laura dug him up,” he said.

Allie's mouth came open at that, and the gun drooped a bit further.

“She brought the body back in the house and treated it like a live baby, and I didn't know how to make her stop,” Doc went on. “I tried to talk sense to her, but she wouldn't listen, and if I tried to take it away she'd throw a screaming fit until I gave it back.”

“Couldn't... didn't anyone else know?” I asked. “Couldn't you take her to a psychiatrist or something?”

“Didn't dare,” he said. “If it came out that there'd been a baby and I'd kept it quiet, and who the father was...”

“Who was the father?”

He looked startled, as if he thought we'd figured that out already. “I was,” he said.

Maybe I had figured it out, because I wan't really surprised, but Allie was.

“Your sister?” she said.

“Two lonely people alone in the house together,” Doc said. “Yes, my sister.”

“What's this got to do with our baby?” I demanded.

“Well, hell, son, dead bodies don't keep,” he said. “When the baby got too far gone, Laura said it was sick and told me to make it better – I was a doctor, couldn't I fix it up? Nagged at me day and night, and 'bout then Mrs. Kelliher's little Josie died – crib death, what they're calling SIDS now. So I got an idea and I talked to Henry Tuchman and switched ours for Josie Kelliher. Been doing it ever since.” He shrugged. “After all, one dead baby's a lot like another.”

“So... but then why isn't there another one in our girl's coffin?”

The doc grimaced. “Last one was too far gone,” he said. “It's buried out back. Told Laura it was sleeping, managed to keep her away for three days – don't know what I'd have done if you poor folks hadn't come along.”

“You killed my baby,” Allie said, and the gun came up again. “You killed her so you could give her to your sister.”

“No, Mrs. Sellers,” he said, “I swear I didn't. I'd never do that. I took an oath, and I meant it.”

The gun wavered some.

“Come on,” I said, getting out of the truck. “We're getting our daughter back. I feel sorry for your sister, Doc, but that's our baby's body, and we're taking it.”

“Right,” Allie said, opening her own door.

Together, we marched up the porch steps, right past Doc Everett, and on into the house – front door wasn't locked, not in Dawsonville.

The doc ran after us, shouting, “No, wait! Wait! I didn't tell you... you can't... let me explain!”

I reckoned we'd heard enough; we didn't stop, marched right into the house. I pointed to the big sliding door. “In there,” I said.

Allie tried to open it, but it wouldn't move.

“It's locked,” she said.

I turned to Doc Everett. “Open it,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Listen, you can't just barge in here. I'll give you back your baby, I'll give Laura a doll or something, but don't...”

“Open it, or we'll shoot the fucking lock off!” I shouted.

He hesitated, and Allie took the revolver two-handed and pointed it, but then the door opened by itself, and there was Miss Everett, asking, “What's all the noise? You're disturbing the baby!”

She had a bundle in her arms, wrapped up in a white-and-pink baby blanket. It wasn't moving, didn't make a sound.

Allie started to grab for it, then realized she still had the gun in her hand, and got confused.

“Miss Everett,” I said, “could we see him? Just for a moment?” I held out my arms.

She looked at me strangely, then smiled, and gave me the bundle.

It was cold and dead, like a bundle of laundry, but I took a look under a flap of blanket.

It was our baby, all right.

“There,” Doc said, “you've got what you want. Take it out for some air.”

I nodded. I thought that was the end of it.

Then I looked in through the sliding door, into the old drawing room, and saw them, lined up on shelves, on the mantelpiece, on the couch, dried-out little things, skin stretched tight over bone, a dozen or more, all mummified.

“Oh, my God,” I said.

Allie screamed.

And Doc Everett, standing in the front door, seemed to slump down into himself.

“Laura always wanted a big family,” he said.

end

~~~~~

Upstairs

They're so damn loud up there. Yelling and fighting, and then that thumping – I guess it must be folk dances or something.

They could show a little consideration, couldn't they?

And then there was the time they left the water running and it leaked through the bathroom ceiling and damn near flooded the place, and of course it was the weekend and we couldn't get hold of the landlord until Monday – no, Tuesday, it was a long weekend! And there was wet plaster falling all over the sink and the floor. And stains everywhere.

I tell you, if we could find a decent apartment we'd have been out of this rathole years ago.

And they won't talk to us when we see them in the halls, when I shout at them they just walk right on by like they didn't even hear me. I went up there once to complain, but they wouldn't answer the door.

Maybe they were busy; I think their refrigerator must have broken down or something, because even with the door closed I could smell something rotten.

They can't be very clean.

Anyway, tonight was the last straw, more yelling, and singing this awful high-pitched song, like something the Arabs sing in one of those old movies, and then thumping about and I swear I heard the furniture breaking.

“I've had enough,” Jack said, and I agreed and said he should call the cops, and he said no, he'd settle it himself, and he went up there.

There was more yelling then, and banging, but then it stopped. I guess he talked some sense into them.

I wish he'd get back, though. There's something dripping through the ceiling again.

It's not water, though, it must be paint.

It's bright red.

end

~~~~~