Shadows 3 Read online

  Your presence is requested at the dark edge of the city of the dead.

  Your place is prepared deep in the dank tombs, under night’s cover.

  Your name is being called by the wind that cries between gravestones.

  Come.

  “Lisa, turn out the light.” She shivered. “Turn out the light.”

  His eyes were closed, and in the moonlight from the window his skin shone pale and cold-looking, thin hands folded on his chest. As she watched, one finger began to tap impatiently, ticking off the seconds in unison with the clock that sat on the nightstand.

  She glanced at the darkened lamp, then turned back to him and spoke softly:

  “David, the lamp is off.”

  Berkley books by or edited by Charles L. Grant

  FEARS

  A GLOW OF CANDLES AND OTHER STORIES

  HORRORS

  NIGHTMARES

  SHADOWS

  SHADOWS 2

  SHADOWS 3

  TERRORS

  “The Ghost Who Limped” copyright © 1978 by R. Chetwynd-Hayes “Avenging Angel” copyright © 1980 by Ray Russell

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This Berkley book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  SHADOWS 3

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Doubleday edition published 1980 Berkley edition / January 1985

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 1980 by Charles L. Grant. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 245 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10017.

  ISBN: 0-425-07453-6

  A BERKLEY BOOK ® TM 757,375 Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016. The name “BERKLEY” and the stylized “B” with design are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Contents

  Introduction

  CHARLES L. GRANT

  The Brown Recluse

  DAVIS GRUBB

  To See You With, My Dear

  BRUCE FRANCIS

  Avenging Angel

  RAY RUSSELL

  The Ghost Who Limped

  R. CHETWYND-HAYES

  Janey’s Smile

  JULEEN BRANTINCHAM

  Opening a Vein

  BARRY N. MALZBERC/BILL PRONZINI

  The Partnership

  WILLIAM F. NOLAN

  Wish Hound

  PAT MURPHY

  Ant

  PETER D. PAUTZ

  Tell Mommy What Happened

  ALAN RYAN

  At the Bureau

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  Cabin 33

  CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO

  Introduction

  Theories, novels, plays, films, sketches, black outs, and poems about writers have a continuing fascination not only for the reading public, but also for the writers themselves. The former somehow gets the idea that it is being let into deep and arcane secrets about the way mortals put words on paper-confirming an already concrete notion that writers are indeed queer ducks at best, raving lunatics on the average—and the latter attempt to find something of themselves in the experiences of other craftsmen, a kinship that enables them to feel somewhat less alone in what is essentially a lonely business.

  Yet most of these novels, plays, films, etc. deal with a writer as he confronts a novel. Seldom do you see an actor hunched over his typewriter trying to put form to an idea that will bear fruit in less than 20,000 words. Perhaps this is because the shorter length seems considerably less heroic in its concept; perhaps it’s because a short piece of fiction implies a less grandiose scope than one, three, four, ten times the length; and perhaps, too, the implication is that it’s much easier to write a short story than a novel, simply because it’s … shorter.

  I admit to fostering the latter belief myself, for the first five or six years of my career in the profession. After all, once you sweat through 5,000 words, 50,000 seems like an impossible figure to attain. Good God—all that description! all that dialogue! all that plotting! Impossible. Anyone willing to invest the time it takes to write a novel must be crazy.

  Then I wrote my first book. And my second.

  Now, at this writing, I’m up to something in the neighborhood of twenty-five, and I’ve discovered something on my own that everyone else who’s been around for a while knew all along—it is, without a doubt, much harder to write a short story than a novel. Much more.

  And when you add to this the horror-fantasy notion, what you have is a minor miracle when it works; a major one when it’s as successful as it should be.

  The short story demands an economy of words, the luxury of rambling reserved to the manuscripts that run 250 pages and longer. And this economy of words demands, in turn, a tighter focus not only on plot but on characterization, on description, on the total effect being attempted. In other words, the reader has to be able to “see*the setting quicker, characters have to be given birth virtually instantly, and there can be nothing extraneous along the way to cause the reader to stumble, to lose heart, to remind himself that this is, after all, only a fiction—nothing could be worse for the writer of a horror story than to have the reader realize too soon that he’s being, essentially, conned into believing something he would not ordinarily give credence to in broad daylight.

  It is not so surprising, then, that there are far more horror-fantasy novelists than there are horror-fantasy short-story writers. The short-story writer (or the novelist who can also write good short stories) is a rare creature indeed. He knows—whether the reading public understands it or not—that short fiction can take just as long as a novel to complete, that the sweating over the proper word is just as intense, that the effect created must be just as real as if he had tens of thousands of words to work with.

  The physical difference is in the number of pages taken in a volume such as this for an individual piece.

  The emotional difference—not to mention the artistic—is incalculable.

  Yet, somehow, just when it seems as if there are no more new writers who are willing to take the time (and the disproportionately lower rates) to perfect a story, the threatened void is overcome … for the time being. This is why you’ll see so many newer (though not necessarily younger) writers in these pages—the total number of men and women devoted to the (yes) delicate craft of conjuring horror in forty pages or less is, in the best of times, no more than a couple of dozen. Good writers, that is; those who enjoy delivering the fright, creating the shadows, letting loose the screams and the shivers we sometimes feel is too childish to admit to.

  What happens then depends on one’s taste.

  But there is seldom a doubt that that shadow over there, the one in the middle of the noonday desert, doesn’t belong. Especially when there’s nothing around to cast it Nothing, that is, that’s apparent

  Enjoy.

  There’s no shame at all in sharing someone’s horror.

  It’s fun.

  Trust me.

  Charles L. Grant

  Budd Lake, N.J.

  1979

  SHADOWS 3

  Introduction

  Davis Grubb, who lives and works in West Virginia, is not known for being the most prolific writer in the field. Yet the work that he’s done over the past several decades has about it the unmistakable mark of a superior craftsman. His classic The Night of the Hunter is virtually untouched for its unrelieved suspense and terror, and his trademark—that which you see is not wha
t you’re seeing—is doubly true of this novelette.

  It is also true that sometimes, if you blink at the wrong moment, what you think is a shadow … isn’t.

  THE BROWN RECLUSE

  by Davis Grubb

  I possess, as you can see, the narrowest, smallest, most beautiful foot in the whole town of Glory.

  I wear a size five and a half quadruple A, and since no Glory shoe store—and few anywhere in West Virginia, for that matter—carries my size, I have my shoes—my shoe, that is—especially crafted for me in Waltham, Massachusetts.

  You see, my left leg below the knee is missing and has been from birth. And now that I have that blunt and admittedly unpleasant detail out in the open I feel well enough to continue my tale of Justice, of fog—and of murder.

  Naturally, I adore this perfect right extremity of mine. And yet, having to make my way about on that one foot, with the aid of a particularly heavy orthopedic crutch made necessary by a slight curvature of the spine, this—one would suppose—might tend to make my foot heavy and calloused and broad. O, no, my dear, far from it! My five narrow little toes wink up at me every night as I draw from them my expensive French silk stocking. At night I soak my foot for hours in warm olive oil. I massage the soles and arch and ankle with Lanolin and vitamin E cream then. The result is a foot of perfection—one without callous or blemish. Each tiny nail has been lacquered with a special shade of polish blended for me exclusively by a Pittsburgh cosmetologist—the subtle flaming hue of the nasturtiums that grow in my small, old-fashioned garden. Is the association too farfetched?—the identification of myself with a flower? Yet what is a flower but beauty standing on its one leg and being swayed and bent by the chance wind of Destiny? Should I be compared perhaps to a stork? No; with my beautiful foot, I think of myself as a blossom.

  But men are cruel.

  Everyone does not see me in this light.

  Towns like Glory are cruel.

  And so I live alone in this perfectly charming old frame house on Water Street—amid a yard overgrown with weeds and wildflowers; with tan bark walks and a spice bush and azalea and crab apple trees for jelly and Impatience growing all around the crumbling, rococo porches.

  My father willed me the property. I was an only child. My mother, Ellen, for whom I am named, died at my birth, which was difficult and which, obviously, injured me as well as her. My father was inconsolable after her death and within a year had resigned his job as Professor of Logic and Oriental Philosophy at the local Glory college.

  He lived until I was nine.

  I did not grieve for him, or my mother particularly, as I grew up under the austere stewardship of my father’s two gaunt sisters who came to the big waterfront house to take over my care and rearing. They did little to help me through a particularly distressing adolescence; and then one of the sisters, the younger, ran away with a carnival medicine man from Chillicothe, Ohio, and the other, within a year, fell asleep after two pints of elderberry wine and drowned in my father’s great Grecian bathtub.

  I was nineteen, alone, and really quite well off, thanks to several oil wells which suddenly resumed production on land my father had owned downriver in Pleasant County.

  And that was thirty years ago.

  Forgive me while I shed my shoe. It is a hot August midday and such humidity—added to the strain of getting about—causes my foot to perspire. I must let nothing strain that exquisite member.

  Look at me closely now, if you please, and tell me what you find. A rather pretty spinster nearing fifty, with striking titian hair, slender (if slightly bowed) figure, with one leg missing and at the end of the other, a foot without peer in all of Glory—perhaps in all of West Virginia.

  Is that all you see?

  Of course it is, since how—unless you were a mystic—could you see behind my large and rather wistful eyes a mind of absolute clarity and of extraordinary powers of ratiocination. Everyone says I inherited such brilliant powers of deduction from my father. I should somehow prefer to think they came from my mother’s side of the family, though, I must confess, it is from my father that I derive my intense fascination for mystery stories in general, and for the tales of Sherlock Holmes in particular.

  I seldom read mysteries anymore, even though the local Glory library has a quite good and up-to-date selection. They are so predictable. If the author plays fair and gives me the clues as he should, I can generally spot the killer by the end of page one hundred. And I sigh and go back to my father’s deep, cool library bookshelves and pull down the bound Strand installments of the Master’s exploits. I know these tales by heart, of course, and yet I find more real mystery and suspense in them than in any of these jejune, modern exercises in deduction.

  Somehow, I believe the fogs we have here in Glory, especially down here on Water Street, account for my fascination with this segment of nineteenth-century London tradition.

  Slowly the river fogs creep in from our great Ohio River. The crickets and frogs down in the rushes and cattails, persist for a while, after the world has grown pale and flocculent and peculiarly hushed. But after a time, Mystery wins, and even they grow still.

  They seem waiting, listening, watching.

  For what?

  One stares out the deep parlor windows and the pale lemon-damask curtains hanging there seem part of the piled mists beyond the wrinkled window panes.

  Mystery is afoot.

  And what is the world out there?

  Is it truly the majestic Ohio out yonder—running deep and silent over its submerged secrets in the cunning and clandestine night? Or is it not, magically, incontrovertibly, suddenly the ancient Thames? And has not our Water Street and the end of Twelfth Street and the bricked, deserted wharf not suddenly become a fragment of London, east of Mansion House, beyond Limehouse and sinister, sleeping Soho—and those bricks gleaming with mists like black blood out there at the place where the wharf descends to the lapping shore—is not this perhaps actually a piece of London’s waterfront with some satanic malevolence implicit within every shifting shadow and mist-drenched bough and glistening cobbled gutter?

  Sometimes I stand in those mists, father’s old blue-and-green Alpaca shawl hugged round my shoulders, and stare down the curling white phantoms in the moonlit street toward the looming black-brick dwelling, ugly beyond description, which stands at the end of Water Street at the place where the land, defoliated by the foul-breathing zinc smelter, provides its endless treasure of arrowheads and other Meso-American artifacts for summertime boys. This ugly edifice is the home of Charlie Gribble, the town banker, pillar of the community, bachelor, eccentric, sixtyish, irascible, unbending, with no single warm human virtue.

  I call him the Brown Recluse. Naturally.

  As you doubtless know, the Brown Recluse shares the distinction of being—along with the Black Widow—the most venomous spider in our land. It is sneaking and furtive and bites unexpectedly and is extremely lethal.

  My appropriation of the name of this loathsome creature and giving it to Charlie Cribble is, as you shall see, quite natural.

  Look at him pass along the misted, glistening, brick sidewalk beyond my honeysuckle and red raspberry bushes, homeward bound, his goldheaded walking stick ferrule ringing resoundingly on the stones as he hunches past in some still hour of the night after long hours at his cluttered, roll-top desk in the frosted-glass office at the bank, hours of piece-mealing painfully through reams of bank loans, mortgages, proposed foreclosures, imminent bankruptcies, corporation claims to mineral rights—the process of squeezing every last penny out of paper until the paper moans in pain.

  Just see him hunker past through the mists which seem, like white spectral fingers, to clasp, cling, and then tear free of the shape of him—a veritable mortal incarnation of the Brown Recluse Spider in that particularly hideous and indescribably ugly brown Manx tweed cape he wears in every kind of weather. See how he seems to scuttle on eight legs rather than stride, like a man, on two. See how the furry, brown, venom
ous hulk of his shoulders in their repulsive vestiture resembles the shape of the insidious and lethal namesake. A moment later and he has scuttled off under the fog, like a Thing hiding under a stone. O, how one longs to overturn that sandstone shelter and drive the creature out into the open, into the light, where it can be seen. And crushed.

  Next to money—and I am not even sure of this—the creature I have named the Brovn Repluse has one obsession. And I am not sure whether or not I should not put this passion of his first I mean, of course, his obsession with Sherlock Holmes.

  I know it is difficult to imagine this miser, this money-grubber of unmitigated meanness, as the fanatic fan of the most romantic figure in perhaps all of English fiction. I used to ponder it over my solitary suppers in the pantry, when the lovely light of sundown came in golden lacy lights through the leaves beyond the kitchen window onto my mothers white linen tablecloth. Why, naturally, the Brown Recluse worshipped Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes, wiser even than Inspector Lestrade, was the absolute paradigm of proper law and order. And banking would rot without law and order. Moreover, there was in the Master’s patient unraveling of the tangled skeins of proof and guilt, something close to Gribble’s own patient nitpicking perusal of a mortgage, a deed, a contract for coal or oil rights. O, how well I have named him the Brown Recluse. How patiently he would sit in the center of his mercantile web, throwing out sticky, fresh strands when necessary to entrap some poor man and then pounce, kill and suck out the last drops of some pitiful little legacy or the picayune and pathetic residue of some insurance check after hospital and funeral deductions were made. O, like Sherlock he was a patient painstaking—and logical—man.

  He was also my first and only lover.

  I shan’t distress you with the details of that short liaison—I don’t like to dwell on it. Suffice it to say that it happened over a period of three months in the summer and early autumn of my twenty-ninth year and by Christmas—perhaps the saddest since my childhood—I had miscarried a child and almost hemorrhaged to death in the Glendale Hospital.