Tales from the Nightside (22 page)

Wet noises, dragging. And it came around the corner.

Charley and mum whimpering behind the sofa.

The light was moving from the fire, shining off the thing’s coat that was dripping water. I could hear it. Nothing else.

All I could see was its hands and its face. The hands had no skin, the fingers sharpened from years of scraping along the riverbed; they were huge and clung to with lots of little things like pointed scales. It held them up and took a step into the room.

Its face. Bones. Hanging green-black things. Grey, like the belly of a dead fish in the market. And nothing, nothing at all where the eyes should have been.

Michael made a noise and the thing moved to him, quicker now. It reached out and Michael swung with the poker, hitting it near the elbow and making it lean back. Then it came at him again, like I wasn’t even there, and Michael aimed for its head, but he missed and it grabbed him like they were going to wrestle. Its hand came up and Michael started screaming, and the women started screaming, and there was a pounding on the front door, and all I could hear was Charley shouting how it was my box, my box. I started shaking all over, and Michael and the man-thing bumped into a table, knocking it over with a lamp and a candy dish. I started looking around for something to throw, anything at all, when I remembered the mantel; and I stretched up and grabbed around until I found the box.

The thing was making noises and Michael was still screaming. I didn’t like the sound of a man screaming, and I crushed the box

under my foot and threw it into the fire. Then I don’t know what happened to/me, but I started shouting terrible things and ran to try to jump on its back, and suddenly there was this awful smell and the fire went bright for a second, so bright I could see the blood splashed on the wall, all over the thing’s coat.

Then everything stopped.

The river-thing let go of Michael, who dropped back a step and fell onto his back, and his face was cut so much I couldn’t look. And then it turned around to me, and I ran into the hall just as the door broke in and policemen started pouring into the house. They stopped, though, when they saw the thing standing there, but before one of them could use his gun, the coat folds like it was over nothing but air. The next thing I knew there was a pile of coat at my feet running out water and everyone talking all at once. I tried to get to Michael, but then all the lights went out, and the next thing I saw way myself in a hospital bed and a nurse bringing in mum and Charley, and they were carrying all kinds of sweets.

Charley leaned over me and kissed me hard and said, “My second hero.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “How’s Michael?”

Her smile went away, but she said he was going to be all right except they would have to do a lot of work on his face before it could look good again. Not, she said, that it ever did. But it was a sad kind of laugh she gave me, then, and I could see the crying in back of her eyes.

“Hey, Mum,” I said when she bent over to take my hands and kiss me. “What am I doing here? I’m all right, honest.”

“You are that,” she said. “The doctors say it’s for observation.” “What’s that mean?”

“It means they want to be sure you’re all right. You’ve had yourself quite a shock for a little boy, Jaimie.”

“Well, what about —”

“The police took what was left away.”

“Will I get my picture in the papers?”

“No, Jaimie. They’re saying they shot the man while he was escaping capture. No pictures. No one would believe it.”

“It was the box, Mum,” I said. “1 know, dear.”

“Something in the box, Mum. It got into the water and —”

“I know, dear. Don’t tax yourself.”

“The ashes! Charley you got to be sure she throws out the ashes. Bury them. Get metal, a tin or something, and bury it in the yard. You got to do it, Mum. Charley, you got to see she does it.”

I guess I was getting kind of loud because mum put her hand on my lips gently and nodded.

"I’m way ahead of you, Jaimie. It’s done, don’t worry. Not exactly like you said, but done just the same.”

“Mum, what did you do?”

“I shoveled it all in a sack and flushed it. Nothing to fear, Jaimie. All the ashes are down in the sewers, stretched from here to London, most likely.”

She winked. Charley smiled. Then the nurse came and said they had to leave, and I was left alone in the ward. Thinking about what my mother had done.

So, if you come to visit, if you come to find my house, knock loud and call out your name. But don’t be surprised if nobody’s home.

Anywhere.

I think it rather safe to say that I dislike fog of any kind as much as any sea captain who ever lived. I suppose that means I'm not much of a romantic. I can see the beauty of the beast on occasion, but I can also feel its clammy breath on my face, and I hate the sparkling white wall that jumps up in front of me when I'm driving. It's not that fog is necessarily creepy, or ominous, or even remotely lethal; it's just... inconvenient.

But there was a fog on the night I first heard the digging.

I was standing on my front porch smoking a cigarette, and not enjoying it at all. My guests had left some ten minutes before, but I still had no inclination to head inside and clean up their mess. I had purchased the house on its full acre lot because it had been, at the time, somewhat prestigious to do so and, frankly, because it was a considerable asset when stalking a woman. It is far easier to be cozy, to be candlelight-and-soft-music suave, in a house like this than in an apartment with neighbors who keep close track of you and who make a mockery of your walls. It didn't always work, of course, since that's the nature of the game. But I never regretted those who made the trip from the city with me.

I drew deeply on the cigarette, and shivered.

The fog was a thick one this time, the kind London would boast of before the classy dowager got modern and cleaned up her act. Cars ghosted by, sound was eerily magnified, and porch lights farther up the block were either totally obscured or sat like shimmering blotches of turned mustard in the air. It was not at all beautiful, and it was chilling me to the bone. Finally, after punishing myself enough for one night, I flicked what remained of the cigarette over the railing and turned to open the door.

And heard the digging.

The scrape of the shovel slipping into dirt not quite soft enough for an easy job; the thud of a heel shoving it in farther; the scrape of withdrawal; the thud of soft earth falling to one side.

Crazy, I thought, and cocked my head until I had decided the noise was coming from behind the house on the right—a tidy little thing that belonged to Roger and Betty Dillan. I walked slowly to the end of the porch and leaned out, listening. No doubt about it. Someone was digging in Rogers backyard. I thought at first it might be some kids lusting after Bet's prize flowers—they used to do it often, to save themselves the price of a florist. Roger had caught them finally, and they had stopped immediately. There had been no threat of police action or complaining to parents. There had been no violence, actual or implied. It was, simply, Roger. He had a way about him.

And if it wasn't the kids, then it must have been Alger, and I felt suddenly sad.

Alger was a purebred bloodhound of indeterminate age, yet obviously older than he had a right to be. Much older, if you believed the stories Roger told about him. And he was dying. Of this and that and whatever else dogs get when they've outlived their time. Roger, however, could not bring himself to take the animal to the vet. He wanted Alger to die at home, where he was born, as long as he was in no discernible pain.

The beast, then, was dead, and poor Roger was burying him.

I hurried back to the steps, crossed the damp lawn, and made my way to the hedge that separated our properties. When we were kids there were well-worn prickly tunnels through that eternally green wall, and now those gaps had been widened to accommodate us as adults. It was, I had always believed, something akin to a miracle that I had been able to buy the place where, like Alger, I had been born, a greater one that the intervening owners had not torn down that infernal green wall.

I pushed my way through, arms close to my sides and face averted, and was halfway up the gentle slope toward the Dillans' backyard when I realized the noise had stopped, the only sound my tobacco-labored breathing.

I hesitated, doubting for a moment I had heard it at all.

No, I thought; my hair may be pretending it belongs to the tide, but my hearing is still perfect.

So I fought through the fog s unpleasantly cool hands and headed straight for the steps that led up to the kitchen door. There was a light on, diffused and dimmed by the fog, and I knocked twice, once, on the storm door before letting myself in.

Roger was sitting at the kitchen table, a massive butcher block affair that almost dwarfed the room. And Alger, lips fluttering in a snore, was asleep by the stove.

I was not only relieved, I felt incredibly stupid.

"Insomnia?" he asked. "Or are you hiding again?"

My grin was weak, though the question was a fair one. I tended, on occasion, to get myself too involved with women I didn't know how to handle; and when I had no idea how to end the relationship cleanly, without spilling anyone's blood, I used the tried-and-up- until-now-true method of not answering the telephone, vanishing for a while, and finally precipitating an argument that ended it all in a cleansing rage. Hardly sporting, I suppose, but nevertheless effective.

"Neither," I said. "I heard someone digging outside there and thought the kids were raiding you again."

Roger was a head taller than I, but several pounds lighter. His Hair was streaked elegantly with grey, and his face was enviously unlined. He worked as a nuclear plant troubleshooter for various power companies and reactor manufacturers up and down the East Coast. These were miserable times for him now; too many accidents making the headlines, and not enough answers to keep the Public from panicking when antigroups shrilled, factually or not. It was a pressure he had not encountered before, anywhere, and I don't think the poor guy understood how to deal with it without losing himself in nightmares.

"Yeah,” he said. His hands were folded loosely around a dark bottle of Irish beer. I rose and got myself one, though I had the distinct impression I wasn't welcome tonight.

"So?" I said, leaning back in the ice-cream-parlor chair.

"So what?"

"So the digging."

"It was me," he said, with a glance toward the door.

I took a drink and licked my lips. "In November? Garbage," I suggested then, giving him an out in case it was none of my business. It wasn't.

"Yeah."

I drained the bottle and tossed it cleanly into the white receptacle by the refrigerator. There was a green plastic bag folded into it, and it was practically full. I got out of the chair with a somewhat confused smile. "Foggy," I said, standing by the door. "Thick as pea soup."

Roger belched. "I hate it."

I hadn't caught the tone. "Yeah. Me, too."

"No," he said sternly. "I mean, I really hate it, Andy."

"No kidding? I always thought you always thought it was kind of Byronic or something. You know, Heathcliff on the moors and all that crap."

He smiled when I looked at him, and there was no mirth behind it. "I used to."

I had had enough. I opened the door as noisily as I could. "Look, Rog, are you going to talk, or are you going to keep on auditioning for Gary Cooper?"

"Yep."

I slammed the door and cracked my heels hard on the steps going down. The kitchen light barely reached the ground, but as I headed for the hedge I saw where he had been digging. It was a short, narrow trench, the raw earth already gleaming wetly, and obscenely, into fog-born mud. I wondered, then—and wondered why I didn't think of it before—if he had hit something on the road, a cat maybe, and had buried it. He was like that, Roger Dillan was. Killing things of any persuasion brought out the supreme guilts in him. In fact  I’ve seen close to tears just because he'd barely missed clipping a rabbit. Me, I've sometimes succumbed to the urge we all have and never admit to and have actually aimed my car at whatever had no business being on my road. Since I've never hit anything, however, I don't really know how I would react. But I sure as hell wouldn't cry.

Roger, I thought, sometimes you're a real dip.

With my mood thoroughly soured I didn't bother to clean up. And I was no better the following morning. Scowling at the world, I decided it was wiser to leave the car at home and take the bus into the city—there was always the chance I might do something stupid with it.

Thankfully, the fog was gone. It was beginning to give me the unreasonable creeps.

I was, by modest and contemporary definition, an advertising man. Which is to say, I somehow managed with fair regularity to come up with enough viable and banal slogans for enough bland products to keep those paychecks and bonuses coming in without pause. I was middle-level on the executive scale, and as safe as I would ever be in my position because I aimed no higher. My ambitions, such as they were, were simple: a fair cushion in the bank against disaster, enough cash floating loose to buy dumb things when I wanted them or to lure women when I needed them, and to reach old age healthy enough for a nice swift departure when I was good and ready. And so far I was doing all right. You might even say I was years ahead of the game.

I also had a secretary—Jackie Bowman. Short, dimpled, just this side of pudgy; the perfect cheerleader who had traded in her pompons for bonbons. We had had a go of it a couple of times over the past five years, but I wasn't stupid enough to keep it burning all the time. She has this husband... and I have no guts.

"Crayton's looking for you, Andy," she told me, leaning over my desk to drop the mail into my hands. I stared boldly down her admittedly fine cleavage, saw nothing I hadn't seen before, and drugged. She scowled and walked out. A moment later I followed, nodded to Bob Parker as I stepped into the elevator, and rode to the floor above where I was ushered briskly and impersonally into Anthony Crayton's office—ebony, mahogany, pine, and walnut,