Terror Incognita (12 page)

In town, he bought two lengths of strong nylon cord.

In the parking lot of the store he examined his car, figuring out how he might attach one end of the linked cords. He had no trailer hitch. The frame beneath, somewhere? It was easiest, he decided, to open both rear windows and pass one end of the cord right through the back, in one side and out the other. Satisfied with at least this end of the problem, he drove home to confront the second half of the equation. As he steered the car, his heart raced like a rat in a wheel, as if its mad workings were what powered the vehicle as it sped back to his haunted house.

He backed the car into the driveway, got out, and began to uncoil his rope, sheltered on the far side of the car so his actions couldn’t yet be seen. But he couldn’t help throwing a smile at the dark maw of the garage. Did the vampires slumber, or were they watching avidly with their lidless eyes?

He fastened one end of the joined cords through the back of his car, as he had planned. “You should have messed with the car again,” he muttered. “You should have done something else to it, huh?”

From under his coat he withdrew the Magnum. Then, taking his rope with him like a spelunker venturing into a labyrinth deep in the earth, Ned crouched down and gingerly entered the garage.

Since last evening he had tried to remember what kind of supports the cross beams had, what might be holding up this end of the roof...if it were even something a car might dislodge. The answer was better than he had hoped. It filled him both with gratitude, and horror that he had dared to enter this potential rat trap.

All that really continued to support the roof on the right was a gallows-like structure, a frail little brace of wood. All he had to do was fasten the cord to the lower part of that brace, yank it away, and the top portion would surely give way. The roof must be precarious even now.

But were they in here, to be trapped?

The gallows brace was half-way into the garage. Keeping his eyes on the shadows at the back of the cave, he straightened up as best he could and began tying the cord around the forty-five degree support arm. In order to do this, he had to reluctantly tuck the pistol in his waistband. His breathing grew rapid, and his breath became an obscuring ectoplasm before his eyes. Suddenly very frightened not to be able to see into the back of the garage, he held his breath while he finished tying off the cord. He knotted it again and again, so that the car’s pull would not simply unravel it.

At last he finished, and squatted back down so he could retreat. He thought he really should venture in just a little deeper, to verify that they were indeed back there before he fully toppled the structure. But no...that was what they wanted. This was their den, now. They were there; he knew it.

As he turned to go back, he saw one of the aliens’ faces peering out at him from the garage’s rubble, not two feet from his face. Huge black eyes, compressed slash of a mouth, a blank face with no soul behind it to give it life.

He cried out, wrenched free his handgun and continued the motion by smashing it like a hammer across that staring visage in a vicious backhand blow.

Glass shattered, and he felt his flesh tear in several places. The gun dropped from his hand and fell through the old leaning window pane he had just struck.

He clutched his bleeding hand to his chest. Just a reflection. But it couldn’t have been his...he hadn’t mistaken what he’d seen. It had to have been one of the aliens, lurking behind him, peering over his shoulder.

He twisted sharply around. Neither of them was there. But he knew they were close at hand. Without waiting for them to pour in upon him, he left the gun behind and scurried out of the garage into the glaring safety of outside air.

Still gripping his gushing hand, Ned slipped into his car. Started it. Yes, they should have screwed with this starter too, shouldn’t they?

Ned clamped his fists on the wheel and stamped his foot on the gas pedal. His car lurched forward...began to race up the slope of the driveway, spitting a fusillade of pebbles behind it...

And then it was brought up short with a jolt, as if it had struck a phone pole. Ned hadn’t fastened his seat belt, and nearly pitched into the windshield.

Behind him came the delayed second half of the crash he had heard inside his house that night.

“Yes!” Ned exclaimed, savoring the monstrous shriek of tormented wood. It might have been the banshee wail of his grandfather’s ghost, anguished at seeing his grandson level the remnants of the structure.

Did he actually hear some unearthly shrieking mixed in with the falling-tree sound of the crash?

Gripping his slashed hand once more, Ned stepped out of the car to take in the results. He saw that the nylon cord had snapped, but only after its work had been done.

The roof was not totally flat. There had been an old washer and stove in there, other items and piles of debris to prevent the roof from uniform flatness, but it was flat enough to have crushed anything remotely human inside it. Ned would have worried about a stray cat being caught in that avalanche.

The back wall alone was standing, though leaning and with boards torn free. Through a gaping section, Ned could see the neighbors who had left that basket of weeds on his porch as a gift, peeking through to see what the noise had been. Two pairs of glittering, stealthy eyes. If he had still had his gun in his hand, Ned would have fired through the boards at those eyes. In fact, he reached to his waistband before he remembered he had lost the Magnum in the cave-in.

“Go away!” he shouted at the two of them instead. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

*     *     *

For the next few nights, he didn’t see the aliens again.

But one night, when he stood at the toilet, his mind filled with the golden haze of beer, his peripheral vision picked up a dim glow reflected in the mirror over the sink.

He jerked back so abruptly that he spattered the floor, backed out of the bathroom and clawed at the light switch on the wall outside the door.

The overhead light came on. He stole back into the room, stole up to the sink, steeled himself for a dead-on look in the mirror.

Just his reflection. But he regarded it with a frown. He had lost weight, his cheeks bony, his thin lips a tight line. His eyes glared from dark hollows. He was tall and slender to begin with, and now looked all the more cadaverous.

He had been sleeping in his bed again. Drinking again. He had let his guard down...

Could they have returned? Could one of them, at least, have survived? And invaded him in a place where it couldn’t be evicted?

He backed out of the bathroom a second time, not lowering his gaze from his own gaze.

That was what
they
 thought, that they couldn’t be evicted...

He would watch for them. He would check, every day.

He still had the guns hidden throughout his house. He must not let his guard down again. He must remain vigilant.

He had killed two of them. He would kill each one that came for him. He would shoot them. Each and every one...until, besieged, he either shot them all or was overrun, trying.

And if he saw in the mirror what he had seen reflected in that old window in the garage...if it came to that...then he would shoot himself, as well.

And so he watched. And he waited.

T-SHIRTS OF THE DAMNED

“T
-Shirt Babylon,
purveyors of the extremely unpleasant...can I help you?” Hays said when he answered the phone. He came up with a new motto every day, much to his own amusement. Yesterday it had been,
“T-Shirt Babylon,
 where the T stands for torture.” Not one of his best ones, but the phone had rung before he had a wittier one prepared.

It was his fiance, Dawn. She wanted to know how late he’d be staying at the shop; his parents were coming to dinner tonight to celebrate their engagement, and he was already forty-five minutes later than he’d said he’d be.

Hays stalked his office with the phone tucked under his jaw, its extra-long cord trailing. He always paced while on the phone, which was a lot, while Dawn handled more of the actual production details. Not that she chose the subject matter of the T-shirts...oh no, that was the most fun to be had, and this was his company.
T-Shirt Babylon
 and Dicky Hays were one and the same thing.

“I’m still waiting for that pinhead LeClair to call me, babe. He said he’d call at four. He better not have forgotten me...that human slime.”

Again Dawn warned Hays of what another dealer had told them about LeClair...that he would buy a fairly small number of shirts, then tell Hays he hadn’t sold them all yet rather than ordering more, when in reality he had had his people copy Hays’ shirts and was selling his own bootleg versions instead.

“Hey...bear in mind too, babe, that Jimmy wants all our business and doesn’t want us sharing with LeClair...right? Of course he’s not gonna exactly tell us LeClair’s the second coming of Christ, is he?”

Hollywood; you were wounder or wounded. But Dicky Hays knew the drill. The street below was filled with the walking wounded, the living dead of deadly living, the human flotsam of many a sunk ship of dreams. But Dicky Hays was nice and dry up here. Sink or swim in this town.

While Hays listened to Dawn persist in her admonitions to be cautious, his eyes idly flowed over the posters filling every available inch of his little office’s walls. Movie posters, old and tattered or glossy new, advertising lurid horror films foreign and domestic. He smirked now at a newly acquired one for an old Mexican horror/wrestling masterpiece. Movies about busty young women in prison. A poster for
Eraserhead.
 That this film was considered by many to be a work of art was of no interest to Hays; it was weird and gross and that was all that concerned him. Hays never tired of his colorful surroundings. How could he? That would be like tiring of himself.

Dawn told him he shouldn’t wait around much longer. Hays replied, “I’ve already called his number three times and no one’s there. Look, if the turd doesn’t call me in an hour I’ll come home no matter what—okay? So what are you gonna make, anyway?”

Dawn laughed. She was going to call in an order of Chinese food. Nothing but the best for his parents, she told him.

Hays was proud. His parents approved of Dawn...they got along very well. He had almost stopped hoping for them to like one of his girlfriends. He didn’t suppose they’d approve of Linda, who he’d been sleeping with lately, but he didn’t suppose Dawn would be too crazy about her either. She was supposed to call soon, too, but he couldn’t tell that to Dawn. He glanced to his watch.

Linda was definitely juicier than Dawn, but he actually loved Dawn. He was probably more shocked when he realized this than his parents were. His friends had teased him. Dicky Hays...
in love?
 Dicky Hays going to get married? He had almost felt like apologizing for forgetting who he was.

And once in a while he found himself washed in a chilly wave of doubt, almost like pre-panic. But he loved her. How often did that happen? And besides, getting his parents to finally approve of him was almost enough incentive in itself.

But he wasn’t married yet and Linda was supposed to call soon...or should have called already, that dumb bitch...so Hays again reassured Dawn that he wouldn’t be much longer. “Love you too, Boobs,” he told her goodbye. His aptly-chosen pet name for her. Hey—it wasn’t just a girl’s personality that got Dicky Hays to the altar.

Hays hung up the phone, his eyes playing across stacks of the new mail order catalogs just in that morning from the printer. The front displayed the “new fashions for spring”...a T-shirt featuring James Dean’s slick little sports car squashed like a pumpkin...a Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head point-blank...a kitten with the top of its head opened up and wires threaded into the raw wound, from a flier protesting animal experimentation. All these with appropriately hilarious captions, thought up, of course, by Dicky Hays.

His parents didn’t approve. A lot of people didn’t approve. But a lot of people were buying his shirts. And as long as the demand was there, he would be there.

Dawn needn’t worry about his dealings with LeClair. He had dodged and ducked and eluded half a dozen lawsuits already, mostly for using photos without permission. Well, he realized that as he grew he shouldn’t be taking risks like that. Luckily he had recently bought the rights to reproduce anything he wanted from a book on circus freaks and another on medical curiosities, and there was a gold mine of material between those two volumes. It wasn’t easy being an entrepreneur, but these days you had to be one to get ahead, and he had the right mind for it.

Hays was lighting a cigarette when the phone rang. “About time,” he said, meaning it for either LeClair or Linda...those two inconsiderate morons.

“T Shirt Babylon...
where the T stands for tawdry trash.” Okay, so that made two mottoes in one day.

“You’re right.”

“Hello...who is this?”

“I’m not an admirer, Mr. Hays.”

The connection sounded distant, like one from overseas. You could always swear you were hearing the ocean the wires ran under. A man. It didn’t help that he wasn’t speaking loudly, either. Hays squinted, as if that might help him hear better. “Hello. Is it my understanding that I’m speaking to a non-fan who intends to shame me into seeing the error of my ways?” It wouldn’t be the first such call.

“After having the misfortune of seeing your last catalog, I’m convinced you have no shame, Mr. Hays.”

“Hey, you should see my newest catalog just in, if you liked that one...I’ve got a juicy shirt with a dead dog smooshed by a car, in vivid red and black, and...”

“Didn’t you ever have a dog, Mr. Hays?”

“Yeah, as a kid I had several. Did you ever have a lobotomy? Kinda sounds like it, from your voice.”

“Didn’t you feel badly when they died?”

“No...I celebrated, what do you think? Hey, pal, it isn’t that you don’t have a brain...it’s that people like you don’t have a sense of humor.”