Masques Read online

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  No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior written consent of anyone.

  Copyright © 1984 by Maclay & Associates, Inc., P.O. Box 16253,

  Baltimore, MD 21210. All rights reserved. Printed in the

  United States of America. Library of Congress Catalog

  Card Number 84-61387. ISBN 0-940776-18-9.

  FIRST EDITION

  “House Mothers,” general introduction, author/story introductions, and interview questions copyright © 1984 by J.N. Williamson.

  “Nightcrawlers” copyright © 1984 by Robert R. McCammon.

  “Somebody Like You” copyright © 1984 by Dennis Etchison.

  “Samhain: Full Moon” and “I Have Made My Bones Secure” copyright © 1984 by Ardath Mayhar.

  “Third Wind” copyright © 1984 by Richard Christian Matheson.

  “Redbeard” copyright © 1984 by Gene Wolfe.

  “The Turn of Time” copyright © 1984 by David B. Silva.

  “Soft” copyright © 1984 by F. Paul Wilson.

  “Party Time” copyright © 1984 by Mort Castle.

  “Everybody Needs a Little Love” copyright © 1984 by Robert Bloch.

  “Angel’s Exchange” copyright © 1984 by Jessica Amanda Salmonson.

  “Down by the Sea near the Great Big Rock” copyright © 1984 by Joe R. Lansdale.

  “The First Day of Spring” copyright © 1984 by David Knoles.

  “Czadek” and “A Short, Incandescent Life” copyright © 1984 by Ray Russell.

  “The Old Men Know” copyright © 1984 by Charles L. Grant.

  “The Substitute” copyright © 1984 by Gahan Wilson.

  “The Alteration” copyright © 1984 by Dennis Hamilton.

  “Trust Not a Man” and “Charles Beaumont: The Magic Man” copyright © 1984 by William F. Nolan.

  “Long After Ecclesiastes” copyright © 1984 by Ray Bradbury.

  “My Grandmother’s Japonicas” copyright © 1984 by Christopher Beaumont; by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.

  “Master of Imagination” (interview responses) copyright © 1984 by Richard Matheson.

  Contents

  Introduction and Acknowledgments - J.N. Williamson

  Nightcrawlers - Robert R. McCammon

  Somebody Like You - Dennis Etchinson

  Samhain: Full Moon and I Have Made My Bones Secure - Ardath Mayhar

  Third Wind - Richard Christian Matheson

  Redbeard - Gene Wolfe

  The Turn of Time - David B. Silva

  Soft - F. Paul Wilson

  House Mothers - J.N. Williamson

  Party Time - Mort Castle

  Everybody Needs a Little Love - Robert Bloch

  Angel’s Exchange - Jessica Amanda Salmonson

  Down By the Sea near the Great Big Rock - Joe R. Lansdale

  The First Day of Spring - David Knoles

  Czadek - Ray Russell

  The Old Men Know - Charles L. Grant

  The Substitute - Gahan Wilson

  The Alteration - Dennis Hamilton

  Trust Not a Man - William F. Nolan

  Long After Ecclesiastes - Ray Bradbury

  My Grandmother’s Japonicas (With Tributes)

  Introduction

  A Short, Incandescent Life - Ray Russell

  “My Grandmother’s Japonicas” - Charles Beaumont

  Charles Beaumont: The Magic Man - William F. Nolan

  Master of Imagination (interview)

  All characters and events depicted in this book

  are purely fictitious.

  Introduction and

  Acknowledgements

  J.N. Williamson

  Why Masques as the title for I his anthology of all-new, horrific, occult, and supernatural material?

  I have my reasons and you shall have them, too . . .

  1. Most readers of such writing get all the trivia questions right when the subject is Edgar Allan Poe, and Masques swiftly conjures EAP’s “Masque of the Red Death” (1842); titles are said to be best when the recognition factor is high;

  2. There may be a subliminal evocation of the cherished Black Mask magazine but with—as Ray Russell observed—more dignity;

  3. A “masque” was an elaborate dramatic performance popular in England during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the focus of the form was a lusty witches’ cauldron of horror, terror, revenge. One encyclopedia even reminds us that English tragedy “customarily probed the roots of evil”

  What with Galileo having recently observed moon craters and Michael of Wallachia conquering Transylvania, the period was ideal for such a man as Ben Jonson to “court favor” with his Masque of Blackness and The Alchemist. It was Ben, actor as well as playwright—Russell, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Mort Castle, and editor Williamson later trod the boards, as well—who organized masques for his king.

  Old Ben’s creations (my encyclopedia insists) had a “controlled style,” “incisiveness,” and “sure sense of structure,” characteristics of most who prune the roots of evil for fictive delights. He enjoyed gathering with his admiring followers in the Apollo room . . . of the Devil Tavern. Among them were two young dramatists of inventive imagination who guided a masque, disquietingly yet with humor, toward a preconceived point. One of the two was named—Beaumont.

  It’s fairly standard practice in introductions such as this to whet your appetite with cheers for the material to come. Considering the wordsmiths of rue assembled here for your pleasure, I cannot imagine such a need exists. Instead, my individual asides preceding each piece may provide you with information that humanizes and “sketches in a little background, as it were” (as memory tells me satirist Stan Freberg once put it).

  Consider: One of the fine post-Lovecraft anthologies of weird fiction was The Playboy Book of Horror and The Supernatural (1967). Six authors were represented by more than one short story, each reprinted from the magazine: Robert Bloch; Ray Bradbury; Richard Matheson; Ray Russell; Gahan Wilson; and Charles Beaumont. All, nearly two decades later, are here—despite Beaumont’s tragically untimely demise—with new writing. William F. Nolan was present, too; Nolan, as well, is back with a finely-honed, frightening yarn.

  And they are joined by more than a dozen other tellers of terror who’d surely have deserved space in that 1967 anthology had they emerged—talent-wise, or in life—earlier. Deserved, and probably won it.

  H. P. Lovecraft preached it right even when he didn’t always practice it: “I believe that weird writing offers a serious field not unworthy of the best literary artists” (Some Notes on a Nonentity). You’ll meet the best in the pages ready to be turned, whether any of them ever see Stockholm or not. I believe that at least twelve contributors have rarely, if ever, achieved the heights they scale in Masques; four have ascended to new levels of personal accomplishment. And except for one beautiful and necessary tribute to Beaumont, which has never before appeared in book form but ran many years ago in a magazine, it’s all heretofore unpublished work—masterworks, if you will.

  Ladies and gentlemen, whether you watch from your royal throne or peer enigmatically through the slits in your domino, prepare yourself for shock, suspense, surprisingly stimulating ideas, and wonder. Let the masque begin!

  J.N. Williamson

  May 1984

  This book is an achievement of cooperative attitudes on the part of the present authors and poets, others who are integral to the free exchange of supportive ideas and information, and the encouragement of friends, eager readers-to-be, and people within the writing and publishing communities who are not present in the pages of Masques. More specific gratitude must be expressed to those who
se unflagging willingness to Point the Way was utterly indispensable, particularly Dr. Milton L. Hillman for the title; William F. Nolan; Stuart David Schiff of Whispers; Ray Russell; Peter Heggie, Executive Secretary of Authors Guild; Richard Matheson; Ardath Mayhar; Nancy R. Parsegian, long-time Playboy editor; Mike Ashley; Dennis Etchison; Joe R. Lansdale; Robert Collins, Editor, Fantasy Review; Karl Edward Wagner; the late Charles Beaumont, whose undiminished spirit increasingly became our inspiration; Joyce Maclay, Ethel T. Cavanaugh, and Mary T. Williamson. Not to mention the publisher, John Maclay, whose idea it was in the first place.

  Design and production: John Maclay

  Composition and mechanical artwork: Madison Graphic Services, Inc.

  Printing and binding: BookCrafters, Inc.

  Dustjacket design: Stanley Mossman

  Dustjacket illustration: Allen Koszowski

  Nightcrawlers

  Robert R. McCammon

  In 1978, an Avon novel—Baal—marked the arrival of another author who hoped to survive the indiscriminate horror “boom” It was a time when many publishers sought to capitalize upon the successes of Levin, Blatty, and King, plus film producers as well—eager, as Douglas E. Winter wrote in Shadowings (Starmont House, 1983), to “snap up seemingly every property in sight and feed them to the momentarily insatiable appetite of the reading and viewing public.”

  Occult readers were more selective than viewers. Five years later, most of those writers who could not advance culled out, Robert R. McCammon had benefited from the demanding nucleus of steadfast horror readers which had learned to recognize the names of top professionals. He’d followed up with Bethany’s Sin, They Thirst, Night Boat, and, in 1983, Mystery Walk. It became a book club selection and genuine best seller both in hardcover and in paperback.

  Yet Rick McCammon had been only 26years old when Baal was published! Born July 17, 1952, another gifted Southern wordsmith, he lives in Birmingham and speaks courteously with but a hint of his regional origin. McCammon novels typically begin on a note of suspense (with some of the more intriguing characters in modern fiction), skip quickly to all-out Terror Alert, then charge at the reader as forcefully as an old Bear Bryant front line.

  His latest novel continues the saga of Poe’s tormented Ushers and he plans The Lady next, a supernatural novel set in surroundings familiar to Rick. Your immediate concern is the following, rare Robert R. McCammon novelette, “Nightcrawlers,” arguably his most mature yet terrifyingly typical shocker. If you read it by night, or alone, “in the light” will be a phrase that makes your skin crawl whenever you see a red neon sign . . .

  I

  “Hard rain coming down,” Cheryl said, and I nodded in agreement.

  Through the diner’s plate-glass windows, a dense curtain of rain flapped across the Gulf gas pumps and continued across the parking lot. It hit Big Bob’s with a force that made the glass rattle like uneasy bones. The red neon sign that said BIG BOB’S! DIESEL FUEL! EATS! sat on top of a high steel pole above the diner so the truckers on the interstate could see it. Out in the night, the red-tinted rain thrashed in torrents across my old pickup truck and Cheryl’s baby-blue Volkswagen.

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose that storm’ll either wash some folks in off the interstate or we can just about hang it up.” The curtain of rain parted for an instant, and I could see the treetops whipping back and forth in the woods on the other side of Highway 47. Wind whined around the front door like an animal trying to claw its way in. I glanced at the electric clock on the wall behind the counter. Twenty minutes before nine. We usually closed up at ten, but tonight—with tornado warnings in the weather forecast—I was tempted to turn the lock a little early. “Tell you what,” I said. “If we’re empty at nine, we skedaddle. ’Kay?”

  “No argument here,” she said. She watched the storm for a moment longer, then continued putting newly-washed coffee cups, saucers and plates away on the stainless steel shelves.

  Lightning flared from west to east like the strike of a burning bullwhip. The diner’s lights flickered, then came back to normal. A shudder of thunder seemed to come right up through my shoes. Late March is the beginning of tornado season in south Alabama, and we’ve had some whoppers spin past here in the last few years. I knew that Alma was at home, and she understood to get into the root cellar right quick if she spotted a twister, like that one we saw in ’82 dancing through the woods about two miles from our farm.

  “You got any Love-Ins planned this weekend, hippie?” I asked Cheryl, mostly to get my mind off the storm and to rib her, too.

  She was in her late-thirties, but I swear that when she grinned she could’ve passed for a kid. “Wouldn’t you like to know, redneck?” she answered; she replied the same way to all my digs at her. Cheryl Lovesong—and I know that couldn’t have been her real name—was a mighty able waitress, and she had hands that were no strangers to hard work. But I didn’t care that she wore her long silvery-blond hair in Indian braids with hippie headbands, or came to work in tie-dyed overalls. She was the best waitress who’d ever worked for me, and she got along with everybody just fine—even us rednecks. That’s what I am, and proud of it: I drink Rebel Yell whiskey straight, and my favorite songs are about good women gone bad and trains on the long track to nowhere. I keep my wife happy, I’ve raised my two boys to pray to God and to salute the flag, and if anybody don’t like it he can go a few rounds with Big Bob Clayton.

  Cheryl would come right out and tell you she used to live in San Francisco in the late ’sixties, and that she went to Love-Ins and peace marches and all that stuff. When I reminded her it was nineteen eighty-four and Ronnie Reagan was president, she’d look at me like I was walking cow-flop. I always figured she’d start thinking straight when all that hippie-dust blew out of her head.

  Alma said my tail was going to get burnt if I ever took a shine to Cheryl, but I’m a fifty-five-year-old redneck who stopped sowing his wild seed when he met the woman he married, more than thirty years ago.

  Lightning crisscrossed the turbulent sky, followed by a boom of thunder. Cheryl said, “Wow! Look at that light-show!”

  “Light-show, my ass,” I muttered. The diner was as solid as the Good Book, so I wasn’t too worried about the storm. But on a wild night like this, stuck out in the countryside like Big Bob’s was, you had a feeling of being a long way off from civilization—though Mobile was only twenty-seven miles south. On a wild night like this, you had a feeling that anything could happen, as quick as a streak of lightning out of the darkness.

  I picked up a copy of the Mobile Press-Register that the last customer—a trucker on his way to Texas—had left on the counter a half-hour before, and I started plowing through the news, most of it bad: those A-rab countries were still squabbling like Hatfields and McCoys in white robes; two men had robbed a Quik-Mart in Mobile and had been killed by the police in a shootout; cops were investigating a massacre at a motel near Daytona Beach; an infant had been stolen from a maternity ward in Birmingham. The only good things on the front page were stories that said the economy was up and that Reagan swore we’d show the Commies who was boss in El Salvador and Lebanon.

  The diner shook under a blast of thunder, and I looked up from the paper as a pair of headlights emerged from the rain into my parking-lot.

  II

  The headlights were attached to an Alabama State Trooper car.

  “Half alive, hold the onion, extra brown the buns.” Cheryl was already writing on her pad in expectation of the order. I pushed the paper aside and went to the fridge for the hamburger meat.

  When the door opened, a windblown spray of rain swept in and stung like buckshot. “Howdy, folks!” Dennis Wells peeled off his gray rainslicker and hung it on the rack next to the door. Over his Smokey the Bear trooper hat was a protective plastic covering, beaded with raindrops. He took off his hat, exposing the thinning blond hair on his pale scalp, as he approached the counter and sat on his usual stool, right next to the cash-register. “Cup of black coffee a
nd a rare—” Cheryl was already sliding the coffee in front of him, and the burger sizzled on the griddle. “Ya’ll are on the ball tonight!” Dennis said; he said the same thing when he came in, which was almost every night. Funny the kind of habits you fall into, without realizing it.

  “Kinda wild out there, ain’t it?” I asked as I flipped the burger over.

  “Lordy, yes! Wind just about flipped my car over three, four miles down the interstate. Thought I was gonna be eatin’ a little pavement tonight.” Dennis was a husky young man in his early thirties, with thick blond brows over deep-set, light brown eyes. He had a wife and three kids, and he was fast to flash a wallet-full of their pictures. “Don’t reckon I’ll be chasin’ any speeders tonight, but there’ll probably be a load of accidents. Cheryl, you sure look pretty this evenin’.”

  “Still the same old me.” Cheryl never wore a speck of makeup, though one day she’d come to work with glitter on her cheeks. She had a place a few miles away, and I guessed she was farming that funny weed up there. “Any trucks moving?”

  “Seen a few, but not many. Truckers ain’t fools. Gonna get worse before it gets better, the radio says.” He sipped at his coffee and grimaced. “Lordy, that’s strong enough to jump out of the cup and dance a jig, darlin’!”

  I fixed the burger the way Dennis liked it, put it on a platter with some fries and served it. “Bobby, how’s the wife treatin’ you?” he asked.

  “No complaints.”

  “Good to hear. I’ll tell you, a fine woman is worth her weight in gold. Hey, Cheryl! How’d you like a handsome young man for a husband?”

  Cheryl smiled, knowing what was coming. “The man I’m looking for hasn’t been made yet.”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t met Cecil yet, either! He asks me about you every time I see him, and I keep tellin’ him I’m doin’ everything I can to get you two together.” Cecil was Dennis’ brother-in-law and owned a Chevy dealership in Bay Minette. Dennis had been ribbing Cheryl about going on a date with Cecil for the past four months. “You’d like him,” Dennis promised. “He’s got a lot of my qualities.”