Duck. He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boogie of
electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night.
Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—
hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha.
And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you. .
We cruise. . . my son and I. . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright
Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it. . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can. . . and tends it.
Thinking such troubled half-dreaming thoughts, Louis Creed slipped away, unplugging his connections to waking reality line by line, until all thoughts ceased and exhaustion dragged him down to black dreamless unconsciousness.
Just before the first signs of dawn touched the sky in the east, there were footsteps on the stairs. They were slow and clumsy but purposeful. A shadow moved in the shadows of the hail. A smell came with it—a stench. Louis, even in his thick sleep, muttered and turned away from that smell. There was the steady pull and release of respiration.
The shape stood outside the master bedroom door for some little time, not moving. Then it came inside. Louis’s face was buried in his pillow. White hands reached out, and there was a click as the black doctor’s bag by the bed was opened.
A low clink and shift as the things inside were moved.
The hands explored, pushing aside drugs and ampules and syringes with no interest at all. Now they found something and held it up. In the first dim light there was a gleam of silver.
The shadowy thing left the room.
PART THREE
OZ THE GWEAT
AND TEWWIBLE
Jesus therefore, groaning inside of himself and full of trouble, came to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone had been raised against the mouth. “Roll away the stone,” Jesus said.
Martha said, “Lord, by this time he will have begun to rot. He has been dead four days.”.
And when he had prayed awhile, Jesus raised his voice and cried,
“Lazarus, come forth!” And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin.
Jesus said to them, “Loose him and let him go.”
—JOHN’S GOSPEL (paraphrase)
“I only just thought of it,” she said hysterically. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t you think of it?”
“Think of what?” he questioned.
“The other two wishes,” she replied rapidly. “We’ve only had one.
“Was that not enough?” he demanded fiercely.
“No,” she cried triumphantly: “we’ll have one more. Co down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.”
—w. w. JACOBS (“The Monkey’s Paw”)
58
Jud Crandall came awake with a sudden jerk, almost falling out of his chair. He had no idea how long he had slept; it could have been fifteen minutes or three hours. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five minutes of five. There was a feeling that everything in the room had been subtly shifted out of position, and there was a line of pain across his back from sleeping sitting up.
Oh you stupid old man, look what you gone and done!
But he knew better; in his heart, he knew better. It wasn’t just him.
He hadn’t simply fallen asleep on watch; he had been put to sleep.
That frightened him, but one thing frightened him more: what had awakened him? He was under the impression that there had been some sound, some— He held his breath, listening over the papery rustle of his heart.
Here was a sound—not the same one that had awakened him, but something. The faint creak of hinges.
Jud knew every sound in this house—which floorboards creaked, which stair levels squeaked, where along the gutters the wind was apt to hoot and sing when it was drunkenly high, as it had been last night. He knew this sound as well as any of those. The heavy front door, the one that communicated between his porch and the front hail, had just swung open. And with that information to go on, his mind was able to remember the sound that had awakened him. It had been the slow expansion of the spring on the screen door communicating between the porch and the front walk.
“Louis?” he called but with no real hope. That wasn’t Louis out there. Whatever was out there had been sent to punish an old man for his pride and vanity.
Footsteps moved slowly up the hail toward the living room.
“Louis?” he tried to call again, but only a faint croak actually emerged because now he could smell the thing which had come into his house here at the end of the night. It was a dirty, low smell—the smell of poisoned tidal flats.
Jud could make out bulking shapes in the gloom—Norma’s armoire, the Welsh dresser, the highboy—but no details. He tried to get to his feet on legs that had gone to water, his mind screaming that he needed more time, that he was too old to face this again without more time; Timmy Baterman had been bad enough, and Jud had been young then.
The swing door opened and let in shadows. One of the shadows was more substantial than the others.
Dear God, that stink.
Shuffling steps in the darkness.
“Gage?” Jud gained his feet at last. From one corner of his eye he saw the neat roll of cigarette ash in the Jim Beam ashtray. “Gage, is that y—”
A hideous mewling sound now arose, and for a moment all of Jud’s bones turned to white ice. It was not Louis’s son returned from the grave but some hideous monster.
No. It was neither.
It was Church, crouched in the hail doorway, making that sound.
The cat’s eyes flared like dirty lamps. Then his eyes moved in the other direction and fixed on the thing which had come in with the cat.
Jud began to back up, trying to catch at his thoughts, trying to hold on to his reason in the face of that smell. Oh, it was cold in here—
the thing had brought its chill with it.
Jud rocked unsteadily on his feet—it was the cat, twining around his legs, making him totter. It was purring. Jud kicked at it, driving it away. It bared its teeth at him and hissed.