The Collection

'Good. Hop in the car.'

Alan killed the man in the living room while he was tak­ing off his coat. It was messy and ugly, and the blood spurted all over the tan carpet and the off-white couch, but it had to be done this way. The homeless man was bigger than he was and probably stronger, and he needed both the element of surprise and the partial incapacitation provided by the undressing in order to successfully carry out the mur­der.

The larger man stumbled, trying to get all the way out of his jacket and free his arms to defend himself, while Alan hacked at his neck with the hatchet.

It was a full ten minutes before he was lying still on the floor, and Alan filled up the measuring cup with his blood.

The macaroni and cheese tasted good.

He had a hard time going to sleep that night. Though his body was dog tired, his mind rebelled and refused to quiet down, keeping him awake until well after midnight.

When he finally did slip into sleep, he dreamed.

Again, it was the man in the doorway. But this time he could see the man's face, and he knew why the outline of the thick body was familiar, why the contours of the form were recognizable.

It was his father.

As always, his father walked through the door, ax in hand, blood still dripping from the dark blade. This time, however, Alan was not a child and his father not a middle-aged man. The surroundings were the same—the old posters on the wall, the aging toys—but he was his real age, and his father, walking slowly toward him, had the dried parchment skin of a corpse.

With a sibilant rustling of skin on sweater, a sharp crackle of bone, his father sat next to him on the bed. 'You've done a good job, boy,' he said. His voice was the same as Alan re­membered, yet different—at once whisperingly alien and comfortably familiar.

Had this ever happened?

He remembered flashes of his past, pieces of an unknown puzzle which he had never before stopped to organize or an­alyze. Had he and his father really stumbled across the bod­ies as they had both told the police? Or had it happened another way?

Had it happened this way?

The pressure of his father's body seated on the side of the bed, the sight of the dark bloody ax in his lap seemed famil­iar, and he knew the words that his father was speaking to him. He had heard them before.

The two of them said the final words in tandem: 'Let's get something to eat.'

Then he was awake and sweating. His father had killed both his mother and his sister. And he had known.

He had helped.

He stumbled out of bed. The apartment was dark, but he did not bother to turn on the lights. He felt his way along the wall, past furniture, to the kitchen, where, by the light of the gas flame, he poured water into the pot and started it boil­ing.

He poured in the salt and macaroni.

'Yes,' the face whispered. Its features looked almost three-dimensional in the darkness, lit from below by the flame. 'Yes.'

Alan stared dumbly.

'Blood,' the face said.

Alan thought for a moment, then pulled open the utensil drawer, taking out his sharpest knife.

The face smiled. 'Blood.'

He did not think he could go through with it, but it turned out to be easier than expected. He drew the blade across his wrist, pressing hard, pushing deep, and the blood flowed into the pot. It looked black in the night darkness.

He realized as he grew weaker, as the pain increased, as the foam face of his father grew red and smiled, that there would be no one left to eat the macaroni and cheese.

If he had not been so weak, he would have smiled him­self.

And I Am Here, Fighting with Ghosts

I've always liked this story. It was rejected by nearly every magazine on the planet before finally finding a home, so maybe my perception is skewed and it's re­ally not very good. But it has resonance for me be­cause it's essentially four of my dreams that I altered a bit and strung together with a loose narrative thread. I stole the title from a line in Ibsen's play A Doll's House.

***

I cannot always tell anymore. It used to be easy, there was a sharp distinction between the two. But the difference has become progressively less pronounced, the distinctions blurred, since Kathy left.

I have no visitors now. They, too, left with Kathy. And if I go into town I am avoided, whispered about, the butt of nervous jokes. Now children tell horror stories about me to frighten their little brothers.

And their brothers are frightened.

And so are they.

And so are their parents.

So I leave the grounds as little as possible. When I go to the store, I load up on groceries and then stay inside my lit­tle domain until my supplies run out and I must venture forth again.

When I do make the trek into town, I notice there are names carved into the gates outside of the driveway. Ob­scene names. I never see the culprits, of course. And if they ever see me coming down the wooded drive toward them, I'm sure they run like mad.

They do not know that their town is on the outskirts. They do not know that my house is on the border. They do not know that I am the only thing protecting them.

The last time I went for supplies, the town was no longer the town. It was the fair. But I didn't question it; it seemed perfectly natural. And I was not disoriented. I had intended to go into Mike's Market when I came to town, but after I reached the midway I knew that the funhouse was where I was supposed to go.

I heard the funhouse before I saw it. The laughter. Outra­geous, raw, uninhibited laughter. Continuous laughter. It came from a mechanical woman—a fifteen-foot Ap­palachian woman with dirty limbs and dirtier clothes and a horribly grinning gap-toothed mouth. She was hinged at the waist, and she robotically doubled over, up and down, up and down, with Appalachian guffaws.

The woman scared me. But I bought my ticket and rushed past her into the funhouse, into a black hole of a maze that twined and intertwined and wound around, ending in a grimy colorless room with no furniture and with win­dows which opened on painted scenes. The room was built on a forty-five-degree slant and the door entered in the bottom right corner. I had to fight the incline to reach the exit at the top left.

Through the fake windows I could still hear the Ap­palachian woman laughing.

The door at the top opened onto an alley. A real alley. And when I stepped through the door, the funhouse was gone. The door was now a wall.

The alley smelled like French food. It was narrow and dark and cobblestoned, and it retained the lingering odors of souffles and fondue. There was a dwarf hiding in one of the doorways, staring at me. There was something else in an­other doorway that I was afraid to acknowledge.

The tap on my shoulder made me jump.

It was the Appalachian woman, only she was no longer mechanical but human and my height and not laughing. With one hand, she pointed down a dark stairway that opened into the ground on the side of the alley. The other hand held a rolling pin. 'Turn off the light at the end of the hall,' she commanded.

I stepped down the stairs and it was cold. But that was not the only reason I shivered.

I turned around, intending to climb back up.

The woman was still pointing. I could see her silhouette against the overcast sky above the alley, framed by the stair­well entrance. 'Turn off the light at the end of the hall,' she repeated.

I started down.

The hallway was long, extraordinarily long. And dark. Doors opened off to each side, but somehow I knew that they did not lead anywhere. At the end of the hall were two rooms, one of which was lighted, one of which was