The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

Russell felt that he would explode from the throbbing pressure inside his trembling body, and watching her fingers release the skirt, he screamed involuntarily.

Instantly the vision of the girl disappeared, cloaking the bedroom in darkness and the echo of his scream. Mitzi had jumped up, grabbing him.

“Russell, what’s the matter with you? You’re soaking wet! What happened?”

Still trembling, Russell continued to stare at the foot of the bed. “Bad dream,” he said weakly. “Bad dream… I’ll be okay.”

But he was not okay and was never okay again.

For the first few days after the vision of Tnen-Ku, Russell Southers had convinced himself that it had not actually happened, that he had witnessed nothing more than a singularly, realistic dream of some of his darker subconscious desires. He found that he could not rid his mind, however, of the disturbing image of the young girl untying her native skirt. He was thinking of her constantly as though becoming obsessed. While commuting to work, while at the office in Manhattan, and even at home with Mitzi watching TV, Russell was plagued by the vision of Tnen-Ku at the foot of his bed. When he concentrated on it, he could hear her voice calling out his name.

But that was only the beginning.

While watching the evening news after his daily martini, while Mitzi prepared dinner, Russell was shocked to see a bulletin teletype-overlay snake across the screen while the commentator spoke of a warehouse fire in Brooklyn:

TNEN-KU IS WATCHING YOU SECOND-PAPA RUSSELL

“Jesus Christ!” yelled Russell, sitting straight up, staring at the TV screen, waiting for the message to roll across the bottom of the picture again. Impossible! I didn’t see it! But you did see it… He felt a lump in his throat as he sat gripping the arms of his chair, waiting for a repeat of the words which did not come. He thought that he was starting to lose his sanity, and that scared him too. He was thinking about that little sexy brat too much, that was it. Got to stop thinking about it, that’s all.

Shaken, he watched the news commentator drone on about more local happenings, but he heard little of it. He toyed with the idea of telling Mitzi what had been happening but thought that she would think he was losing his marbles. Mitzi had always depended on him to be strong and pragmatic and rational; he shuddered to think of how she would react to him showing such obvious signs of mental weakness. No, Mitzi should not know anything. Russell was going to have to handle this himself.

But it did bother him that Mitzi was not sharing in his… his what? His delusions? His guilt? She was blithely rolling along, having totally forgotten the Spare the Child Program in turn for some new, fleeting, but always enjoyable project. And it was Mitzi who had gotten him into the whole mess in the first place. It wasn’t fair, thought Russell…

That night she returned to him and he sat up in bed, transfixed and captivated by her little brown body, wrapped in a shimmering cloak of light. She held something in her hands, which she slowly placed on the covers of his bed, then quickly disappeared.

Russell’s throat was so tight that he could not swallow, could not have uttered a sound if he had wanted to. His hands were trembling badly, keeping pace with the thumping of his heart and his ragged breath. His mind was slipping away from him, and he sat in the darkness, resolved to see a psychiatrist the next day. Take the afternoon off and see one of his golf partners, Dr. Venatoulis.

Then he noticed something on the covers of the bed, something where the image of the girl had placed her hands, and he felt the fear grip him again. Pushing back the sheets, Russell groped about on the softness of the quilt and felt something hard and solid. What the hell…?

It was a small, hand-carved box with a fitted top which slid open. Shaking it, something rattled inside, and he feared for a moment that the sound might awaken Mitzi. Quickly, Russell slipped out of bed and went into the bathroom, switching on the fluorescent lights around the mirror, and shutting the door. The box, when he opened it, contained scores of small white sticks, about half the size of kitchen matches, of uneven shapes. They seemed to be polished smooth and resembled ivory… or perhaps bone. The thought held him for an instant as Russell stared at the box, realizing fully and for the first time that the presence of the box was physical proof that he was not delusional, that he was not imagining things, and that, somehow, Tnen-Ku had actually been inside his bedroom, ten thousand miles away from her island home.

No! His mind screamed out the rejection of such a thought. And yet he stared at the evidence with eyes that were starting to water and sting from nervous tension.

The little white sticks were scattered across the top of the vanity formica, and as Russell watched them, they began to move. Vibrating ever so slightly at first, tingling as if touched by a slight breeze, the bones—and Russell knew now that they were indeed bones—moved like iron filings over a magnet to form a caricature of a skull.

Screaming involuntarily, he swept the pieces off the counter scattering them across the bathroom tile. It was getting too crazy, too unbelievable!

“Russell, is that you…!” Mitzi was knocking loudly at the bathroom door.

“No!… I mean, yes, it’s me! Who the hell do you think it would be!”

“Russell, are you all right? What’s the matter with you?” Mitzi tried the knob, but it was locked. “Russell?!”

“Oh Christ, what?! Yes, Mitzi, I’m all right. Go back to bed, will you please? I’ve got an upset stomach that’s all…”

“I thought I heard you scream, Russell, are you okay? Why is the door locked? You never lock the bathroom door, Russell.”

“I’ve got some bad gas pains, that’s all. I—I didn’t want to disturb you, honey. I’ll be out in a minute.”

He looked down to the floor and saw that the little bones had been moving while he spoke to his wife, gathering themselves together like a small herd of animals. They were arranging themselves into letters, like tiny runic symbols, which at first were indecipherable. But the more Russell stared at the configurations, he could read the message that was forming:

PUNISH WITH DEATH

He wanted to scream again, and he held the sound in his throat only by the greatest force of will. He could taste bile at the back of his mouth as he bent down and scooped up all the little white pieces, throwing them into the toilet and flushing it repeatedly, until all the bones were sucked into the small porcelain maelstrom.

Luckily, when he returned to bed, Mitzi was already asleep.

He could not bring himself to tell his wife about the delusions he had been suffering, and he was ashamed to call up a psychiatrist, especially someone he played golf with on occasion. Since no real, hard evidence, no proof actually existed, Russell had convinced himself that what had been happening to him was the product of an overworked mind, a heavily wracked, guilty conscience, and too much displaced imagination. And so he tried to ignore the messages which Tnen-Ku sent him: the warning headline on the New York Post which disappeared when he picked up the paper from the subway newsstand; the skull-like configuration of the coffee grounds in his cup at Nedick’s in Grand Central; the pair of dark eyes which seemed to be staring at him through the glass of the speedometer of his Monte Carlo; the familiar, half-whispering voice that he thought he could hear in the telephone in between the beeps of the touch-tone dial; the movie marquee he glanced at from the corner of his eye on 56th Street, which for a moment, until he had looked for a second time, had said: “Tnen-Ku Is Coming!”

Normally Russell Southers would have been greatly disturbed by the portents and omens jumping up unexpectedly from all parts of his everyday life. But he was becoming almost accustomed to the preternatural for one simple reason: he was losing his mind. Simply and totally. He just didn’t care anymore.