out, or was the writing another form of repudiation?
One was still left in his brain. It felt like a boil in his skull. Suddenly he knew that he wasn’t equal to writing it out, whatever else might happen. Had his imagination burned out at last? He would be content never to write another word. It occurred to him that the book he’d discussed with Hugo was just another form of rejection: knowing you were reading about real people reassured you they were other than yourself.
He slumped at his desk. He was a burden of flesh that felt encrusted with grit. Nothing moved except the festering nightmare in his head. Unless he got rid of it somehow, it felt as though it would never go away. He’d failed twice to intervene in reality, but need he fail again? If he succeeded, was it possible that might change things for good?
He was at the front door when the phone rang. Was it Susie? If she knew what was filling his head, she would never want to speak to him again. He left the phone ringing in the dark house and fled to his car.
The pain in his skull urged him through the dimming fields and villages to Birkenhead, where it seemed to abandon him. Not that it had faded—his mind felt like an abscessed tooth—but it was no longer able to guide him. Was something anxious to prevent him from reaching his goal?
The bare streets of warehouses and factories and terraces went on for miles, brick-red slabs pierced far too seldom by windows. At the peak hour the town center grew black with swarms of people, the Mersey Tunnel drew in endless sluggish segments of cars. He drove jerkily, staring at faces.
Eventually he left the car in Hamilton Square, overlooked by insurance offices caged by railings, and trudged toward the docks. Except for his footsteps, the streets were deserted. Perhaps the agony would be cured before he arrived wherever he was going. He was beyond caring what that implied.
It was dark now. At the ends of rows of houses whose doors opened onto cracked pavement he saw docked ships, glaring metal mansions. Beneath the iron mesh of swing bridges, a scum of neon light floated on the oily water. Sunken rails snagged his feet. In pubs on street corners he heard tribes of dockers, a sullen wordless roar that sounded like a warning. Out here the moan of a ship on the Irish Sea was the only voice he heard.
When at last he halted, he had no idea where he was. The pavement on which he was walking was eaten away by rubbly ground; he could smell collapsed buildings. A roofless house stood like a rotten tooth, lit by a single streetlamp harsh as lightning. Streets still led from the opposite pavement, and despite the ache—which had aborted nearly all his thoughts—he knew that the street directly opposite was where he must go.
There was silence. Everything was yet to happen. The lull seemed to give him a brief chance to think. Suppose he managed to prevent it? Repressing the ideas of the crimes only made them erupt in a worse form—how much worse might it be to repress the crimes themselves?
Nevertheless he stepped forward. Something had to cure him of his agony. He stayed on the treacherous pavement of the side street, for the roadway was skinless, a mass of bricks and mud. Houses pressed close to him, almost forcing him into the road. Where their doors and windows ought to be were patches of new brick. The far end of the street was impenetrably dark.
When he reached it, he saw why. A wall at least ten feet high was built against the last houses. Peering upward, he made out the glint of broken glass. He was closed in by the wall and the plugged houses, in the midst of desolation.
Without warning—quite irrelevantly, it seemed—he remembered something he’d read about years ago while researching a novel: the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement. They’d driven out the scapegoat, burdened with all the sins of the people, into the wilderness. Another goat had been sacrificed. The images chafed together in his head; he couldn’t grasp their meaning—and then he realized why there was so much room for them in his mind. The aching nightmare was fading.
At once he was unable to turn away from the wall, for he was atrociously afraid. He knew why this nightmare could not have been acted out without him. Along the bricked-up street he heard footsteps approaching.
When he risked a glance over his shoulder, he saw that there were two figures. Their faces were blacked out by the darkness, but the glints in their hands were sharp. He was trying to claw his way up the wall, though already his lungs were laboring. Everything was over—the sleepless nights, the poison in his brain, the nightmare of responsibility—but he knew that while he would soon not be able to scream, it would take him much longer to die.
PUMPKIN HEAD
by Al Sarrantonio
Born May 25, 1952, Al Sarrantonio is another of a growing conclave of horror writers who live in the Bronx. Lovecraft foresaw such things. For six years Sarrantonio edited science fiction, fantasy, horror and westerns for Doubleday, before leaving his position there this past year to become a full-time writer. His career is off to a quick start, with sales to
An orange and black afternoon.
Outside, under baring but still-robust trees, leaves tapped across sidewalks, a thousand fingernails drawn down a thousand dry blackboards.
Inside, a party beginning.
Ghouls loped up and down aisles between desks, shouting “Boo!” at one another. Crepe paper, crinkly and the colors of Halloween, crisscrossed over blackboards covered with mad and frightful doodlings in red and green chalk: snakes, rats, witches on broomsticks. Windowpanes were filled with cut-out black cats and ghosts with no eyes and giant
A fat jack-o’-lantern, flickering orange behind its mouth and eyes and giving off spicy fumes, glared down from Ms. Grinby’s desk.
Ms. Grinby, young, bright, and filled with enthusiasm, left the room to chase an errant goblin-child, and one blackboard witch was hastily labeled “Teacher.” Ms. Grinby, bearing her captive, returned, saw her caricature, and smiled. “All right, who did this?” she asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. She tried to look rueful. “Never mind; but I think you know I don’t
Laughter.
“Ah!” said Ms. Grinby, happy.
The party began.
Little bags were handed out, orange and white with freshly twisted tops and filled with orange and white candy corn.
Candy corn disappeared into pink little mouths.
There was much yelling, and the singing of Halloween songs with Ms. Grinby at the piano, and a game of pin the tail on the black cat. And then a ghost story, passed from child to child, one sentence each:
“It was a dark and rainy night—”
“—and… Peter had to come out of the storm—”
“—and he stopped at the only house on the road—”
“—and no one seemed to be home—”
“—because the house was empty and haunted—”
The story stopped dead at the last seat of the first row.
All eyes focused back on that corner.
The new child.
“Raylee,” asked Ms. Grinby gently, “aren’t you going to continue the story with us?”
