Читать книгу The Horror Megapack - Robert E. Howard - Страница 9

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO SHOUT ABOUT IT, by Darrell Schweitzer

When Caroline was born (so she was told later), she came out of the womb screaming, and the doctor allegedly remarked, “Good strong lungs. Maybe she’ll be an opera singer when she grows up.” But by the time she was old enough to run around the neighborhood and blast people’s eardrums to near deafness (or at least to the point of angrily slammed windows and doors) it was clear that she might have the volume, but there was no particular beauty in her voice.

“Christ, that kid is loud,” people said, and what very few friends she had in the early grades asked her, “Why do you make so much noise?”

That wasn’t to be the last time anyone asked her that, though her mother, by and large, gave up on the point, and when her father took her to the zoo or to the park or celebrated her birthday or otherwise paid attention to her (however infrequently) and managed to keep her quiet, he never ruined the affair by asking such questions.

But most of the time her father was “away” and her mother was preoccupied with something she said Caroline was too young to understand.

Father went away for good when Caroline was nine. One night she got up late because she had a sore throat, or a had had a bad dream, or both (details became confused as she was later forced to tell this story over and over) and for all she knew that it was really unlikely that she would get much comfort from either parent, she came downstairs, and knocked gently on the door to her father’s study (which was always locked, even when he was in it).

But she paused when she heard Father and Mother arguing in there, in tones that sounded as much fearful as angry.

Certainly no one heard her, and she stood alone in the darkened hall as the noise got worse and things crashed and there were awful, burning smells, then the impossible sound of a roaring wind, as loud as an express train. The whole house shook with it and something thumped hard, once, twice, three times against the door until it seemed about to burst off its hinges.

Then there was silence, and blood flowed like a wave under the door, eclipsing the light from within, splashing over Caroline’s slippers until her feet were soaked and the cuffs of her pajamas were glued to her ankles.

That was when Caroline started screaming. She ran out into the chilly November night, screaming, until windows came up and people shouted, “Shut up you crazy brat!”

She was still screaming when the police found her, hours later, minus her slippers and covered with mud, huddled among some trees in the park, almost hoarse now, so that the noise she made was more of a wheezing moan than a scream, and she tasted blood in her mouth.

After that she was wrapped up in warm blankets and treated kindly by lots of people who made stupid noises at her and talked in near baby-talk in a pathetic attempt to “get down to her level,” as someone (even Caroline, years later) might have put it. She was made to tell her story again and again, but still she screamed a lot, and therapists, in a hospital, gave her drugs to make her sleep, and told her when she woke up that everything had been a bad dream.

But no one believed her story. Her father was gone, yes, but there was no trace of blood, and nothing was broken in the house, and her mother, on visits, refused to explain further. She overheard the doctors and her mom and someone who might have been a lawyer talking about “desertion” once, but when everybody realized Caroline was listening, they shut the door to her room and went down the hall to the lounge.

What really must have been a dream, Caroline concluded, was the time her mother slipped into her room after visiting hours and sat down beside her bed in the dark. Mother was crying, which was amazing, and she whispered, “Honey, I want you to know that whatever happens, I still love you.”

Then Caroline turned and buried her face in her pillow and screamed as hard as she could, but no one heard her, and Mother was gone.

That was the greatest discovery in her life so far, that if she screamed into her pillow and no one heard her, she could pretend she was getting better and would be allowed to go home, and she could keep her secret from her mother, from the therapists, from everyone.

Her secret, which indeed she had kept, even through the relentless interrogations, was the real reason she made so much noise in the first place, why she screamed—into her pillow now, unheard by everyone else, which was actually much better.

It was because if she screamed loudly enough, it was like punching through a barrier into another world, and sounds came back to her, not echoes, but answers. She was conversing with something or someone very far away, and she had to shout to make herself heard. Many nights she would scream into her pillow for a while, then lie awake for hours, listening to the darkness make its reply, comforting her and soothing her, telling strange stories and promising the answers to things she didn’t understand.

If no one else listened to her, if no one else believed her, there was always this other, this answerer, who did.

Once she even asked the darkness, “What am I going to be when I grow up?” and a voice like a winter wind rattling dead leaves replied, “Anything you want. Anything at all.”

II

That must have been a dream about her mother saying she loved her, because when Caroline came back home, Mom had a new boyfriend, whose name was Jack. He pretended to be her uncle, but wasn’t. He didn’t like Caroline at all. Mom would not let “Uncle” Jack hurt her, and once she even grabbed his wrist when he raised a coke bottle to smack her, but otherwise Mom did everything Jack told her to do, as if she were his slave. The two of them were away a lot, or when they were home they were locked in the basement (which had been converted into a laboratory of some sort; Caroline was never allowed down there), and sometimes there were the awful smells and noises.

In summer, Caroline took to sleeping on the porch, or in the hammock in the back yard. This was encouraged. She wasn’t wanted in the house.

She always brought a pillow to scream into.

She pretty much raised herself. When she was twelve, she decided she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up, and in the times when Mom and Jack were somewhere else, she would spend long hours curled up in front of the TV watching videotapes of Fred Astaire and Ginjer Rogers movies, sometimes with the sound off, just watching the two graceful black and white figures whirling across the screen, while the darkness whispered to her in the voice she had known all her life.

Meanwhile, Jack started to bring strangers into the house, a lot of them, late at night. Sometimes they didn’t seem to arrive. They were merely there. They spoke with foreign accents or even in foreign languages, or chanted, or sang behind closed doors, and the smells were worse then. Caroline could tell that her mother didn’t like this. Mom looked hollow-eyed and even afraid, exhausted all the time, but she still wouldn’t say anything to Caroline, who knew that when this sort of stuff was happening, it was time to make herself scarce.

She spent hours in the local library, doing her homework, reading books about far places, or drawing leaping, flying, costumed figures in her notebooks. She had given up on the idea of being a dancer by the time she was thirteen, because she knew she’d never get lessons and it was probably already too late to begin anyway. She’d fallen in love with comic books and sometimes pretended she was a superhero with a secret identity. Not heroine. It never occurred to her that comic-book characters really had gender, or anything under those tights.

More seriously, she thought she’d like to draw X-Men when she grew up, even if, right now, her figures tended to be lumpy and misshapen. She knew she’d have to study hard.

But it was hard enough just to get by in school. She was out of the house so much that it was a struggle to keep up appearances. Not that she cared much about appearances the way the popular girls did, not that she bothered with makeup or painting her nails, but she did like to be clean like anybody else, and have fresh underwear. Yet if she spent all night at the library, or at the train station reading under the lights while pretending to be waiting for a late train, and then came home to find the house full of strange people and noises and odd flickering lights and had to sleep out in the yard, it showed. She hated going to school with the knees of her pants dirty or leaf bits in her hair. By the time she was in junior high, she figured out how to slip into the girl’s locker room at six o’clock in the morning and use the shower—until she got caught at it one day.

“My mom hasn’t been paying the water bills,” she said, but she didn’t think she was believed.

“Caroline,” the school counselor said, in a voice so drippingly sympathetic that it was all Caroline could do to not laugh in her face, “is everything all right at home?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”

That was the funny part, as she laughed and cried and screamed into her pillow—or sometimes, when she was alone in the park, into the sky and she didn’t give a damn who heard her—because things were not fine.

It was, again, almost November. She was sleeping out in the yard more often than not because she was afraid to go into the house, and she was likely to get frostbite in that damn hammock, even if she did wear a heavy coat and sleep under the same old, muddy blanket as always.

She lay there in the dark. Her face was cold. Her teeth chattered. She was angry. By now she was fourteen and had torn up her notebooks in a fit of rage, and wasn’t going to be an artist anymore when she grew up. No, she was going to become a scientist and learn a way to blow up the world and do it. No one cared about her. No one believed anything she said, and so, she decided, it didn’t matter what she said—because she was always a mess, because she was crazy and everyone knew it and she lived in a house with a yard that was overgrown with weeds and looked condemned or haunted or both. So it didn’t matter that time when one of the goth kids at school sidled up to her in the hallway and said, “Caroline, are you a witch? Wanna join our coven?”

“Yes,” she said, “I am a witch. I’ve sold my soul to the Devil!”

She said it with such conviction that the goth-kid seemed to just melt. He ran away, and Caroline laughed so hard and so long and so loudly that it made a scene, and everybody was staring, and she didn’t give a damn if they did.

But most of them didn’t call her a witch. Somebody saw her scrounging for pizza out of a dumpster and the next day it was all over school and kids greeted her with, “Eew, gross…” and said among themselves, but making sure she could hear them, “Caroline’s going to be a bag-lady when she grows up. Maybe she’s one already.”

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” she told the counselor again and again.

So she lay in the hammock in the late October dark, on a night when she was certain that Jack and dear old Mom, who supposedly loved her no matter what, had murdered someone. She had seen them dragging a girl not much older than herself, somebody she didn’t know, who didn’t seem to be wearing much clothing, down into the basement. She had even been able to sneak a glimpse of what was going on down there, just this once. The struggling girl must have made Mom and Uncle Jack careless.

The curtains were open, so Caroline, crouching on the back porch, could peer in through the back door and see down the basement steps. A crowd of people waited at the base of the stairs, their faces horribly pale, all of them dressed in black, their outstretched hands like claws—and then the basement door slammed shut and she knew, as she so often did, that it was time to make herself invisible.

* * * *

That night, after she’d screamed into her crumpled blanket for a long time and finally punched a hole through the darkness into that other place where the answers came from, the darkness began to speak to her, its voice more distinct than she had ever heard it before. The darkness touched her. Its touch was hard and warm, but somehow comforting, as if strong, invisible hands caressed her. That night she looked up from out of her hammock and saw that the whole house was ablaze with light. She watched as all of the windows of the house slid open simultaneously, silently. In complete silence her mother and Uncle Jack, now dressed in black robes, leaned out of the upstairs bedroom and floated into the air, ascending like smoke, while from all the other windows, even the barred ones in the basement window-wells, other people rose up, dozens of them, like an cloud of enormous bats, their black robes fluttering like wings as they spiraled up, up, blotting out the moon.

Meanwhile the darkness whispered in her ear, and something with hard, warm hands touched her and comforted her.

That night was Halloween, not that any trick-or-treaters ever came to Caroline’s house, or anyone came at this hour, as it was well past midnight, but she knew that on this night (and also in the spring, at the end of April) Mom and Jack and the rest had their big “do’s” and this must have been one of them, for which occasion they had murdered that girl, whoever she was.

The thing in the darkness took her by the hand, and helped her out of the hammock, then led her into a dance as the bat-things scattered from the face of the Moon. Pale light rippled over the back yard and she began to see what she was dancing with, a male figure, naked, utterly black, like a computer graphic, she thought, something that could morph into any shape; but now it was this gleaming, handsome man, and she danced with him as if she were Ginjer Rogers and he was Fred Astaire; and they whirled around and around with the music turned off, listening to the darkness, which spoke to her from very far away and told her that she was safe and everything would be fine and she could be anything, anything at all that she wanted to be when she grew up.

“Yeah, I’m a witch all right, just like my mom,” she said aloud, as if concluding that conversation with the goth-boy at school. “I’m pretty sure.”

But all that might have been a dream. She knew she would have to wait until dawn, when Mom and Jack and the rest would return from their distant sabbat. Then the friend she had called out of the darkness would confront them, and command them, and begin to feed.

Then she would be sure.

She shouted. She didn’t care who heard.