The Horror Megapack. Robert E. Howard

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      THE STORY OF MING-Y, by Lafcadio Hearn

      Sang the Poet Tching-Kou: “Surely the Peach-Flowers blossom over the tomb of Sië-Thao.”

      * * * *

      Do you ask me who she was—the beautiful Sië-Thao? For a thousand years and more the trees have been whispering above her bed of stone. And the syllables of her name come to the listener with the lisping of the leaves; with the quivering of many-fingered boughs; with the fluttering of lights and shadows; with the breath, sweet as a woman’s presence, of numberless savage flowers—Sië-Thao. But, saving the whispering of her name, what the trees say cannot be understood; and they alone remember the years of Sië-Thao. СКАЧАТЬ