Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities Read online

  Julie had often talked about starting a family…not if—when. When she talked of a son, she never mentioned a name; but whenever she spoke of having a daughter, she knew what she wanted to call her. A name she loved.

  Anna.

  Julie had always intended to call her little girl Anna.

  Morley felt weak. He closed his eyes. Something had invaded the wood of that tree, and the wood of that tree had invaded his house, his life. Was it Anna, the tiny little life that had been snuffed out along with her mother’s, or was it Julie, seeking vengeance in the name of the child who would never be born?

  How did it go? Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

  But what of a woman never allowed to be born?

  Morley shuddered. It didn’t matter who, really. Either way, measures had to be taken, and he knew exactly what he needed to do.

  Night had fallen by the time Morley got home. He entered his house cautiously, turning on lights in each room, hallway, and staircase before he proceeded. When he reached the living room he went directly to the fireplace, opened the flue, and lit the kindling beneath the stack of aged logs on the grate.

  He waited until he had a roaring fire, then went to the hall closet and removed a heavy winter blanket. With this tucked under his arm, Morley headed up the stairs—turning lights on as he went—to the floor where he’d locked the footstool in the spare bedroom.

  He hesitated outside the door, heart pounding, hands trembling. He tried the knob—still locked, thank God. He turned the key and opened the door just enough to snake his hand in and turn on the light. Then, taking a deep breath, he pushed the door open.

  The footstool lay on its side, exactly as he had left it.

  He felt a little silly now. What had he been afraid of? Had he been half expecting it to jump at him?

  But Morley was taking no chances. He threw the blanket over the stool, bundled it up, and carried it downstairs where he dumped it in front of the fireplace. Using the log tongs, he pulled the stool free and consigned it to the flames.

  He watched the curly maple burn.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected next. A scream? The legs of the stool writhing in pain? None of that happened. It simply lay there atop the other logs and…burned. At one point he leaned closer, trying for one last peek at the name hidden in the grain, but the heat drove him back before he could find it.

  Anna…his child’s name…he thought he should feel something, but he was empty of all emotions except relief. He never knew her…how could he feel anything for her? And as for Julie…

  “It’s too bad you had to die,” he whispered as the varnish on the wood bubbled and blackened. “But you left me no choice. And as for coming back and interfering with my life, that’s not going to happen. I’d all but forgotten about you—and now I’ll go about forgetting you again.”

  Morley watched the fabric and padding of the stool dissolve in a burst of flame, watched the wood of the seat and legs char and smoke and burn and crumble. He remained before the fire until every last splinter of the stool had been reduced to ash.

  Finally he rose and yawned. A long, hard day, but a fruitful one. He looked around. His home was his again, purged of a malign influence. But how to keep it from re-entering?

  Easy: Morley resolved never to buy another stick of furniture that wasn’t at least a hundred years old.

  With that settled, he headed upstairs for a well-deserved night’s rest. In his bedroom he pulled out the third drawer in his antique pine dresser. As he bent to retrieve a pair of pajamas, the top drawer slid open and slammed against his forehead.

  Clutching his head, Morley staggered back. His foot caught on the leg of a chair—a chair that shouldn’t have been there, hadn’t been there a moment ago—and he tumbled to the floor. He landed on his back, groaning with the pain of the impact. As he opened his eyes, he looked up and saw the antique mahogany wardrobe tilting away from the wall, leaning over him, falling!

  With a terrified cry he rolled out of the way. The heavy wardrobe landed with a floor-jarring crash just inches from his face. Morley started to struggle to his feet but froze when he saw the letters worked into the grain of the wardrobe’s flank: ANNA.

  With a hoarse cry he lunged away and rose to his hands and knees—just in time to see a two-foot splinter of wood stab through the oriental rug—exactly where he’d been only a heartbeat before. He clambered to his feet and ducked away as his dresser tumbled toward him. On its unfinished rear panel he saw the name ANNA wrapped around one of its knots.

  Caught in the ice-fisted grip of blind, screaming panic, Morley lurched toward the door, dodging wooden spears that slashed through the rug. Julie…Anna…or whoever or whatever it was had somehow seeped out of the footstool and infected the entire room. He had to get out!

  Ahead of him he saw the heavy oak door begin to swing shut. No! He couldn’t be trapped in here! He leaped forward and ducked through the door an instant before it slammed closed.

  Gasping, Morley sagged against the hallway wall. Close. Too close. He—

  Pain lanced into his ankle. He looked down and saw a foot-long splinter of floorboard piecing his flesh. And all up and down the hall the floorboards writhed and buckled, thrusting up jagged, quivering knife-sharp spikes.

  Morley ran, dodging and leaping down the hall as wooden spears stabbed his lower legs, ripping his clothes. Where to go? Downstairs—out! He couldn’t stay in the house—it was trying to kill him!

  He reached the stairs and kept going. He felt the wooden treads tilting under his feet, trying to send him tumbling. He grabbed the banister and it exploded into splinters at his touch, peppering him with a thousand wooden nails. He slammed against the stairwell wall but managed to keep his footing until the next to last step when he tripped and landed on the tiled floor of the front foyer.

  What now? his fear-crazed mind screamed. Would the tiles crack into ceramic daggers and cut him to shreds?

  But the foyer floor lay cool and inert beneath him.

  Of course, he thought, rising to his knees. It’s not wood. Whatever was in the footstool has managed to infiltrate the wood of the house, but has no power over anything else. As long as I stay on a tile or linoleum floor—

  Morley instinctively ducked at the sound of a loud crack! behind him, and felt something whiz past his head. When he looked up he saw one of the balusters from the staircase jutting from the wall, vibrating like an arrow in a bull’s-eye. At that instant the upper border of the wainscoting splintered from the wall and stabbed him in the belly—not a deep wound, but it drew blood.

  And then the entire foyer seemed to explode—the wainscoting panels shredding and flying at him, balusters zipping through the air, molding peeling from the ceiling and lancing at him.

  Morley dashed for the front door. Moving in a crouch, he reached the handle and pulled. He sobbed with joy when it swung open. He stumbled into the cool night air and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Battered, bruised, bleeding, he gripped the wrought iron railing—metal: cold, hard, wonderful, reliable metal—and slumped onto the granite slabs of his front steps where he sobbed and retched and thanked the stars that years ago he’d taken a contractor’s advice and replaced the original oak door with a steel model. For security reasons, the contractor had said. That decision had just saved his life.

  He’d lost his home. No place in that building was safe for him—even being this close to it could be dangerous. He fought to his feet and staggered across the glorious concrete of the sidewalk to lean against the magnificent steel of one of the parked cars. Safe.

  And then something bounced off his head and dropped to the sidewalk. Morley squinted in the darkness. An acorn. Dear God!

  He lurched away from the overhanging oak and didn’t stop moving until he was a good dozen feet from the tree.

  An accident? A coincidence? After all, it was October, the time of year when oaks began dropping acorns.
/>   But how could he be sure that even the trees hadn’t turned against him?

  He needed a safe place where he could rest and tend his wounds and clear his head and not spend every moment fearing for his life. A place with no wood, a place where he could think! Tomorrow, in the light of day, he could solve this problem, but until then…

  He knew the place. That newly restored hotel on West Thirty-fifth Street—the Deco. He’d been to an art show there last month and remembered how he’d loathed its decor—all gleaming steel and glass and chrome, so completely lacking in the warmth and richness of the wood that filled his home.

  What a laugh! Now it seemed like Mecca, like Paradise.

  The Deco wasn’t far. Giving the scattered trees a wide berth, Morley began walking.

  “Sir, you’re bleeding,” said the clerk at the reception desk. “Shall I call a doctor?”

  I know damn well I’m bleeding, Morley wanted to shout, but held his tongue. He was in a foul mood, but at least he wasn’t bleeding as much as before.

  “I’ve already seen a doctor,” he lied.

  “May I ask what happened?”

  This twerp of a desk clerk had a shaved head, a natty little mustache, and a pierced eyebrow that rose as he finished the question. His name tag read Wölf. Really.

  “Automobile accident.” Morley fumbled through his wallet. “My luggage is wrecked, but I still have this.” He slapped his Amex Platinum down on the black marble counter.

  The clerk wiggled his eyebrow stud and picked up the card.

  “I must stress one thing,” Morley said. “I want a room with no wood in it. None. Got that?”

  The stud dipped as the clerk frowned. “No wood…let me think…the only room that would fit that is the Presidential Suite. It was just refurbished in metal and glass. But the rate is—”

  “Never mind the rate. I want it.”

  As the clerk nodded and got to work, Morley did a slow turn and looked around. What a wonderful place. Steel, brass, chrome, marble, glass, ceramic. Lovely because this was the way the future was supposed to look when the here-and-now was the future…a future without wood.

  Lovely.

  He did not let the bellhop go—though Morley had no luggage, the man had escorted him to the eighth floor—until he had made a careful inspection. The clerk had been right: not a stick of wood in the entire suite.

  As soon as he was alone, Morley stripped and stepped into the shower. The water stung his wounds, but the warm flow eased his battered muscles and sluiced away the dried blood. He wrapped himself in the oversized terry cloth robe and headed straight for the bedroom.

  As he reached for the covers he paused, struck by the huge chrome headboard. At its center, rising above the spread wings that stretched to the edges of the king-size mattress, was the giant head of a bald eagle with a wickedly pointed beak. So lifelike, Morley could almost imagine a predatory gleam in its metallic eye.

  But no time for aesthetics tonight. He was exhausted. He craved the oblivion of sleep to escape the horrors of the day. Tomorrow, refreshed, clear-headed, he would tackle the problem head on, find a way to exorcise Julie or Anna from his home. But now, tonight…

  Morley pulled back the covers and collapsed onto the silk sheets. Hello, Morpheus, good-bye, Anna…

  Wölf spots the night manager crossing the lobby and motions him over.

  “Mr. Halpern, I just had a guest here who insisted on a room with no wood—absolutely no wood in it. I gave him the Presidential Suite. I believe that’s all metal and glass and such, right?”

  “It was until yesterday,” Halpern says. He’s fortyish and probably thinks the curly toupee makes him look thirtyish. It doesn’t. “The designer moved in a new headboard. Said he found it in a Massachusetts wood shop. Brand new and carved out of heavily grained maple. But he went and had it coated with so many layers of chrome paint it looks like solid steel. Said he couldn’t resist the eagle. Can’t say as I blame him—looks like it came straight off the Chrysler Building.”

  “Should I inform the guest?”

  “What? And disturb his sleep?” Halpern waves a dismissive hand and strolls away. “Let the man be. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  2000–2002

  Now I go three years without a short story.

  I have a good explanation for that. No, I didn’t return to the interactive field. Novels…novels and novellas were to blame.

  2000

  I guess you could call this my Cemetery Dance year.

  I started off writing the first two Sims novellas back to back, finished them, then sent them to Rich Chizmar. I wanted to keep rolling on the story but I was under contract to deliver the fifth Repairman Jack novel in the fall, so that took precedence. I decided to call it Hosts.

  The Conspiracies trade edition was published in February and Dark Delicacies, the famous Burbank bookstore, flew me out for a signing. Afterward I sat down with Craig Spector and Richard C. Matheson who convinced me to throw some of my backlist in with a new publisher named Stealth Press. It didn’t take much convincing: Pat Lobrutto was the editor and he wanted to put my old sf back into print. He’d been one of the editors with Doubleday back in the 1970s who’d first put it into print. (Amazing how the wheel turns.) What else did I have to hear?

  On the movie front, a guy named Scott Nimerfro was chosen to rewrite Repairman Jack. Since things seemed to be flowing smoothly, I okayed another option renewal. By June the Nimerfro rewrite was “not quite there yet.” In October, while out in L.A. for an All the Rage signing at Dark Delicacies, I had breakfast with producers Barry Rosenbush and Bill Borden who told me that Nimerfro was out, all scripts had been scrapped, and they were looking for a new writer. They eventually hired a guy named Trevor Sands. I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of a recurring scenario.

  In March I traveled to St. Augustine to see the opening of “Syzygy.” A modest production, to say the least, but an enthusiastic cast. And the audience screamed and laughed in all the right places.

  While talking to Rich Chizmar in June he asked me if I had anything lying around that he could publish. I said the only unpublished piece was a Christmas story I used to read to my daughters when they were young. I thought it was still on a disk somewhere. He wanted to see it so I sent him The Christmas Thingy. He called back the next day and said he wanted to publish it. In fact, he’d already lined up Alan Clark to do the art. How could I say no?

  Sims-1 (La Causa) was published in July and quickly sold out. I finished a draft of Hosts in September and started in on Sims-3.

  Here I ran into a bit of a problem. I hadn’t fully outlined the series (I’m one of those anal types who likes to travel with a map, but here I thought I’d indulge in a tightrope-without-a-safety-net approach), and now when I went back to the story I discovered things I wished I’d put in the first two novellas. But it was too late: La Causa was in print and the second, The Portero Method, was on its way.

  So I adjusted. I finished the third, Meerm, by mid-October and Zero by early December. The Portero Method had yet to appear.

  By now a number of the regulars on the repairmanjack.com forum had become so close and were in contact so often in virtual space that they decided to get together in person. They chose the last weekend in October in Baltimore for what they called the Grand Unification (after the story cross-reference graphic on the Web site). I shocked them by driving down and joining them for dinner on Saturday night. (How could I not? One fellow had come all the way from En gland.) Great fun, great people. They love each other like family and I feel like a proud father for having brought them together. The GU, as it’s called, has become an annual event, and each year it gets a little bigger.

  All the Rage was published in October, The Christmas Thingy in November, and the Stealth Press reprint of Healer in December.

  Two new novels, a novella, and a Christmas story published, plus my first novel resurrected. But no short story.

  2001

>   A nothing-special year.

  Beacon wanted to extend the film option on The Tomb for eighteen months this time. I gathered that Trevor Sands was not wowing anyone with his rewrite. It occurred to me to say no. I’d signed the original option when there had been only one Repairman Jack novel. Now there were four and a fifth due soon. My agent was getting calls from one studio or production company after another asking about film rights to Jack. I could auction them for a tidy piece of change. And if not for Barry Rosenbush, a true believer in putting Jack on the screen since the 1980s, I would have. Instead we renegotiated a few points and I signed.

  I finished the last Sims novella and handed in volumes three, four, and five to Cemetery Dance in a single package. Then I started Repairman Jack number 6. The working title was Spirits which I later changed to The Haunted Air.

  Sims-2 was being held up by delayed art but Rich assured me that all five parts would be published within the next twelve months.

  I’d written the Sims novellas with an eye toward collecting all five in one volume after CD published them. So I melded them, changing the order of some events for a smoother flow, and took the novelized version to Forge. They bought it but said it couldn’t be scheduled until 2003. This was fine with me because that would give Rich extra time to get all five novellas into print first.

  I’d optioned the Midnight Mass novella to a local fellow named Tony Mandile who managed to come up with half a million in financing. He began shooting his film.

  And that got me thinking about Midnight Mass again. I’d long intended to blend it with “Good Friday” and “The Lord’s Work” and expand them to a novel. Now seemed like the time to do it. Since a good portion of the novel had already been published elsewhere, I doubted a regular trade publisher would be interested. So on the way back from Baltimore one Sunday morning in October I had breakfast with Rich and offered it to him. He wanted it.