The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
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Out of print.
OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY
The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)
The Wildside Book of Fantasy
The Wildside Book of Science Fiction
Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
BOY BLUE, by Steve Rasnic Tem
Alice worked the cigarette vigorously with quick, nervous puffs. The floors and walls seemed to whimper.
“You know, it’s okay if you’re not sure you love me anymore.”
She stirred, focused her enormous blue eyes on him, scowled. “Don’t you have any respect for yourself?”
He looked past her. “Maybe…I don’t know anymore. I do know…I’d do anything for you.”
“Oh, Morgan, you make me feel guilty all the time!”
His heart wasn’t in the argument, but he reacted because he knew she wanted him to defend himself. He pulled out something from one of the many pop psychology books he had read; it was the only way he knew to program himself to argue. “I can’t make you feel guilty.”
He knew immediately he had made a mistake.
“That’s right, Morgan; you can’t make me feel.”
He could just stare at her now, the nimbus of yellow hair crowning the puffy, sleep-starved face, and listen for the noises. The noises were more persistent when they argued: the scrapings, tappings, wood creakings so like whimpers. He was getting another migraine.
She examined him slowly. “I’m sorry I said that. We did it again, didn’t we?”
“Yeah. We get weird every time we go to a party. Pretty nasty business tonight.”
The noises were getting louder. Alice looked around the walls, and stared at the cellar door. “I want you to go down there.”
“You know…it’s probably just a field mouse, or a gopher.”
He looked at the door. He had been avoiding it. He needed to know what was going on—if it was a mouse, perhaps a trapped cat, some small animal living in the crawl spaces. But he hadn’t checked it out.
“Morgan…please.”
His headache was getting worse. But he’d do anything for her.
Morgan stood silently on the first landing, wiping the sweat up off his forehead and into the thick black hair. Then he started down the long flight of steps. Like many other old handmade houses in this mountainous part of Virginia, this one had been built into the side of a hill. No ground had been leveled, and the floors were left staggered up and down the hill. The living room was six inches above the bedroom, the kitchen a good two feet below that. Alice insisted it was dangerous.
As he descended the steps, Morgan grabbed a flashlight off a slanting shelf attached to the railing, and played the light over the chaotic substructure of the house, where joints and floor braces came into each other at strange angles. Large crawlways and shelves were left between the separated walls. Down below he could see the mouth of a long tunnel off the cellar which led to a small coal outcropping mined out of the hill. The air was moist and cloying.
The noises seemed to have stopped. But Morgan could hear water dripping.
A large crevice behind the staircase was full of trash and fallen mud. Morgan’s great-uncle and the two families who had lived there after him had dumped their garbage there for an old underground stream, now diminished to a trickle, to dispose of. For most mountain dwellers the area streams had been their dishwasher, garbage collector, and sewer line. Someone had tried to bury the trash by hauling in dirt, but that had only made individual bits of trash stand out like jewels.
A sighing seemed to move through the house.
An old lace-up boot, four rusted cans, a piece of rotting tire, driftwood, a chair leg. Someone’s baby doll, minus one arm, an eye, and half the hair pulled out. Rising and falling water had left topographical map lines on the torso. He moved the doll, thought he heard a faint cry, went so far as to search for a voice box, but the head cavity was full of dirt, nothing more.
He’d had a doll as a child. “Little Boy Blue” it said on the tag. He’d begged his mother for months to buy it for him. His father had wanted to give him a gun for squirrel hunting, but he didn’t want to kill squirrels. He’d pestered her so much she’d finally given in.
“Now, Morgan, don’t get your clothes all dirty, now. And let little Louise play with Blue too!” His mother smiled at the neighbor lady across the fence. “Oh, he’s all right.”
Morgan overheard her and began whispering to Blue, away from little Louise. Louise began to cry.
When his father came home from the fields each night Morgan was talking to Blue on the faded purple living room rug. “Is that true, Blue? Do you really come from there? How do you know so much, Blue?”
His father towered over him, the face from the eyes down a darker color than the rest. His father walked to the back of the house and a door slammed.
“Will you take me there, Blue, will you?”
The wide black belt surprised him.
“I’ll beat the queer out of you, boy!”
Blue slipped from Morgan’s fingers as he frantically tried to protect his legs, shoulders, and head from the blows.
Morgan didn’t cry, not once. Even when Blue’s head was cracked. Blue just stared at him. Blue didn’t cry either. Morgan didn’t belong here.
Blue had been sent to take him back where he belonged.
A key chain protruded from a section of yellow clay near the stair railing. Two old Indian-head pennies. A ball of wire. Half a yellow dinner plate. Armour’s Baking Soda can. A round ring of amber flush with the dirt surface. He took a stick and dug around the ring, exposing one, then two, then a whole cache of amber beer bottles, the labels rotted off.
Drinking, fighting, and making babies had been about the only things to do in those hills. When his father drank, it upset his aim. More than once a belt aimed at Morgan’s rear or legs bruised a cheek bone or scarred an eye instead. Once in his frustration his father had thrown down the belt, picked up a brick and struck Morgan in the back of the neck.
The next morning Blue seemed to have a small crack in the back of his neck. Morgan knew Blue was angry inside, but the doll just closed his eyes.
But that night Morgan heard whispering from underneath his bed. Blue was gone from his pillow. When he crouched and stuck his head under the bed he could see Blue lying on the floor, mouth open, staring at him.
* * * *
He’d reached the bottom of the staircase, his head beginning to ache again. He could barely see anything around him, or the tunnel mouth a few feet away. Listening carefully, he could hear a scurrying as of tiny feet back toward the coal outcropping. The floorboards were creaking above him. Alice was pacing. Something scratched behind him. He whirled, but there was nothing.
He started down the tunnel to the coal outcropping, wishing he had another flashlight. There were more scratching noises ahead of him.
Someone had stacked large wooden crates and crumbling cardboard boxes along both sides of the tunnel. He recognized some of