For fear of the night, p.1
For Fear of the Night, page 1
FOR FEAR OF THE NIGHT
By Charles L. Grant
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2017 Kathryn Ptacek
Original publication by TOR Books – January, 1988
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
Photo by Jeff Schalles
Charles L. Grant taught English and history at the high school level before becoming a full-time writer in the ’70s. He served for many years as an officer in the Horror Writers Association and in Science Fiction Writers of America.
He was known for his “quiet horror” and for editing the award-winning Shadows anthologies. He received the British Fantasy Society’s Special Award in 1987 for life achievement; in 2000, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from HWA. Other awards include two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards for writing and editing.
Charlie died from a lengthy illness on September 15, 2006, just three days after his birthday. He lived in Newton, NJ, and was married to writer/editor Kathryn Ptacek for nearly twenty-five years.
Book List
Horror
Novels
Black Oak: Genesis
Black Oak: The Hush of Dark Wings
Black Oak: Winter Knight
Black Oak: Hunting Ground
Black Oak: When the Cold Wind Blows
Fire Mask
For Fear of the Night
In A Dark Dream
Jackals
Millennium Quartet #1: Symphony
Millennium Quartet #2: In the Mood
Millennium Quartet #3: Chariot
Millennium Quartet #4: Riders in the Sky
Night Songs
Raven
Something Stirs
Stunts
The Bloodwind
The Curse
The Grave
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead
The Last Call of Mourning
The Nestling
The Pet
The Sound Of Midnight
The Tea Party
The Universe of Horror Trilogy
The Soft Whisper of the Dead
The Dark Cry of the Moon
The Long Night of the Grave
Collections
Dialing the Wind
Nightmare Seasons
The Black Carousel
The Orchard
Science Fiction
A Quiet Night of Fear
Ascension
Legion
Ravens of the Moon
The Shadow of Alpha
As “Geoffrey Marsh”
The Fangs of the Hooded Demon
The King of Satan’s Eyes
The Patch of the Odin Soldier
The Tail of the Arabian, Knight
As “Lionel Fenn”
The Quest for the White Duck Trilogy
Blood River Down
Web of Defeat
Agnes Day
The Kent Montana Series
The Really Ugly Thing From Mars
The Reasonably Invisible Man
The Once and Future Thing
The Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire
668, the Neighbor of the Beast
The Diego Series
Once Upon a Time in the East
By The Time I Get To Nashville
Time, the Semi-Final Frontier
The Seven Spears of the W’dch’ck
As “Simon Lake”
The Midnight Place Series
Daughter of Darkness
Death Cycle
He Told Me To
Something’s Watching
As “Felicia Andrews”
Moonwitch
Mountainwitch
Riverrun
Riverwitch
Seacliffe
Silver Huntress
The Velvet Hart
As “Deborah Lewis”
Eve of the Hound
Kirkwood Fires
The Wind at Winter’s End
Voices Out of Time
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This one is for Jo, who makes long trips worth the taking,
And also for Steve,
who makes the leaving again hard;
Two good friends indeed,
Despite the ocean and the night.
For fear of the Night,
Men shy from the moon,
And Death seeks His throne.
FOR FEAR OF THE NIGHT
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
ONE
The August breeze cooled as the lights began to die, bulbs and twisted glass winking off in slow segments across the broad amusement pier that stretched its bed across the surf, drawing in the darkness from the dark of the ocean, banishing the day’s heat still clinging to the sand. The rides were first, empty and shadowed, and the sagging rainbow strings above the iron-pipe railing.
And last, always last, the Ferris wheel at the far end—outer rim, inner rim, and each side of the square that collared the rusted hub.
And when it was done, the dark nearly complete, neon no longer popping, generators no longer grinding, there was the silence above the hollow throat of the constant surf. No voices. No music. No laughter. No screams Only the ebbing tide that slapped against the pilings, only the grumbling breakers, and the foam that hissed over the sand in crescents a dull white, reaching, pawing, endlessly feeding.
And the moon on its way toward dawn, the stars over the Atlantic that made the night sky seem lower, and colder, the ocean a rolling mirror that distorted reflection.
The August breeze cooled, and behind the deserted boardwalk and the low buildings that faced it, there were hazed sputtering streetlights, lingering porch lights, a few lights in a few windows, all of them feeble without the boardwalk’s matching glitter, all of them melancholy in the quiet left behind when the tourists fell to bed. Traffic signals changed color, but there were no cars to obey them. Pennants fluttered. A balloon bounced along a gutter. From a hallway behind the mask of a warped screen door, a clock chimed the third hour, with no one to hear it.
The railing was clammy at the far end of the pier, and Devin leaned against it and looked down at the waves, saw them rising, falling, heard them split against the barnacled wood that held the pier above the sea. A shrug at nothing seen, and he looked out into the breeze that forced him to squint and saw nothing but black, the horizon gone until dawn; nothing but endless black, and silver fragments, and the occasional flare of startling white when a breaker met a sandbar.
A lift of a heavy eyebrow as if he’d expected something more, then a glance to his right, to the beach stretching away toward the first of the brown-boulder jetties that struggled against erosion. Waves in low tiers. The glint of moonlight off a shell turning slowly in the water.
And to his left, the narrower beach that was framed by this pier and the next, the two marking the range of the area’s amusements and food stands, the bars and the gift shops. Six blocks of sand at the foot of a boardwalk just high enough for a grown man to walk under without bending his head. All of it deserted now, even the beachcombers gone home or to their niches in alleys, in doorways, those stretches of shoreline where the police didn’t patrol.
The far pier was dark, and always had been, even in full sunlight, and it seemed darker now because only the weak waning moon dared give it shape: charred beams, scorched metal, the remnants of a ferocious blaze that had ravaged it seven days before—the result, the word was, of faulty wiring because someone had neglected to turn the electricity off.
The August breeze; a chill.
Even before the fire had swept it, blackened it, turned all its paint to soot and shattered the tinted glass of its roof, the place had been condemned. At the start of the summer season, the caution signs had gone up, the barriers across the arched entrance. Too many years of neglect, too many reports of accidents that shouldn’t have happened. Though the story had been in all the local papers, it was odd, in a way, because as far as he knew, there had been no one to dispute the findings of the inspectors. No proprietor had stepped forward, no lawyer, no landlord.
Condemned in an afternoon, and the entrance sealed with plywood.
He blinked then and held his breath when he thought he saw a sudden gout of flame somewhere in the ruins, realized it was only memory, and his fingers curled to tighten their grip on the railing.
He’d been down there, on the beach, beside the center lifeguard stand, when it had happened, right there at twilight, when the long crown of fire suddenly exploded through the domed roof that covered three-quarters of the structure, and the sunbathers and swimmers had started screaming, started running. Without thinking, he had grabbed his cameras and begun shooting, telephoto zoom- and wide-angle lens, kneeling, standing, climbing to the lifeguard’s seat and bracing himself with his knees, framing furious black clouds against the pastels of the sky, flames brilliant and bellowing and trapped within the smoke.
And when the film was gone, he’d rushed back to his house and made calls as he was printing, the sweat-slicked telephone cradled between cheek and trembling shoulder, and in the following day’s New York and Philadelphia newspapers, his photographs told the story.
A young woman had died, and no one knew why she’d been there.
A weekly news magazine took three of his shots, a Sunday supplement three more.
Her name was Julie Etler, and he had counted her a friend.
The breeze; puffing toward a late September wind.
Before he had learned of her death, he had told himself the disaster had been a long-awaited piece of admittedly perverse luck, the break he’d been praying for since he’d first moved to the shore nearly a decade ago. Getting his name known, and his work. Appreciation for more than simple mechanical skills. Doing something else besides endless birthdays and weddings and high school graduations. He had told himself the money was untainted, and unquestionably needed if he was going to survive come September. He had told himself he was a professional and needed to keep his distance.
But Julie had been found in the middle of the pier, barely enough of her for identification, and nothing burned around her.
There were no nightmares.
But there was memory.
And there was the blackened pier up the beach.
The breeze; it was cold.
Trapped thunder beneath his feet as the tide clawed at the sand.
A young woman not long escaped from her teens, dying as he took her picture, not realizing she was there until it hung in the darkroom, and he’d seen her, he’d seen her…
Oh Jesus, Graham, enough, he scolded with a quick shake of his head; and he pushed away from the railing to begin the process of going home—camera capped and slipped into its padded bag and the bag hung from his right shoulder, tripod collapsed and hung by its strap over his left, the futile adjustment of his jacket where the straps bunched the denim and made him feel lopsided. Then he stepped carefully over the thick cables that fed power to the rides and made his way down the center of the pier toward the boardwalk, listening to the rattle of a heavy double chain being drawn across the entrance, beneath the horseshoe of a sign flanked with grinning faces of giant clowns.
He yawned, shifted the heavy bag with a practiced jerk of his shoulder, and pushed the fingers of his left hand back through curly dark hair. Shifted the bag again, and blinked and squinted against the glare of two large naked bulbs dangling over the entrance. The chain was little more than a shadow stretching from the shadowhands of a man smaller than he but with considerably more bulk, his back hunched, his arms long, his short wiry hair perfectly white.
“You coming or what?” the man asked, his voice deep and soft. “I ain’t gonna wait on you all night, y’know.” With an apologetic grunt, Devin hurried through the gap and turned as the chain was slipped over a stout hook on one of the sign’s supports. “You really expect to keep someone out with that?”
Stump Harragan, in shirtsleeves and Bermuda shorts, yanked the chain to be sure it was fastened, then pulled wide plaid suspenders away from his chest, held them with a smile and let them snap back. “It took you all summer to ask me that, you know that?”
“I like to reserve judgment.”
Harragan stared at him, one eye permanently half-closed. “What’s that mean?”
“It means I just thought of it.”
The old man laughed, clapping long-fingered hands as black as the shadows building behind him on the pier.
“You are something else, boy, something else again.” He nodded at the camera bag. “Get anything tonight?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Depends.”
Harragan scratched the side of his neck. “Pretty girls out there, or are you blind? Suits like the stuff they wear, when I was a kid, they were banned. Sinful. Still are, but what the hell.”
“I’ve got all the bathing suits I need, thanks,” he said with a mock shudder. “Me and every other photographer in the known Western world.”
“Well, what about the tykes?”
“Cute kids building sand castles are boring. So are dogs playing ball and surfers wiping out.”
“Sure are fussy, aren’t you?”
“No.” He cocked a hip. “Well, maybe.”
“You get laid yet?”
Devin only stared.
“All them girls,” the old man said with exaggerated rue and the sweep of an arm toward the empty beach. “God, all summer long all them girls just lying out there, in the flesh, smelling like oil and looking like heaven, and… you,” and he pointed a grimy finger, “are not a monk. You wanna be a monk, go to the mountains. You come to the shore, you gotta meet a girl. That’s the way of it, boy. That’s the way God wants it.”
“You know that for a fact, huh?”
For an answer Harragan tugged a bandanna from his hip pocket, blew his nose, and belched loudly.
Devin laughed as he shook his head in friendly disgust. The old man, despite his weight and the size of his arms, seemed aged, frail, and perpetually cowed; only those who rented space on his pier knew that he owned it. The rest thought him nothing more than a half-witted janitor, a bent-over black man who silently cleaned the daily messes and emptied the trash cans and twice a day washed the boards with a tape-patched hose; they either ignored him or made cracks about him, and only those who caused trouble learned how young and strong he really was, and how short was his temper.
“Hey, boy, you gonna stand there all night, or you gonna buy me coffee?”
“Neither,” he said regretfully, a hand over his eyes. “I’ve been up since eight, remember? I’m going to drop if I don’t get some sleep.”
“Drop,” Harragan muttered. “You got thirty years on me, boy. You ain’t gonna drop.”
Maybe not, he thought as he waved and walked away, but right now he felt as if he wasn’t long for another day. His back ached, his eyes were filled with sand, and his clothes were stiff with the salt the sea spray left behind.
What he needed, if someone was inclined to hand him a miracle, was a solid two-day sleep, without the neighbors’ interruptions, without tourists shouting outside his window, without the dreams; what he knew he was going to get, however, as he’d been getting since June, was a few restless hours before the sun brought back the heat and made his air conditioner groan so loudly it woke him up.
The August breeze cooled as the lights began to die, and Tony hugged his knees tightly after drawing them to his chest. He wished he had worn his jeans tonight instead of just a bathing suit, wished again he’d brought a jacket instead of his wrestling team sweatshirt. But that was typical of the way things had gone today. This summer. This year. Apparently one step behind and around the corner from the rest of the stupid world, and having a hell of a time trying to find someone with a map.
