20th Century Ghosts (3 page)

"He what?"

"Oh God, yes. Right in the middle of the conversation he forces a hot needle through the upper part of his brother's ear. Blood like you wouldn't believe. When the fat guy got up, it looked like he had been shot in the side of the head. His head is pouring blood. It's like the end of
Carrie
, like he just took a bath in it, and he asks if he can get me another Coke."

This time they laughed together, and after, for a moment, a friendly silence passed between them.

"Also they were watching about Jonestown," Noonan said suddenly—blurted it, really.

"Hm?"

"On the TV. With the sound off. While we talked and Peter stuck holes in his brother. In a way that was really the thing, the final weird touch that made it all seem so absolutely unreal. It was footage of the bodies in French Guyana. After they drank the Kool-Aid. Streets littered with corpses, and all the birds, you know ... the birds picking at them." Noonan swallowed thickly. "I think it was a loop, because it seems like they watched the same footage more than once. They were watching like ... like in a trance."

Another silence passed between them. On Noonan's part, it seemed to be an uncomfortable one.
Research
, Carroll thought—with a certain measure of approval.

"Didn't you think it was a remarkable piece of American fiction?" Noonan asked.

"I did. I do."

"I don't know how he'll feel about getting in your collection, but speaking for myself, I'm delighted. I hope I haven't creeped you out about him."

Carroll smiled. "I don't creep easy."
 

Boyd in the grounds department wasn't sure where he was either. "He told me he had a brother with public works in Poughkeepsie. Either Poughkeepsie or Newburgh. He wanted to get in on that. Those town jobs are good money, and the best thing is, once you're in, they can't fire you, it doesn't matter if you're a homicidal maniac."

Mention of Poughkeepsie stirred Carroll's interest. There was a small fantasy convention running there at the end of the month—Dark Wonder-con, or Dark Dreaming-con, or something. Dark Masturbati-con. He had been invited to attend, but had been ignoring their letters, didn't bother with the little cons anymore, and besides, the timing was all wrong, coming just before his deadline.

He went to the World Fantasy Awards every year, though, and Camp NeCon, and a few of the other more interesting get-togethers. The conventions were one part of the job he had not come entirely to loathe. His friends were there. And also, a part of him still liked
the stuff
, and the memories the stuff sometimes kicked loose.

Such as one time, when he had come across a bookseller offering a first edition of
I Love Galesburg in the Springtime
. He had not seen or thought of
Galesburg
in years, but as he stood turning through its browned and brittle pages, with their glorious smell of dust and attics, a whole vertiginous flood of memory poured over him. He had read it when he was thirteen, and it had held him rapt for two weeks. He had climbed out of his bedroom window onto the roof to read; it was the only place he could go to get away from the sounds of his parents fighting. He remembered the sandpaper texture of the roof shingles, the rubbery smell of them baking in the sun, the distant razz of a lawnmower, and most of all, his own blissful sense of wonder as he read about Jack Finney's impossible Woodrow Wilson dime.

Carroll rang public works in Poughkeepsie, was transferred to Personnel.

"Kilrue? Arnold Kilrue? He got the ax six months ago," said a man with a thin and wheezy voice. "You know how hard it is to get fired from a town job? First person I let go in years. Lied about his criminal record."

"No, not Arnold Kilrue. Peter. Arnold is maybe his brother. Was he overweight, lot of tattoos?"

"Not at all. Thin. Wiry. Only one hand. His left hand got ate up by a baler, said he."

"Oh," Carroll said, thinking this still somehow sounded like one of Peter Kilrue's relations. "What kind of trouble was he in?"

"Violatin' his restraining order."

"Oh,"
Carroll said. "Marital dispute?" He had sympathy for men who had suffered at the hands of their wives' lawyers.

"Hell no," Personnel replied. "Try his own mother. How the fuck do you like that?"

"Do you know if he's related to Peter Kilrue, and how to get in touch with him?"

"I ain't his personal secretary, buddy. Are we all through talking?"

They were all through.
 

He tried information, started calling people named Kilrue in the greater Poughkeepsie area, but no one he spoke to would admit to knowing a Peter, and finally he gave up. Carroll cleaned his office in a fury, jamming papers into the trash basket without looking at them, picking up stacks of books in one place and slamming them down in another, out of ideas and out of patience.

In the late afternoon, he flung himself on the couch to think, and fell into a furious doze. Even dreaming he was angry, chasing a little boy who had stolen his car keys through an empty movie theater. The boy was black and white and flickered like a ghost, or a character in an old movie, and was having himself a hell of a time, shaking the keys in the air and laughing hysterically. Carroll lurched awake, feeling a touch of feverish heat in his temples, thinking,
Poughkeepsie
.

Peter Kilrue lived somewhere in that part of New York, and on Saturday he would be at the Dark FutureCon in Poughkeepsie, would not be able to resist such an event. Someone there would know him. Someone would point him out. All Carroll needed was to be there, and they would find each other.
 

He wasn't going to stay overnight—it was a four-hour drive, he could go and come back late—and by six A.M. he was doing 80 in the left-hand lane on 1-90. The sun rose behind him, filling his rearview mirror with blinding light. It felt good to squeeze the pedal to the floor, to feel the car rushing west, chasing the long thin line of its own shadow. Then he had the thought that his little girl belonged beside him, and his foot eased up on the pedal, his excitement for the road draining out of him.

Tracy loved the conventions, any kid would. They offered the spectacle of grown-ups making fools of themselves, dressed up as Pinhead or Elvira. And what child could resist the inevitable market, that great maze of tables and macabre exhibits to get lost in, a place where a kid could buy a rubber severed hand for a dollar. Tracy had once spent an hour playing pinball with Neil Gaiman at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, B.C. They still wrote each other.

It was just noon when he found the Mid-Hudson Civic Center and made his way in. The marketplace was packed into a concert hall, and the floor was densely crowded, the concrete walls echoing with laughter and the steady hollow roar of overlapping conversations. He hadn't let anyone know he was coming, but it didn't matter, one of the organizers found him anyway, a chubby woman with frizzy red hair, in a pinstripe suit-jacket with tails.

"I had no idea—" she said, and, "We didn't hear from you!" and, "Can I get you a drink?"

Then there was a rum-and-Coke in one hand, and a little knot of the curious around him, chattering about movies and writers and
Best New Horror
, and he wondered why he had ever thought of not coming. Someone was missing for the 1:30 panel on the state of short horror fiction, and wouldn't that be perfect—? Wouldn't it, he said.

He was led to a conference room, rows of folding chairs, a long table at one end with a pitcher of ice water on it. He took a seat behind it, with the rest of the panel: a teacher who had written a book about Poe, the editor of an online horror magazine, a local writer of fantasy-themed children's books. The redhead introduced them to the two dozen people or so who filed in, and then everyone at the table had a chance to make some opening remarks. Carroll was the last to speak.

First he said that every fictional world was a work of fantasy, and whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror. He had been drawn to horror fiction, he said, because it took the most basic elements of literature and pushed them to their extremes. All fiction was make-believe, which made fantasy more valid (and honest) than realism.

He said that most horror and fantasy was worse than awful: exhausted, creatively bankrupt imitations of what was shit to begin with. He said sometimes he went for months without coming across a single fresh idea, a single memorable character, a single striking sentence.

Then he told them it had never been any different. It was probably true of any endeavor—artistic or otherwise—that it took a lot of people creating a lot of bad work to produce even a few successes. Everyone was welcome to struggle, get it wrong, learn from their mistakes, try again. And always there were rubies in the sand. He talked about Clive Barker and Kelly Link and Stephen Gallagher and Peter Kilrue, told them about "Buttonboy." He said for himself, anyway, nothing beat the high of discovering something thrilling and fresh, he would always love it, the happy horrible shock of it. As he spoke, he realized it was true. When he was done talking, a few in the back row began clapping, and the sound spread outward, a ripple in a pool, and as it moved across the room, people began to stand.

He was sweating as he came out from behind the table to shake a few hands, after the panel discussion was over. He took off his glasses to wipe his shirttail across his face, and before he had put them back on, he had taken the hand of someone else, a thin, diminutive figure. As he settled his glasses on his nose, he found he was shaking hands with someone he was not entirely pleased to recognize, a slender man with a mouthful of crooked, nicotine-stained teeth, and a mustache so small and tidy it looked penciled on.

His name was Matthew Graham and he edited an odious horror fanzine titled
Rancid Fantasies
. Carroll had heard that Graham had been arrested for sexually abusing his underage stepdaughter, although apparently the case had never gone to court. He tried not to hold that against the writers Graham published, but had still never found anything in
Rancid Fantasies
even remotely worth reprinting in
Best New Horror
. Fiction about drug-addled morticians raping the corpses in their care, moronic hicks giving birth to shit-demons in outhouses located on ancient Indian burial grounds, work riddled with misspellings and grievous offenses to grammar.

"Isn't Peter Kilrue just something else?" Graham asked. "I published his first story. Didn't you read it? I sent you a copy, dear."

"Must've missed it," said Carroll. He had not bothered to look at
Rancid Fantasies
in over a year, although he had recently used an issue to line his catbox.

"You'd like him," Graham said, showing another flash of his few teeth. "He's one of us."

Carroll tried not to visibly shudder. "You've talked with him?"

"Talked with him? I had drinks with him over lunch. He was here this morning. You only just missed him." Graham opened his mouth in a broad grin. His breath stank. "If you want, I can tell you where he lives. He isn't far you know."
 

Over a brief late lunch, he read Peter Kilrue's first short story, in a copy of
Rancid Fantasies
that Matthew Graham was able to produce. It was titled "Piggies," and it was about an emotionally disturbed woman who gives birth to a litter of piglets. The pigs learn to talk, walk on their hind legs, and wear clothes, a la the swine in
Animal Farm
. At the end of the story, though, they revert to savagery, using their tusks to slash their mother to ribbons. As the story comes to a close, they are locked in mortal combat to see who will get to eat the tastiest pieces of her corpse.

It was a corrosive, angry piece, and while it was far and away the best thing
Rancid Fantasies
had ever published—written with care and psychological realism—Carroll didn't like it much. One passage, in which the piggies all fight to suckle at their mother's breasts, read like an unusually horrid and grotesque bit of pornography.

Matthew Graham had folded a blank piece of typing paper into the back of the magazine. On it he had drawn a crude map to Kilrue's house, twenty miles north of Poughkeepsie, in a little town called Piecliff. It was on Carroll's way home, up a scenic parkway, the Taconic, which would take him naturally back to 1-90. There was no phone number. Graham had mentioned that Kilrue was having money troubles, and the phone company had shut him off.

By the time Carroll was on the Taconic, it was already getting dark, gloom gathering beneath the great oaks and tall firs that crowded the side of the road. He seemed to be the only person on the parkway, which wound higher and higher into hills and wood. Sometimes, in the headlights, he saw families of deer standing at the edge of the road, their eyes pink in the darkness, watching him pass with a mixture of fear and alien curiosity.

Piecliff wasn't much: a strip mall, a church, a graveyard, a Texaco, a single blinking yellow light. Then he was through it and following a narrow state highway through piney woods. By then it was full night and cold enough so he needed to switch on the heat. He turned off onto Tarheel Road, and his Civic labored through a series of switchbacks, up a hill so steep the engine whined with effort. He closed his eyes for a moment, and almost missed a hairpin turn, had to yank at the wheel to keep from crashing through brush and plunging down the side of the slope.

A half mile later the asphalt turned to gravel and he trolled through the dark, tires raising a luminescent cloud of chalky dust. His headlights rose over a fat man in a bright orange knit cap, shoving a hand into a mailbox. On the side of the mailbox, letters printed on reflective decals spelled KIL U. Carroll slowed.

The fat man held up a hand to shield his eyes, peering at Carroll's car. Then he grinned, tipped his head in the direction of the house, in a
follow-me
gesture, as if Carroll were an expected visitor. He started up the driveway, and Carroll rolled along behind him. Hemlocks leaned over the narrow dirt track. Branches swatted at the windshield, raked at the sides of his Civic.