Lovers and Other Monsters Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Odd Couples Poul Anderson – Journeys End

  Jerome Bixby and Joe E. Dean – Share Alike

  C. H. Sherman – Teacher

  Christina Rossetti – A Nightmare

  Dan Burrello – The Songs of My Young

  Darrell Schweitzer – Minotauress

  Parke Godwin – A Matter of Taste

  Mildred Clingerman – The Wild Wood

  Worldly Love Arthur Conan Doyle – The Colonel’s Choice

  Julia L. Keefer – A Secret

  Frederick Laing – Gentleman on the Top Floor

  Maxim Gorky – Twenty-Six Men and a Girl

  William S. Gilbert – Ellen M’Jones Aberdeen

  Joan Andelman – A Sunday in December

  Jessica Amanda Salmonson – The Old Woman Who Dragged Her Husband’s Corpse

  Carole Buggé – Laura

  E. P. Conkle – Minnie Field

  H. G. Wells – The Pearl of Love

  Not of This World H. P. Lovecraft – The Strange High House in the Mist

  Paula Volsky – Let No Man Dream

  Morgan Llywelyn – Princess

  Edith Wharton – The Lady’s Maid’s Bell

  Toby Sanders – The Satyr

  Honoré de Balzac – Don Juan; or The Elixir of Long Life

  Justin Dowling – The Legs That Walked

  Saralee Terry – The Bridge to the Liver Pies

  Ray Russell – The Black Wench

  Guillaume Apollinaire – The Blue Eye

  Anne Rice – The Master of Rampling Gate

  Theodore Sturgeon – The Deadly Ratio

  Out of This World Amy Wasp-Wimberger – Will the Real Dennis Casper Please Stand Up?

  Fredric Brown – Expedition

  Dan Potter – Tripping the Light Fantastic

  Frederik Pohl – The Fiend

  Marvin Kaye – Happy Hour

  Richard L. Wexelblat – Horace, Nellie, and the Computer

  Isaac Asimov – I’m in Marsport Without Hilda

  J. Timothy Hunt – Moonflower

  Robert Sheckley – The Language of Love

  Fatal Attractions Edgar Allan Poe – Berenice

  Bret Harte – A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst

  Dashiell Hammett – In the Morgue

  Thomas D. Sadler – Himeros’s Daughter

  Josef Marais – A-round the Corner

  Mary Higgins Clark – Voices in the Coalbin

  Ray Bradbury – The Maiden

  Wallace West – A Thing of Beauty

  Traditional – The Douglas Tragedy

  W. C. Morrow – The Permanent Stiletto

  Joan Vander Putten – In the Shadows of My Fear

  Maurice Level – Blue Eyes

  Jack Moffitt – The Lady and the Tiger

  Selected Bibliography and Filmography

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  All in the Name of Love

  Berlioz, Byron, Coleridge, Liszt, Shelley wooed Wagner’s love-death motif, but long before the romantic movement, William Shakespeare, in The Life and Death of King John, penned literature’s most chilling invocation of the ultimate lover and monster—

  Death, death; O amiable lovely death!

  Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness!

  Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,

  Thou hate and terror to prosperity,

  And I will kiss thy detestable bones,

  And put my eyeballs in thy faulty brows,

  And ring these fingers with thy household worms,

  And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust.

  And be a carrion monster like thyself.

  Monstrous, indeed, are the many instances of perverse love throughout history, from Jacob’s indiscreetly expressed preference for one son over eleven envious others; Cleopatra’s coy empire-sacrificing stratagem at Actium; the fervent worship of Holy Writ that paved the way for the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition; and let us not omit that self-loving lust for power that tempts kings, presidents and dictators to lay waste to their own nations. One might rephrase an important sentiment of Bertrand Russell’s, and say that throughout history, the immoderate pursuit of love has wrought incalculable harm upon humanity’s mind and spirit.

  Lovers & Other Monsters dwells on some of the more bizarre aspects of Ye Tender Passion. Mere and there, the mix may be leavened with compassion and the miracle of true tenderness, but let the reader be warned, most of these selections are harrowing excursions into the darkest corners of the human heart, running the gamut from simple blood-lust to amorous betrayal, cosmic seduction, incest, morbid fetishism, murder, necro-cannibalism, suicide and even a species of vegetable rape.

  Romantic Foreplay

  Victor Hugo once wrote that no army can conquer an idea whose time has come, but for seventeen years, a veritable militia of editors fought the notion of Lovers & Other Monsters. Its title, obviously inspired by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna’s funny-sad play and 1970 hit movie, Lovers and Other Strangers, occurred to me in 1974 as I prepared two early paperback anthologies for publication.

  The idea of an anthology devoted to some of the grimmer aspects of love and sex struck me as an easy one to market, but publishers thought otherwise. A few of them maintained the demonstrably erroneous opinion that “anthologies don’t sell,” but most of them—including Playboy Press!—simply were afraid Lovers & Other Monsters would be too hot to handle.

  I put the idea—well, to bed—and went on to other projects, only briefly sending it around again years later when my friend, writer-editor Jessica Amanda Salmonson, suggested we collaborate on “Lovers,” but there were still no takers. (Thanks though, to Jessica, whose own contribution appears in this book and who introduced me to Guillaume Apollinaire’s “The Blue Eye,” which I have indeed included.)

  But at last I trial-ballooned the idea by dividing my second Doubleday Book and Music Club anthology, Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural into subsections, the second of which is labeled “Lovers and Other Monsters.” The ongoing success of that volume led my friends at the Doubleday clubs to agree to midwife this long a-borning anthology.

  As usual, I have restricted each author to a single entry and generally have preferred the less familiar to the oft anthologized. Both reprints and new work comprise the contents of this volume: forty-six tales, half-a-dozen poems, and one short dramatic composition.

  The theme-dictated selections in the opening and closing sections, “Odd Couples” and “Fatal Attractions,” include examples of various types of literature, but the three inner portions of Lovers & Other Monsters are respectively divided by genre. “Worldly Love” contains only “mainstream” compositions; “Not of This World” is pure fantasy, and “Out of This World” consists exclusively of science fiction.

  And now it is time to steel your heart and gird your loins as Cupid dips a quiverful of aphrodisiac arrows in acid.

  —Marvin Kaye

  —Manhattan, 1991

  Odd Couples

  To enlarge upon the old folk saying, strange bedfellows are made for many reasons other than politics, as the eight mismatched couples of this inaugural section learn. Bizarre circumstances draw them together—telepathy, shipwreck, fire, fantasy, music, greed, hunger and, weirdest of all, shopping for a Christmas tree.

  Several kinds of love—companionate, lustful, philanthropic, romantic, spiritual—are here apparent, but incompatibility runs high. Only one pair of these odd couples ends up satisfied with each other, and their bond is purely platonic.

  Poul Anderson

  Journeys End

  Do you yearn to find a kindred s
pirit to share your every thought and mood? Think carefully before wishing for it, lest, like Poul Anderson’s “esper” couple, you actually succeed. Author of such acclaimed science-fantasies as The High Crusade, Three Hearts and Three Lions and Queen of Air and Darkness, Mr. Anderson lives in San Francisco with his writer wife, Karen.

  —doctor hill & twinges in chest but must be all right maybe indigestion & dinner last night & wasn’t audrey giving me the glad eye & how the hell is a guy to know & maybe i can try and find out & what a fool i can look if she doesn’t—

  —goddam idiot & they shouldn’t let some people drive & oh all right so the examiner was pretty lenient with me i haven’t had a bad accident yet & christ blood all over my blood let’s face it i’m scared to drive but the buses are no damn good & straight up three paces & man in a green hat judas i ran that red light—

  In fifteen years a man got used to it, more or less. He could walk down the street and hold his own thoughts to himself while the surf of un-voiced voices was a nearly ignored mumble in his brain. Now and then, of course, you got something very bad, it stood up in your skull and shrieked at you.

  Norman Kane, who had come here because he was in love with a girl he had never seen, got to the corner of University and Shattuck just when the light turned against him. He paused, fetching out a cigaret with nicotine-yellowed fingers while traffic slithered in front of his eyes.

  It was an unfavorable time, 4:30 in the afternoon, homeward rush of nervous systems jangled with weariness and hating everything else on feet or wheels. Maybe he should have stayed in the bar down the street. It had been pleasantly cool and dim, the bartender’s mind an amiable cud-chewing somnolence, and he could have suppressed awareness of the woman.

  No, maybe not. When the city had scraped your nerves raw, they didn’t have much resistance to the slime in some heads.

  Odd, he reflected, how often the outwardly polite ones were the foully twisted inside. They wouldn’t dream of misbehaving in public, but just below the surface of consciousness... Better not think of it, better not remember. Berkeley was at least preferable to San Francisco or Oakland. The bigger the town, the more evil it seemed to hold, three centimeters under the frontal bone. New York was almost literally uninhabitable.

  There was a young fellow waiting beside Kane. A girl came down the sidewall, pretty, long yellow hair and a well-filled blouse. Kane focused idly on her: yes, she had an apartment of her own, which she had carefully picked for a tolerant superintendent. Lechery jumped in the young man’s nerves. His eyes followed the girl, Cobean-style[1], and she walked on... simple harmonic motion.

  Too bad. They could have enjoyed each other. Kane chuckled to himself. He had nothing against honest lust, anyhow not in his liberated conscious mind; he couldn’t do much about a degree of subconscious puritanism. Lord, you can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.

  —the trouble is, he thought, they hurt me. but i can’t tell them that, they’d rip me apart and dance on the pieces, the government /the military/ wouldn’t like a man to be alive who could read secrets but their fear-inspired anger would be like a baby’s tantrum beside the red blind amok of the common man (thoughtful husband considerate father good honest worker earnest patriot) whose inward sins were known, you can talk to a priest or a psychiatrist because it is only talk & he does not live your failings with you—

  The light changed and Kane started across. It was clear fall weather, not that this area had marked seasons, a cool sunny day with a small wind blowing up the street from the water. A few blocks ahead of him, the University campus was a splash of manicured green under brown hills.

  —flayed & burningburningburning moldering rotted flesh & the bones the white hard clean hones coming out gwtjklfmx—

  Kane stopped dead. Through the vertigo he felt how sweat was drenching into his shirt.

  And it was such an ordinary-looking man!

  “Hey, there, buster, wake up! Ya wanna get killed?”

  Kane took a sharp hold on himself and finished the walk across the street. There was a bench at the bus stop and he sat down till the trembling was over.

  Some thoughts were unendurable.

  He had a trick of recovery. He went back to Father Schliemann. The priest’s mind had been like a well, a deep well under sun-speckled trees, its surface brightened with a few gold-colored autumn leaves... but there was nothing Wand about the water, it had a sharp mineral tang, a smell of the living earth. He had often fled to Father Schliemann, in those days of puberty when the telepathic power had first wakened in him. He had found good minds since then, happy minds, but never one so serene, none with so much strength under the gentleness.

  “I don’t want you hanging around that papist, boy, do you understand?” It was his father, the lean implacable man who always wore a black tie. “Next thing you know, you’ll be worshipping graven images just like him.”

  “But they aren’t—”

  His ears could still ring with the cuff. “Go up to your room! I don’t want to see you till tomorrow morning. And you’ll have two more chapters of Deuteronomy memorized by then. Maybe that’ll teach you the true Christian faith,”

  Kane grinned wryly and lit another cigaret from the end of the previous one. He knew he smoked too much. And drank—but not heavily. Drunk, he was defenseless before the horrible tides of thinking.

  He had had to run away from home at the age of fourteen. The only other possibility was conflict ending with reform school. It had meant running away from Father Schliemann too, but how in hell’s red fires could a sensitive adolescent dwell in the same house as his father’s brain? Were the psychologists now admitting the possibility of a sadistic masochist? Kane knew the type existed.

  Give thanks for this much mercy, that the extreme telepathic range was only a few hundred yards. And a mind-reading boy was not altogether helpless; he could evade officialdom and the worst horrors of the underworld. He could find a decent elderly couple at the far end of the continent and talk himself into adoption.

  Kane shook himself and got up again. He threw the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with his heel. A thousand examples told him what obscure sexual symbolism was involved in that act, but what the deuce... it was also a practical thing. Guns are phallic too, but at times you need a gun.

  Weapons: he could not help wincing as he recalled dodging the draft in 1949. He’d traveled enough to know this country was worth defending. But it hadn’t been any trick at all to hoodwink a psychiatrist and get himself marked hopelessly psychoneurotic—which he would be after two years penned with frustrated men. There had been no choice, but he could not escape a sense of dishonor.

  —haven’t we all sinned /every one of us/ is there a single human creature on earth without his burden of shame?—

  A man was coming out of the drugstore beside him. Idly, Kane probed his mind. You could go quite deeply into anyone’s self if you cared to, in fact you couldn’t help doing so. It was impossible merely to scan verbalized thinking: the organism is too closely integrated. Memory is not a passive filing cabinet, but a continuous process beneath the level of consciousness; in a way, you are always reliving your entire past. And the more emotionally charged the recollection is, the more powerfully it radiates.

  The stranger’s name was—no matter. His personality was as much an unchangeable signature as his fingerprints. Kane had gotten into the habit of thinking of people as such-and-such a multi-dimensional symbolic topography; the name was an arbitrary gabble.

  The man was an assistant professor of English at the University. Age 42, married, three children, making payments on a house in Albany. Steady sober type, but convivial, popular with his colleagues, ready to help out most friends. He was thinking about tomorrow’s lectures, with overtones of a movie he wanted to see and an undercurrent of fear that he might have cancel after all, in spite of what the doctor said.

  B
elow, the list of his hidden crimes. As a boy: tormenting a cat, well-buried Oedipean hungers, masturbation, petty theft... the usual. Later: cheating an a few exams, that ludicrous fumbling attempt with a girl which came to nothing because he was too nervous, the time he crashed a cafeteria line and had been shoved away with a cold remark (and praises be, Jim who had seen that was now living in Chicago)... still later: wincing memories of a stomach uncontrollably rumbling at a formal dinner, that woman in his hotel room the night he got drunk at the convention, standing by and letting old Carver be fired because he didn’t have the courage to protest to the dean... now: youngest child a nasty whining little snotnose, but you can’t show anyone what you really think, reading Rosamond Marshall when alone in his office, disturbing young breasts in tight sweaters, the petty spite of academic politics, giving Simonson an undeserved good grade because the boy was so beautiful, disgraceful sweating panic when at night he considered how death would annihilate his ego—

  And what of it? This assistant professor was a good man, a kindly and honest man, his inwardness ought to be between him and the Recording Angel. Few of his thoughts had ever become deeds, or ever would. Let him bury them himself, let him be alone with them. Kane ceased focusing on him.

  The telepath had grown tolerant. He expected little of anyone nobody matched the mask, except possibly Father Schliemann and a few others... and those were human too, with human failings, the difference was that they knew peace. It was the emotional overtones of guilt which made Kane wince. God knew he himself was no better. Worse, maybe, but then his life had thrust him to it. If you had an ordinary human sex drive, for instance, but could not endure to cohabit with the thoughts of a woman, your life became one of fleeting encounters; there was no help for it, even if your austere boyhood training still protested.

  “Pardon me, got a match?”—lynn is dead/ i still cant understand it that i will never see her again & eventually you learn how to go on in a chopped-off fashion but what do you do in the meantime how do you get through the nights alone—