Lovers and Other Monsters Read online

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.” She kept staring at him, waiting. He looks very sad, she thought. “What...?” She didn’t finish, couldn’t find the question, but he answered it.

  “A heart attack, ma’am. Looks like a massive coronary. He was probably dead as soon as he hit the floor. There’s nothing we can do.”

  She was talking half to him, half to herself. “Just like that. Just like that. But he tried to say something to me—he was trying to talk.”

  “Perhaps, ma’am, but more likely it was the air leaving his throat.”

  Very carefully, she placed her pocketbook and coat over her chair, then stood for a moment, her shoulders drooping with a sudden loss of purpose. Slowly she walked over and knelt down beside Lou, searching his face.

  “So, Louie—that’s it. That’s it.” She was nodding her head up and down, up and down. She sat on the floor, back against the wall, cradling his head in her lap, and began to smooth his hair. “I’m sorry, Louie, I’m sorry I didn’t let you have the syrup.” Her tears began to fall on his face. “My poor Louie, I should have let you have some syrup.”

  Jessica Amanda Salmonson

  The Old Woman Who Dragged Her Husband’s Corpse

  Here is a grim little essay/speculation on love’s declining years by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, a Seattle book dealer who has written several impressive fantasy tales and novels and who edits Fantasy Macabre, one of Americas most sophisticated “little magazines.” “The Old Woman Who Dragged Her Husband’s Corpse” first appeared in Ms. Salmonson’s Ace Books collection, A Silver Thread of Madness.

  THE AUTHOR intrigued by things macabre (who is, after all, the only sort of author worthy of attention) will find it difficult to outdo the daily paper. Not long ago it was reported that a retired physician acquired permission from a lifelong friend (by then an elderly wino) to preserve his corpse “for use as a paperweight.” They had gotten an attorney to go over the written contract. After the friend’s death, the physician set forth by means unspecified to preserve the body as a memento of long friendship in as natural a condition as could be achieved.

  When the authorities learned of this, they wished to arrest the physician on charges of “abusing a corpse” but could not locate the evidence, the physician having hidden it until such time as he was assured it would not be confiscated.

  Such a grotesque, taken from life, is difficult to exceed in fiction, which is perhaps why many horror writers trump up an element of the supernatural, ensuring the illusion of imaginativeness.

  I never saw a follow-up on the case. I do not know if the physician was allowed to keep his enormous paperweight. I certainly hope he won out in the end. His sentimental feelings strike me as less shocking than what most doctors would do with a corpse, not to mention with living beings. If it is not abusive for medical students to tear a body liver from spleen, why should it be abusive to preserve one intact?

  If the physician did lose his cherished friend, we needn’t feel terribly sorry for him, as he seemed by nature a humorous gentleman and probably would not be long distraught. Another case from the newspaper, by contrast, struck me as poignant and pitiful: A man who had kept the skeleton of his wife, wedding ring upon its finger, beside himself in his bed for twenty years, took seriously ill and was discovered by an emergency aid unit. By the time his physical health was sufficiently restored that he was released from the hospital—and allowed to return to his pathetic apartment—his wife had been taken from him, never again to be touched, held, loved.

  How indeed does even the greatest mistress of horror one-up the reality of life’s simple madnesses?

  A case in yesterday’s paper interested me enormously and preys upon my mind. It regarded a pair of retired schoolteachers in their eighties, many years divorced from the realities of the modern world. They became paranoid and secretive. The husband died suddenly and in a week began to deteriorate. The old woman, too frail to move her husband’s decomposing body, and too frightened to seek help from neighbors, contrived a method of removing the stinking body from her trailer house.

  She tied a rope about his body and, though the paper doesn’t say so, I would suppose she apologized and explained the necessity of her plan. With tremendous effort she was able to drag the body from the bed, down the trailer’s narrow hallway and to the front door.

  Then she took the farther end of the rope out to the driveway and tied it to the rear bumper of an old Chevrolet.

  Seating herself behind the wheel, and being so very short that she could scarcely see out the windshield, she started the engine, and drove slowly out into the street.

  Then she drove faster.

  The corpse was dragged for several miles, losing some of its parts along the way. Then the poor woman accidentally drove off the side of the road into a ditch. Can you imagine the condition of her mind as she drove about seeking an appropriate place to dump her husband’s body? Watching that body hop and tumble along in her rearview mirror? Then, poor frail old gal, getting her car stuck in a ditch?

  She managed to free the wheels from the ditch and regain the highway, but was by then in such a state of mind... The final straw was when the rope broke and the body, such that remained of it, reposed on the centerline.

  Feeling helpless and forlorn, the old woman drove home.

  The corpse was struck at least twice by passing motorists before a highway patrolman pulled over to see what it was.

  By following the trail of the dragged corpse, the authorities were able to trace its origin to a trailer court.

  The woman was arrested, charged with “abusing a corpse,” that fine phrase. Her neighbors, pitying her, refused to discuss her with those reporters who made a national story of the tragedy. The official police statement was that the old woman had acted in “misguided desperation.”

  That’s as much as we are ever apt to know about the old woman who dragged her husband’s corpse. I hope she got off with a light sentence and was soon able to return to the routine of her daily existence. If by anyone’s reckoning she deserved punishment for her crime, I should think being able to live out her life much as she had been living it already would be punishment enough.

  My own mate asked me, “What if you knew, since the day we met, that when you died, I would tie your body to the bumper of our Volkswagen, and drag you about until your pieces were strewn across the countryside? Would you still love me?”

  In point of fact, it wouldn’t bother me a bit. I dread the doctor and the mortician, whose abuses are legal ones, who profit from our mortality, but whatever my mate decided to do with my remains would not be, by my estimation, abusive.

  That incident haunted me all night. I kept picturing the lonely, frightened old woman trying to get that stinking corpse out of her home, talking to her husband as a combination “thing” and “companion,” confused in one part of her mind, certain of her intent in another, struggling to succeed at her simple task without being harassed by outsiders....

  I think of her and I want to make a story of it.

  The story begins:

  Once upon a time there was a dead husband...

  And it ends:

  His ghost came to the trailer house later on, all in pieces, and sat in front of the television.

  Ah, well, perhaps I shouldn’t write such a story.

  Carole Buggé

  Laura

  In 1947, Ronald Colman won an Oscar for his performance in the film A Double Life, the tale of an actor whose personality succumbs to the role he is playing (Othello). Carole Buggé, who had never seen the Colman film, penned a remarkable feminist variation on the same theme, for the role that possesses “Laura” is the great Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsens controversial heroine, Hedda Gabler. Ms. Buggé is a director and performer with New York’s popular improvisational comedy troupe, Chicago City Limits. Her first published story, “Miracle in Chimayo” appeared in my 1991 anthology Haunted America.

  LAURA SAT DOWN on the new sofa and stared str
aight ahead, her eyes unfocused, the cordless phone still in her hand. She half-expected it to ring again, to find out that the message she had just heard was a mistake, that somehow her answering service had gotten it wrong. And yet she could still hear the voice of the boy at her service, as he read the message: “You have been cast as Hedda Gabler. Please call Jerry Hawkins to confirm.” The words played over and over in her head as she sat on the couch, phone dangling from her hand. She would call Jerry Hawkins to confirm, she would call her husband Tom to share the news, but right now she wanted to sit quietly and relish the news all by herself; it was hers, only hers, at this moment before it became the world’s, and she wanted to savor it in private.

  The house was very still, with only the faint hoarse chirp of the sparrows outside and the occasional swish of a passing car. Tom had been right: this was a quiet street, a cul-de-sac in this leafy suburban town, and more often than not the stray cars that passed by in the night were lost, trying vainly to find the highway that led to the city.

  Laura sometimes missed the noise and movement of her life in the city before she moved out here to this green patch of suburbia, but Tom liked it out here so much that she could not begrudge him his happiness. She had learned to garden and find pleasure in the mowing of grass and trimming of hedges. She got used to traveling everywhere by car instead of on foot, got used to the nearest deli being half a mile instead of half a block away, even got used to the nosy inquiries of the Epsteins, their neighbors to the left. Mrs. Epstein never got anything right anyway; seeing them pack the car on Friday for a trip, she would chirp, “Oh, where are you going?” The next morning as they piled the last few things into the trunk she would emerge in her housecoat and bedroom slippers saying, “Oh, back already?” Mrs. Epstein was a little daft, and more than a little inquisitive, but as Tom liked to remind Laura, she had no children and was lonely, with her husband at work in the city all day.

  “I understand how it is for her,” Laura would say, “but why doesn’t she do volunteer work or something—give her life some purpose?”

  Laura didn’t really care whether or not Mrs. Epstein found purpose in her life; she knew she was just venting her own frustration, her own deepest fear. When she decided on a life in the theatre, she knew what would haunt her most was not the rejections, not the endless auditions and interviews—which God knows were bad enough—but the boredom, the ennui of waiting for work, for her life to have a direction. Each time a play began it was the same thing: the happy, exciting smell of sawdust and floorboards at the first read-through, meeting the other actors during the coffee breaks, the quiet exhilaration of the rehearsal process as the production begins to take form, the glamour of opening night, of settling back into your dressing room with the scent of flowers, the telegrams taped to the mirror, cards and little mysteriously wrapped presents from the other cast members.

  But each performance led a little closer to the inevitable emptiness of closing night when, after the curtain goes down, the sound of hammers breaking up the set mixes with the thin, stale smell of dead bouquets, when telegrams are ripped off the mirrors along with the cards and good luck messages, costumes taken off for the last time and thrown in a heap to be laundered. At the end of these sad wrapping-up rituals Laura always felt the same draining stupor of inertia, and she would be depressed for several days; unable to leave the house, she would sit on the screened-in porch eating cheese sandwiches and reading detective novels.

  Now as she sat on the living room couch Laura did not think about all the closing nights she had been through; her mind was too full of the wonderful news: she was going to play Hedda Gabler! Hedda Gabler—one of the most intriguing, dynamic, puzzling characters ever written for the stage. Uta Hagen had played her, and Alla Nazimova, and now Laura was going to add her name to this list! She had studied the part for weeks, memorizing whole scenes for the final auditions, and although she had tried as always to erase desire from her mind during the audition process, she had burned to play the role with a fire which was more than just ego. She felt she understood Ibsen, that she knew who Hedda was and what part of herself she might call on to become Ibsen’s moody, manipulative heroine. She felt Hedda’s exasperation with everyone around her, with her slow, plodding husband and his well-meaning, interfering aunt. She understood Hedda’s restlessness and irritation with her life.

  Laura picked up the phone and looked for the button labeled “Tom—work.” This phone was one of Tom’s recent acquisitions, an expression of his love for technology. It could store up to twenty Frequently Called Numbers; all you had to do was push the button for the number you wanted and the phone automatically dialed it. Under “Tom—work” the console said “Tom—parents” and under that “Laura—Grandmother,” and so on. Tom had lovingly programmed it, and when he ran out of Frequently Called Numbers he filled in the rest with things like “Liquor Store” and “Library.”

  Laura pressed the button for Tom’s office at the college where he was a professor of history.

  “Hello?” Me answered on the first ring. Laura pictured him in his small, cluttered office, happily browsing through original texts, researching the History of the Druids in the British Isles.

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “Hi, Loloo.” This was the nickname Laura’s grandmother used to call her, which Tom had latched onto within the first few months of their courtship. Laura did not particularly like nicknames, but she found it hard to curb Tom’s boyish enthusiasms. “What’s new? Or are you just calling to express your yearning for me?”

  Laura thought of Toni’s freckled face, ruddy skin, short, thick fingers, and stocky, square body and tried to think if she had ever yearned for him. Their relationship had always been based on his passion for her; his energetic and cheerful pursuit of her had eventually transformed her apathy into amused tolerance and finally, acceptance. Tom was very attentive, and over the past year she had grown fond of him.

  “It’s not so bad to be with someone who loves you more than you love him,” her grandmother had said when she was trying to decide whether to marry Tom, “That way, the balance of power is in your favor.” There was no doubt that Laura liked having power over men, even if it was only Tom. Poor Tom, so full of romantic notions and hope that Laura would share them, when mostly she found them embarrassing.

  “Well, actually, there is some news. I just—I’ve just been asked to play Hedda Gabler.”

  “Oh, Laura—that’s wonderful!” Tom sounded sincerely happy, even though each show Laura did meant more of her evenings spent in the city at rehearsal; for Tom it meant dinners alone with only their Siamese cat for company. Tom was too into his role as Tolerant Husband to complain, though; sometimes Laura wished he would just whine a little bit about it, but he would always greet her late-night returns from rehearsal with a cheerful “Everything go okay? Everyone remember their lines, eh?” Tom was Canadian and often ended interrogative sentences with “eh,” in spite of his colleagues’ teasing. Laura refused to be irritated by this particular mannerism, but she did think it odd that a man who wrote books on medieval history couldn’t think of anything more intelligent to say than “Everyone remember their lines, eh?”

  “When do you start rehearsals?”

  “Right away—tomorrow.”

  “Not wasting any time, eh? Isn’t Hedda Gabler that Ibsen character who hates her life and shoots herself in the end?”

  “Right.” Tom, reducing things to their components.

  “Oh, listen, Laura, I have some news, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “Guess who’s going to be a guest lecturer in the department this term?”

  “Who?” But even as he said the name, she felt the answer in her stomach.

  “Ed Lowell.” Tom’s voice was buoyant, with no trace of malice, but then Tom had no idea of what emotions that name dredged up for Laura.

  “Oh, that’s interesting.” She forced her voice into a disinterested flatness which she hoped was believable.
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br />   “Yeah. How about that, eh? He’s back in town—I hear he was out West for a while.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah—New Mexico, I think. Well, I haven’t seen him but the word is he’s cleaned up his act.” Laura found Tom’s use of colloquial slang unbecoming in a history professor. “Anyway, I thought you might be interested. We could—have him over some time if you’d like.”

  “Whatever. If you want.”

  Laura was sure her forced casualness sounded horribly phony, but Tom went on placidly.

  “Okay, well, think about it, eh? Anyway, I have to teach a class now, so congrats and I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Okay. Goodbye.”

  Laura hung up the phone and felt a scream forming in her throat. She tossed aside the couch cushion which she had been grasping and walked briskly through the living room and out the front door, into the yard. It was a heavy summer day in July, the air thick with humidity. The trees along their street—maple, ash, oak—drooped with the burden of their leaves, creating a dark green canopy over the sidewalk. Laura turned left and began to walk toward the park. The hot, hazy air seemed to press on her flesh, as though she were walking against a wind. It was perfectly still, though, one of those silent, steady days in the depth of summer before the cicadas come to signal the advent of fall.

  Ed Lowell. Ed Lowell, Ed Lowell. Her feet seemed to click out the rhythm of his name as she walked. She felt irritated with Tom. Was this his attempt to show how truly liberated and unjealous he was, or did he really have no idea how obsessed about Ed Lowell she had been? No, probably Tom thought her feelings for Ed were in the past; after all, she had dumped him, hadn’t she? And Tom had married her, and that was that. Tom was a man who appreciated finalities, who liked closure of topics. The History of the Druids in the British Isles. Long gone and never to return, the Druids could be examined with detachment and equanimity. And Ed Lowell—well, she thought he was gone too—but here he was again, creeping up on them in his shroud, reviving questions that should never be asked.