Madding took her arm. Her skin was covered with gooseflesh. She drew away.
“I can’t go,” she said. “I have to find Greta.”
He scanned the grassy slopes with her, avoiding the gorge until there was nowhere left to look. It was blacker than he remembered. Misshapen bushes and stunted shrubs filled the canyon below, extending all the way down to the formal boundaries of the city. He remembered standing here only a few weeks ago, in exactly the same position. He had told himself then that his dog could not have gone over the edge, but now he saw that there was nowhere else to go.
The breeze became a wind in the canyon and the black liquid eye of a swimming pool winked at him from far down the hillside. Above, the sound of the music stopped abruptly.
“You don’t think she went down there, do you?” said Stacey. There was a catch in her voice. “The mountain lions…”
“They only come out at night.”
“But it is night!”
They heard a high, broken keening.
“Listen!” she said. “That’s Greta!”
“No, it’s not. Dogs don’t make that sound. It’s—” He stopped himself.
“What?”
“Coyotes.”
He regretted saying it.
Now, without the music, the shuffling of footsteps on the boards was clear and unmistakable. He glanced up. Shadows appeared over the edge of the deck as a line of heads gathered to look down. Ice cubes rattled and someone laughed. Then someone else made a shushing sound and the silhouetted heads bobbed silently, listening and watching.
Can they see us? he wondered.
Madding felt the presence of the Doberman behind him, at the top of the slope. How long would it take to close the distance, once the guards set it loose to clear the park? Surely they would call out a warning first. He waited for the voice, as the sounds ticked by on his watch.
“I have to go get her,” she said, starting for the gorge.
“No…”
“I can’t just leave her.”
“It’s not safe,” he said.
“But she’s down there, I know it! Greta!”
There was a giggling from the deck.
They can hear us, too, he thought. Every sound, every word magnified, like a Greek amphitheater. Or a Roman one.
Rover, Spot, Towser? No, Cubby. That’s what I was going to call you, if there had been time. I always liked the name. Cubby.
He made a decision.
“Stay here,” he said, pushing her aside.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going over.”
“You don’t have to. It’s my dog…”
“Mine, too.”
Maybe they’re both down there, he thought.
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“No.”
He stood there, thinking. It all comes down to this. There’s no way to avoid it. There never was.
“But you don’t know what’s there…!”
“Go,” he said to her, without turning around. “Get out of here while you can. There’s still time.”
Go home, he thought, wherever that is. You have a life ahead of you. It’s not too late, if you go right now, without looking back.
“Wait…!”
He disappeared over the edge.
A moment later there was a new sound, something more than the breaking of branches and the thrashing. It was powerful and deep, followed immediately by a high, mournful yipping. Then there was only silence, and the night.
From above the gorge, a series of quick, hard claps fell like rain.
It was the people on the deck.
They were applauding.
PERFECT DAYS
by Chet Williamson
Some years back at a World Fantasy Convention in Chicago, Chet Williamson and I were on a panel together. He described a particularly nasty story he was working on, I said I’d like to see it when published, the story was published, and here it is. Worth the wait.
When asked to say something nice, Williamson responded: “I was born in Lancaster, PA in 1948, have a background in theater and advertising before I got into real writing, have published in a bunch of magazines, including Playboy, The New Yorker, Esquire (the Japanese edition, but it sounds good), F&SF, and others, as well as lotsa anthologies. Six novels, only one of which is currently in print (Reign), but with two coming up this year, Second Chance from CD Publications, and Mordeheim from TSR. Also due out any day is a four-issue Aliens mini-series from Dark Horse called Music of the Spears.” Williamson presently resides in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania with his wife Laurie and teenaged son Colin.
It was the sheer perfection of the day that made Franklin Richards think about killing again. What there had been so far of winter was cold, harsh and biting. The first snowfall had come in early November, and the freezing temperatures had kept most of the four inches on the ground, though the roads and driveways and parking areas of the homes had long been bare. But this day was different. This day was glorious.
Richards had been a resident of the homes for six years now. It was the twin curse of mind and bowels that had decided him. His bowels had become more and more reluctant to obey his orders, and his mind had become less and less anxious to give them. He would awaken in the night soiled and not caring, lying in his bed until the discomfort and the smell finally drove him to his feet and into the bathroom to clean himself. He made the decision, no one else, as he had no children to make a pretense of caring for him. His decisions were his own, as always. He had never needed anyone to make them, indeed had never needed anyone at all, except for the times when he had killed. The women were the only others he had needed.
It had been easy to enter the homes. It was the national retirement community of a fraternal organization he had joined in the forties, after the war, when he had attained a small amount of respectability. He had gone to meetings from 1947 through 1949, but when the urge came again and he was forced to leave the town for weeks at a time to satisfy it, his attendance diminished, and finally lapsed, although he always continued to pay his national dues. Writing the check once a year gave him a feeling of belonging.
It also gave him a place to go when he was old and incontinent. He had merely signed over all his property and financial holdings (which were minimal), and moved into the “mid-care” building of the homes. He had been 78 then, and was 84 today, on this perfect day.
Richards stood on the balcony and looked down over the plaza, a half acre of cement pathways lined with old trees. Anderson was there, alone, hobbling along with his walker, snarling curses with his twisted mouth as he negotiated the aluminum frame around a patch of ice that had not yet fully melted. Richards glanced at one of the thermometers set here and there about the balcony railing, as if the residents could have no more fascinating pastime than to check the air temperature. Sixty-five. It was positively balmy on December 21st, a thing unheard of in their latitude.
Though Richards had never been a religious man, his required attendance at chapel (and, he thought, his inexorable approach to his own death) had brought out a spiritual side to him he had not known was there, and he had begun, as a result, to look for reasons in slight things, purposes and patterns in what he had before considered to be only a random cosmos. So now he wondered why the weather should have been so kind, what the gentle season augured.
Was it, he fancied, a boon to one of the residents who would die today or tonight? A final gift of grace before passing into the cold of the grave? Such an unexpected pleasure could not be mere happenstance. And then such thoughts passed, as he remembered other golden days, sunshine flooding down, making cold flesh warm, red blood gleam like rubies, metal blades flash blindingly when he licked them clean.