“Larry,” said Garland, “you look to me as if you’ve been around a lot.”
“Maybe my looks are deceptive,” he said, brown eyes upon her. “I—I’ve never been at a place like this before.”
Garland edged closer to him. “Tell me a little about yourself.”
“Oh, I’m just a freshman at Ellerby. Nothing very exciting about that.”
“But it must be.” She edged even closer. “Just being on campus must be exciting. Come on, tell me more.”
She put her hand on his. He took it in his warm clasp.
“Well, freshman year is rough.” He seemed to have difficulty talking. “There’s no hazing at Ellerby any more, not exactly, but you have to take a lot of stuff to get ready to be a sophomore.”
She pulled his young arm around her shoulder and began to count the fingers on his hand with delicate little taps. Across the room, Claudia was sitting on Guy’s lap, pulling his ear. They seemed to have come to good terms.
“This is really a great house,” Larry said slowly. “It’s—” He gulped. “It’s nice,” he said.
And right here it would come, Garland thought, something about how she was too lovely a girl to be in such a sordid business. To her relief, he didn’t say it. Again she must take the initiative. She pulled his hand to where it could envelop her soft breast and held it there.
“Like it?” she whispered.
He must know what was coming, but plainly he was drowned in all sorts of conflicting emotions. Uncle Whit hadn’t coached him, not nearly enough. He looked around the lamplit room with his eyes that were somehow plaintive. His beard seemed to droop.
“All right, Larry,” said Garland, “come with me.”
She got up and tugged his hand to make him get to his feet. He smiled. Of course, get him somewhere away from Claudia and Guy, there so cozy in the armchair. She picked up a lamp and led him into the hall.
“Wow,” he said. “That staircase. Spiral. Looks like something in a historical movie.”
“Does it?”
The staircase wound up into dark reaches. Gently Garland guided him and he seemed glad to be guided. She shepherded him past the torn spots in the carpeting, away from the shaky stretch of the balustrade, up to the hall above. She held up the lamp. It showed the faded roses on the carpet.
“Here,” she said, “this is my room.”
She opened the heavy door and pushed it inward. They stepped across the threshold together. She set the lamp on a table near the oriel window.
“I swear, Garland,” he muttered, “this is great. That old four-poster bed, the bench—they must be worth a lot. They’re old.”
“Older than I am,” she smiled at him.
“You’re not old, Garland. You’re beautiful.”
“So are you,” she told him truthfully.
They sat down on the bed. It had a cover of deep blue velvet, with dim gold tassels. Larry seemed overwhelmed.
“I can’t tell you how lovely all this is,” he stammered.
“Then don’t try. Put your feet up. That’s right. Now relax.”
He sank back. She pulled the loose shirt collar wider. “What a beautiful neck you have.”
“Oh,” he said, “it’s Guy who’s got the neck. All those exercises, those weights he lifts.”
“Let Claudia attend to Guy. You’re here with me.”
Outside the door, a soft rustling. Garland paid no attention. Larry was quiet now, his eyes closed. Garland bent to him, her tender fingers massaging his temples, his neck. He breathed rhythmically, as though he slept. Closer Garland bent to him, her hands on his neck. Her fingers crooked, their tips pressed.
The lamplight shone on her red lips. They parted. Her teeth showed long and sharp. She crooned to him. She stopped. Her mouth opened above his neck.
Outside, voices spoke, faint, inhuman.
Garland rose quickly and went to the door. She opened it a crack.
Shapes hung there, gaunt and in ragged clothes. “Well,” she whispered fiercely, “can’t you wait?”
“Let me in,” said one of them. Eyes gleamed palely. “Let me in,” said another. “Hungry, hungry—”
“Can’t you wait?” asked Garland again. “After I’m finished, you can have him. Have what’s left.”
She closed the door on their pleas, and hurried back to where Larry lay ready, motionless, dreaming, on the bed.
I HAE DREAM’D A DREARY DREAM
by John Alfred Taylor
One of the rewards as editor of a continuing anthology series is to watch the emergence of new talent. In reading each year’s crop of horror fiction, I find that my selections generally are stories either by established authors—more or less regular contributors to each year’s publications—or by newcomers and writers outside the field, whose presence in the horror genre is simply a guest appearance. Occasionally I come upon a new writer and sense that here is a name to watch. John Alfred Taylor is one such writer.
Taylor was born in Springfield, Missouri, on September 12, 1931 and grew up in one place or another across southern Missouri. He earned a B.A. from the University of Missouri and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, where he was in the Writer’s Workshop under Donald Justice and others. During his teaching career Taylor has lived in New Hampshire, Texas and New York, and he now teaches English at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. Taylor has had some 300 poems published in various little magazines over the years, and recently he has had stories in Galaxy, Galileo, Twilight Zone Magazine, Space & Time, Eerie Country, and The Argonaut. His story “When the Cat’s Away” (Twilight Zone Magazine, September 1981) just got crowded out of The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series X, and “I Hae Dream’d a Dreary Dream” in this year’s selection is one of four excellent (and quite dissimilar) stories from John Alfred Taylor in 1982. Remember his name.
Harold Percy took the rain as a matter of course. When he left the Black Bull that morning, Angus Donnan had warned of a possible storm, and he’d said he was prepared. Percy always tried to be.
Perhaps it was reaction against his inevitable nickname: he was not and never would be a “Hotspur.”
Under his mac he wore a fine wool shirt, his moleskin trousers had lasted him half a dozen vacations, inside his waterproof boots he wore two pair of socks, and in his rubberized duck musette bag were sandwiches, binoculars, notebook, clasp knife, a guidebook to the Isle of Skye, MacAlpine’s Gaelic Dictionary, and a small nickel-plated flask of what he supposed some of the natives still insisted on spelling uisgebeatha.
So when the mist turned to drizzle and the drizzle turned to rain, he buttoned his mac and pulled down the brim of his Irish tweed hat. He’d seen worse weather last year, following out Riastrick’s Green Tracks on the Pennines with Ordnance Survey maps.
At first the rain barely decreased visibility. It was supposed to be possible to see North Uist across the Minch on a clear day, but Percy wondered if the local definition of a clear day was synonymous with the Second Coming. Earlier the waves of the Minch had glittered, the mists and sun formed momentary castles from beams of gold and blocks of pearl, but now the rain had shut down. Only occasionally through its shifting could he see the leaden waves of the Minch below the western slope.
And then the real storm struck, a line squall roaring in like a black wall, and Percy had to clutch his hat before he lost it, while the wind came in from every side. It was blinding, paralyzing, like being thrown into a cold douche fully clothed in the dark, but he still retained enough sense of direction to find his way back to the outcropping he had just passed. Perhaps there was an overhang or some shelter from the wind.