Win all or lose all, there was only one thing to do. Letting go with his left hand, he curled his body around, and struck at the thing on his ankle.
For an instant he thought he would be dragged over, and then the moan was cut off, and his ankle was free from the crushing force.
He lay panting on the shelf, weak with strain, until he had the courage to crawl to the edge and look down. The cliff sparkled in the sun, light laughed from the blue waves of the Minch, the trail below was empty of all threat.
He looked at his ankle; the cloth of his trouserleg was twisted and driven into his boot, and when he pulled it away, he saw why. Something fell out of the cloth as he pulled the cuff up, and after he examined the curve of indentations in the leather, the yellow tooth was merely objective confirmation of the horror. If it had been an inch above the boottop and broken the skin, Percy was sure no antitetanus, antivenom, or antibiotic would have saved him.
He put on his gloves before he picked it up, wrapped and knotted it in a handkerchief folded double, and began to limp up the Pass of the Dead.
At first all Angus Donnan said when Percy told him he’d had a fall was, “Must have been a bad one,” but when he invited Percy into the bar even though it was late afternoon, and sat him down for a glass of his best malt, his glance at the climbing gear was knowing. “Now that’s medicinal, Mr. Percy, and even if it’s between licensed hours, I consider you a benighted traveler. Precisely where did you fall?”
Percy took a fiery gulp, but his shudder came before the whisky hit his throat.
“Was it perhaps some place you shouldn’t have climbed, some place you were warned against?”
So Percy told him the gist of it, watching Donnan’s face for signs of disbelief. But the innkeeper listened solemnly, not saying a word till he was done, and when Percy put on his gloves and unwrapped the tooth, looked at it with dour interest. “Aye. You’re a lucky man indeed. Would you mind telling one other man of this?”
“Who?”
“He’s called Daft Rabbie,” then seeing the look on Percy’s face “but he’s no daft at all. I’m thinking you’d like to change your room—the room next to ours is empty, and I know the knowledge would be a great comfort when you’re going to sleep.”
Percy was ready to say he wasn’t a child, but thought again, and gratefully accepted.
When the pub opened again at five, Percy went down and stayed. He wanted company, and the regulars had accepted him. He ate his supper there, but drank sparingly, still shaken enough not to let down his guard. Near closing time a giant of an old man came in, long gray hair hanging from under his knitted cap, but when he took it off Percy saw he was bald. “I heard you were asking after me,” he said to Donnan.
“Aye,” said Donnan, and beckoned him closer so he could speak in a low voice. Then he led him over to Percy’s table. “This is Rabbie MacLeod, Daft Rabbie.”
Percy could see why Angus had insisted he was misnamed; MacLeod’s look was like a hawk’s, though without the ferocious fixity. “As soon as we’re closed I want you to tell Rabbie what happened.”
Daft Rabbie and Percy drank the whiskies Percy ordered, talking desultorily till Donnan gave the ten-minute warning. Even on such short acquaintance, Percy felt comfortable enough with MacLeod to share silence with him.
Afterwards, by the one light left on in the bar, Percy told the old man his story while Angus cleaned up quietly, so as not to miss a word. This time he went into more detail, and Rabbie now and again moved his head assentingly. “Aye, that’s what I saw,” he said at the end, “that’s what I saw myself forty years ago when I looked down Bealach a’ du Mairbh. Except for the one in rags—that would be the Johnson.”
When Percy brought down the handkerchief in his gloved hands and unknotted it, Angus came over, and the three of them stared down at the relic. “Memento mori,” whispered Rabbie, “as Parson’s so fond of saying.”
“Not with the help of this,” said Percy. “It’s a souvenir I can do without. But what to do with it?”
“I’ll fetch the paraffin,” said Angus.
So it ended with the three of them out on the hillside in the night. Percy soaked and resoaked the handkerchief and the bare rock around it, and then touched a match to it. As they watched the flames shifting in the wind, Angus said, “Let’s not talk of this.”
“Indeed not,” said MacLeod. “I know better now, and there’s no reason for you to be Daft Angus and you to be Daft Harry.”
DEATHTRACKS
by Dennis Etchison
This past autumn marked a long overdue major event in the history of horror literature—the publication of The Dark Country, Dennis Etchison’s first collection of short fiction. This book is overdue by at least a decade; in 1971 what was to have been Etchison’s first collection of stories, entitled The Night of the Eye, was stillborn when its publisher went bankrupt on the eve of publication. Etchison has been selling short stories since 1961, and it’s unthinkable that fans have had to wait an additional ten years to read a collection of his work.
Born March 30, 1943 in Stockton, California, Etchison is finally receiving deserved recognition as the finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced. Etchison’s nightmares and fears are intensely personal, and his genius is to make us realize that we share them. He is that rarest of genre writers: an original visionary, whose horrors are those of loneliness, of an individual adrift in a society beyond his control, beyond his comprehension, in which only sheeplike acceptance and robotlike nonawareness permit an individual to survive until his allotted time. The reader in avid search of shambling slashers and tentacled monstrosities will only be baffled by Etchison’s fiction. A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Etchison is deeply interested in films and has written a number of screenplays from his own material and from works by Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and others. Recently Dennis Etchison has written the paperback novelizations for the horror films The Fog, Halloween II, Halloween III, and Videodrome (these last three under his pseudonym, “Jack Martin”).
ANNOUNCER: Hey, let’s go into this apartment and help this housewife take a shower!
ASSISTANT: Rad!
ANNOUNCER: Excuse me, ma’am!
HOUSEWIFE: Eeek!
ANNOUNCER: It’s okay, I’m the New Season Man!
HOUSEWIFE: You—you came right through my TV!
ANNOUNCER: That’s because there’s no stopping good news! Have you heard about New Season Body Creamer? It’s guaranteed better than your old-fashioned soap product, cleaner than water on the air! It’s—
ASSISTANT: Really, rad!
HOUSEWIFE: Why, you’re so right! Look at the way New Season’s foaming away my dead, unwanted dermal cells! My world has a whole new complexion! My figure has a glossy new paisley shine! The kind that men…
ANNOUNCER: And women!
HOUSEWIFE:… love to touch!
ANNOUNCER: Plus the kids’ll love it, too!
HOUSEWIFE: You bet they will! Wait till my husband gets up! Why, I’m going to spend the day spreading the good news all over our entire extended family! It’s—
ANNOUNCER: It’s a whole New Season!
HOUSEWIFE: A whole new reason! It’s—
ASSISTANT: Absolutely RAD-I-CAL!
The young man fingered the edges of the pages with great care, almost as if they were razor blades. Then he removed his fingertips from the clipboard and tapped them along the luminous crease in his pants, one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, stages of flexion about to become a silent drumroll of boredom. With his other hand he checked his watch, clicked his pen and smoothed the top sheet of the questionnaire, circling the paper in a cursive, impatient holding pattern.