Dark Screams, Volume 8 Read online

  Dark Screams: Volume Eight is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Hydra Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2017 by Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar

  “Walpuski’s Typewriter” by Frank Darabont, copyright © 2005 by Frank Darabont

  “The Boy” by Bentley Little, copyright © 2017 by Bentley Little

  “Tumor” by Benjamin Percy, copyright © 2017 by Benjamin Percy

  “Twisted and Gnarled” by Billie Sue Mosiman, copyright © 2017 by Billie Sue Mosiman

  “The Palaver” by Kealan Patrick Burke, copyright © 2017 by Kealan Patrick Burke

  “India Blue” by Glen Hirshberg, copyright © 2017 by Glen Hirshberg

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Walpuski’s Typewriter” by Frank Darabont was originally published individually by Cemetery Dance Publications in 2005.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399181955

  Cover design: Elderlemon Design

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Walpuski’s Typewriter

  The Boy

  Tumor

  Twisted and Gnarled

  The Palaver

  India Blue

  About the Editors

  Walpuski’s Typewriter

  Frank Darabont

  For Steve King, and kindnesses too numerous to repay

  “Yes? May I help you?”

  Howard froze in the open doorway, letting the wind howl through the long, narrow shop like a wounded beast. The scabrous old man behind the counter was grinning—not smiling, but grinning and rubbing his hands together with predacious glee like John Carradine in a bad movie. He was positively ancient, a bald fossil in green tweed, sporting a pink road map of eczema on his scalp. He reminded Howard of a praying mantis.

  A rumble of thunder rolled down Hollywood Boulevard and rattled the windows in their frames. Howard stepped inside and shut the door against the gale. It wasn’t a dark and stormy night, not yet, but it was getting there in a big, ugly way.

  “May I help you?” the proprietor persisted.

  “I hope so.” Howard hefted the battered black typewriter case onto the counter and opened it to reveal the equally battered and black IBM Selectric II within. “I’m afraid my typewriter broke down this morning.”

  Broke down, hell. It had self-destructed with an oily belch of smoke and a prolonged, wheezing death rattle. The sound it made as it expired was that of an old dog farting. Howard saw no point in relating all the sorry details. “I’m not really sure what the trouble is.”

  “How tragic,” murmured the old man, and he leaned over the carcass of the machine with a look of overwhelming sadness. Then his grin returned, so sudden and unexpected that Howard took a nervous step back. “You’re a writer,” he croaked. It wasn’t a question so much as the accusation of a hooded Inquisitor.

  “Well, yes,” Howard admitted.

  “I spotted it right off, didn’t I? I am Cyril Pratt. And you are…?”

  “Howard. Howard Walpuski.”

  “Feel free to browse around, Mr. Walpuski. See what strikes your fancy. Will you be using the dearly departed”—he nodded at Howard’s IBM with the solicitous air of an undertaker—“as a trade-in?”

  Howard shrugged, noncommittal. The truth of the matter was he had the sum of his worldly wealth riding around in his wallet in the form of five wrinkled dollar bills and an MTD bus pass. He noticed the faded REPAIRS MADE ON CREDIT sign mounted on the wall and gestured vaguely in its direction. “Actually, I wondered if you might be able to—”

  “Affect repairs?” spat the old man. Again, an accusation: Zoo, you vant your typewriter repaired, schweinhunt? Und on credit, no doubt! Hmmm…you haff relatives in Argentina, perhaps? Howard felt his face redden, suddenly sure that Pratt knew he had only five bucks to his name, knew about the phone company threatening to disconnect him for nonpayment, knew about the nasty letters his bank was sending him with the words INSUFFICIENT FUNDS and OVERDRAWN screaming at him from every paragraph, knew…well, everything.

  “Yes,” Howard stammered. “Affect repairs.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we? We’ll just have to see if repairs are in order.”

  Pratt removed the carriage housing cover and poked his nose into the IBM, prodding around with his index finger, whistling and grunting softly under his breath.

  Howard turned away and pretended to browse the typewriters that lurked in the shadows on musty shelves and pedestal displays, hating himself for letting the old man make him feel ashamed and small, praying that the Selectric could be Mickey-Moused into functioning again. He had a deadline to meet, rent to pay.

  Howard glanced at the counter and was shocked to find the old man staring at him. He was suddenly sure Pratt had been watching him all along, studying him instead of the typewriter. He pictured himself lying on the counter in the IBM’s place, the top of his head removed like a carriage housing cover, Pratt peering inside his skull and poking his finger around, making those soft sounds under his breath.

  “Well?”

  “Yes,” said Pratt, “I think repairs are called for. Much-needed repairs.”

  Howard’s face lit up. For a brief moment he even found himself liking the old guy. “Great! How long do you think it’ll take?”

  “Major repairs,” continued Pratt, ignoring the question. “Beyond just the obvious. The typewriter is the least of it.”

  Howard blinked. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Answer me this. If you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly hitting the keys of an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, do you know what you’d get?”

  “You would eventually get all the great works of literature?”

  “YOU’D GET BULLSHIT, THAT’S WHAT YOU’D GET!” screamed Pratt, causing Howard to jump several feet in the air. “And do you know why you’d get bullshit?”

  “Why?” blurted Howard.

  “Because monkeys can’t write!” Pratt unfurled a long, gnarled finger and jabbed it in Howard’s direction. “You, Mr. Walpuski, are like one of those monkeys. You just keep hitting the keys, and all you keep producing is bullshit.”

  Howard’s mouth dropped open like a trapdoor. “Now wait just a damn minute…”

  “Yes, I will affect repairs. On credit, of course. You need pay only a small deposit now, say perhaps…five wrinkled dollar bills?”

  This stopped Howard cold. He had just been working himself into a good rage, too—had, in fact, promised himself to grab the nasty old codger by the frayed lapels and shake him till his head fell off—but this brought him up short like a bucket of water between the eyes.

  “Fuh-fuh-fuh-five…?”

  “Wrinkled dollar bills, yes. You can keep the bus pass. The remainder of my fee will be ten percent of all your earnings from the three novels.”

  “Three novels?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Pratt, waggling three fingers impatiently in front of Howard’s nose. “My work is guaranteed, you know. For three novels.”

  Before Howard could respond, Cyril Pratt tucked the big IBM effortlessly under his arm, case and all. He strode to a door near th
e back of the shop and threw it open, revealing rickety wooden steps leading down into darkness. He spared a glance over his shoulder. “Well? Come, come! I haven’t got all night, you know!”

  —

  The old man plunged into darkness.

  The candle was the only source of light, and it made the shadows move in sinister ways. Howard was reminded of the cellar of his boyhood home, where unspeakable drooling things had surely lain in wait for him on those occasions his unsympathetic father ordered him down to fetch some firewood; that he’d never been torn apart and eaten on those trips he could attribute only to some vague miracle.

  So what was he doing here now, crouched in this basement with a certified nutcase?

  The ceremonial robe Pratt wore was an absurd purple affair several sizes too large, a Vaudevillian conceit with stars and half-moon crescents embroidered in tacky gold thread, replete with pointed wizard’s hat. He was kneeling on the floor and muttering in a strange language, punctuating his phrases with cryptic, flailing arm gestures.

  Clearly, the old coot had shaken a few screws loose. Howard wondered with a dry stab of fear if he might actually be dangerous. He watched Pratt pull a musty velvet pouch from the inner folds of the robe and sprinkle powder on the floor, creating a large circle.

  Within the circle sat Walpuski’s typewriter, gleaming in the guttering candlelight like some ridiculous altar.

  Pratt positioned five candles at equal points around the circle and lit them, then drew chalk lines from candle to candle to enclose the IBM in a pentagram. He then lit a mound of incense in a clay dish and held it aloft, filling the basement with a pungent aroma that managed to smell like dead flowers and dead rats at the same time. Howard’s stomach lurched in protest. The old geezer was really on a roll now, muttering ever faster, ever louder, a speed rap of mumbo jumbo that might have been Latin. One word stood out among the rest and lodged itself in Howard’s mind, for it was repeated often.

  The word was Lucius.

  A name?

  Howard gasped as Pratt took a pinch of burning incense between his fingers and held it to his lips. He blew gently, making the incense glow like a tiny hot coal, but his fingers remained unsinged, or so it seemed in the gloom. Howard leaned closer to see, but Pratt chose that moment to flick the speck of burning incense at the circle of powder, which exploded like a magnesium flare. Intense, surprising light leapt up, searing through Howard’s eyes like a nuclear flash, and for a moment he thought he could hear his brain sizzling. He threw his arms over his face and fell on his ass, howling.

  Cyril Pratt was cackling.

  As soon as Howard’s eyes stopped pinwheeling in his skull, he peeked cautiously through his fingers. Pratt was still at it, howling and waving his arms like a maniac, rocking back and forth on his knees, his face a black-and-white relief map in the glare. That was bad enough, but the pentagram was something else again, something altogether god-awful. A bulge was growing in the floorboards next to Howard’s typewriter, pressing upward as if something beneath were doing its damnedest to break through. The wood began to smoke and char, the boards splinter and give way, and Howard just sat, eyes wide as saucers, hands clasped over his mouth, making a noteworthy effort not to throw up.

  The swelling subsided for a moment, and Howard whined a hysterical prayer that whatever was down there would decide to stay, but then the floor erupted and the thing exploded into view, screaming its head off. It was maybe two feet from snout to tail, but what it lacked in size it more than made up for in being pissed off. It got bounced around inside the magic circle as if caught in a tornado, leaving a dizzy contrail of flame in its wake that tattooed afterimages on the eyes like a Fourth of July rocket and afforded only strobing glimpses. A spine of spikes ridging a scaly back. A stubby segmented tail tipped with a fat scorpion stinger. An enormous mouth bristling with multiple rows of razor-sharp piranha teeth, lashing and snapping but unable to break through the invisible barrier of entrapment. Christ, the damn thing was all mouth and teeth.

  And it had cloven feet.

  Howard almost wet himself when he saw the cloven feet.

  Cyril Pratt was shouting something about enslavement, calling upon the Nameless Ones to consign the shrill little demon into the body of the typewriter.

  “NO!” screamed Howard. “NOT MY IBM!”

  Pratt ignored him, thundering his invocations.

  The whirlwind inside the pentagram increased in force, doubling and redoubling, and the little demon went ’round and ’round, faster and faster, until it was nothing less than a furious blur (Howard had a mental flash of the Tasmanian Devil buzz-sawing through solid rock in his mindless eagerness to chow down on Bugs Bunny), and then it was sucked abruptly into the carriage housing of the Selectric, gone in the blink of an eye with a pathetic squawk and a sickening THUMP!

  It was the sound a large mallard might make getting sucked into the engine of a 747.

  Then total silence. And darkness. The candles had gone out.

  Howard was frozen to the spot, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, still sitting on the floor, eyes staring, although there was nothing left to see, phantom pyrotechnics jitterbugging on his retinas, the knuckles of both fists crammed into his mouth.

  The silence was finally broken by Cyril Pratt, who said matter-of-factly, “Well, that’s it, then. You’re all squared away.” Then came the sound of a typewriter case being latched.

  Howard screamed.

  Stumbled to his feet.

  Ran.

  He charged headlong into a wall and almost knocked himself out cold but managed to remain standing. He groped around in the pitch-blackness, determined to find the goddamn stairs or die trying.

  Pratt’s voice, somewhere in the dark: “Mr. Walpuski, don’t forget your typewriter!”

  Howard gibbered something in reply.

  He found the stairs and took off, shagged ass, got it in gear, put it in overdrive, and flat-out feet-don’t-fail-me-now ran. He double-timed it up those stairs like his ass was on fire. He heard footsteps in pursuit.

  Just as he reached the door at the top of the stairs, the old man hit him with a flying tackle that carried them both out into the shop in a sprawling, tangled heap.

  Though his vision still danced with spots, Howard had no trouble seeing what Pratt held in his hands. How the wizened old fart could get up those stairs that fast lugging a heavy black IBM Selectric was something Howard would never figure out, but here it was. Pratt thrust the monster into his hands, muttering something about quality workmanship and customer satisfaction.

  Hysterical, Howard pushed away, lunged to his feet, and kept running. He held on to the typewriter for no other reason than that it didn’t occur to him to drop it. He got to the front door and crashed his shoulder into it, rattling it in its frame.

  It didn’t budge.

  Outside, an enormous flash of lightning bathed Hollywood Boulevard purple-white, illuminating the torrential rain lashing the street. It was fully dark now, and the storm had arrived with a vengeance. Howard fumbled frantically with the knob.

  Locked.

  He swung the typewriter back to hurl it through the glass but was stopped by an icy voice from behind: “Now, now, Mr. Walpuski. You wouldn’t think of leaving without paying, would you?”

  Howard turned, stiff as a marionette. The old man stood at the far end of the narrow shop, still by the basement stairs.

  “Remember the terms? You owe me five wrinkled dollar bills as down payment on my fee, yes?”

  Numb, Howard reached for his wallet and dug out the five bucks. He held the money in Pratt’s direction but could not bring himself to step forward with it. Pratt grinned his slippery best and the door suddenly blew open behind Howard on an incredible gust that almost knocked him off his feet. The wind tore the dollar bills from his grasp and took them sailing down the length of the dismal old shop, right into the old man’s outstretched hands.

  Lightning crashed.

  Howard Walpuski turned
and fled into the storm.

  —

  Riding the bus, Howard sat squeezed up against the window as far away from the typewriter as the seat would allow. He kept stealing glances at it, expecting the Hordes of Hell to come pouring out at any moment, but the machine was inscrutable. The damn thing just sat there.

  His mind raced furiously, trying to figure the best way to rid himself of the IBM. He briefly considered dragging it into the first church he saw and demanding that rites of exorcism be performed, but it occurred to him that they would in all probability, and with the purest of intent, have him committed.

  As the bus neared his stop, the answer came to him with the clarity and simplicity of all great sudden inspirations: he’d leave the vile thing on the bus and let the city’s transit system worry about it. Maybe they’d know what to do with a demon-possessed typewriter. He tugged on the pull-cord, signaling the driver to stop, then hurried down the aisle toward the exit. The bus lurched to the curb and Howard was greeted by a reassuring blast of cold air as the pneumatic doors whoofed open in front of him. Freedom.

  As he stepped down, he felt a tap on his shoulder and whirled around. The old black man who had been sitting a few rows back stood in the doorway. His eyes were sad and dignified, the color of nicotine.

  “Mister? You forgot your typewriter.”

  The spit in Howard’s mouth dried up and turned to sand. He looked down and saw the monster clutched in the man’s grip. He opened his mouth to scream CHRIST, NO, GET IT AWAY FROM ME, but instead just mumbled, “Oh, thanks,” and took the typewriter.

  The man gave a curt nod and went back to his seat. The doors hissed shut and the bus rumbled off. Howard found himself standing in the drizzly aftermath of the storm, watching the tail-lights recede into the night, still the proud owner of an IBM Selectric II with a resident demon.

  Fucking Samaritans.

  He started walking. Desperate now, his options running out, he decided to leave the goddamn thing for some homeless person to find. Maybe they could pawn it for a good hot meal. He set the typewriter down on the sidewalk and just kept going. Half a block later, he turned and glanced at it.