Dark Screams, Volume 8 Read online

  Although his face was still the color of a beet, Hawkes considered his wife’s words. Then, after a moment of drumming his fingers on the table, as if he’d been waiting for the wisdom to infiltrate the battlefield of his temper via Morse code, he nodded. “So you’re saying we let him be, give him his shop, and let him hang himself with his own inability to contain his baser urges.”

  Gladys blinked slowly. “No, dear, that’s not quite what—”

  “Perfect. You, my dear, are a genius.” He rose, went to his wife, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. Her attempts to clarify her meaning fell on deaf ears as a tide of renewed determination swept him out the door.

  —

  Hawkes decided that although Gladys’s suggestion was indeed a good one, he couldn’t afford to rely simply on the man’s inability to be indiscreet. For one, it might be months, even years, before the man made a public misstep, and Hawkes was unwilling to wait that long to be rid of him. He also had to consider the possibility, however unwillingly, that he had misjudged The Barber’s disposition and that he was simply effeminate and nothing more. An overprotective mother and an absentee father might create a similar creature without it influencing at all the man’s choice of sexual partners in future years. Ultimately, though, whatever he might prove to be when all was said and done, Hawkes decided it didn’t matter. The Barber had to go, and sooner rather than later. He could worry about justifying his actions later, should anyone require it of him. He didn’t think this likely, but one never knew. If asked, he would use his suspicions about the man’s sexual proclivities, and that would more than sate whoever in this town of conservative values and fear of change had put the question to him. What he wouldn’t tell them, what he dared not speak aloud, was the truth at the core of his distaste for The Barber, which was quite simply that he was afraid of him.

  Because a lot more than just his manner seemed off.

  Hawkes was unaccustomed to people just showing up in his town. Usually, it was the other way around. When the mine died, the population began to dwindle at a depressing rate, and nobody came here seeking a new life, because there was little life to be had. He hadn’t seen a stranger in two years outside of the occasional public official or traveling salesman. The Barber’s sudden unannounced arrival, then, had surprised him, but as he approached the man, the tunic giving away his trade, he suspected one of his constituents had simply sent a message to some friend or relative abroad letting them know of an opening for a barber in Milestone. Hawkes might even have appreciated the filling of the vacancy.

  Until he met the man and was left not only offended but unnerved.

  It was, he decided after countless replays of the meeting, the man’s skin that had bothered him the most. It had been smooth, completely hairless, his arms like giant grubs that had parasitically attached themselves to the man’s shoulders, his face like a dry-pressed pillowcase into which someone had planted two lumps of anthracite. The man appeared to have seen little sun. The effect of the red lips and slight dusting of rouge on his cheeks seemed to Hawkes a kind of mockery, like one of those masks Oriental women wore in their theaters. And if the man’s face was a mask, one could only wonder what might be hiding underneath. Though he was thinking in metaphorical terms, he briefly imagined the man tearing off his face to reveal a hollowed-out skull packed with grave dirt, worms, and maggots, and he quickly shook off the thought.

  For the next few hours he walked the streets of Milestone. In truth, it would ordinarily have taken him less than thirty-five minutes to circumnavigate the whole town, side streets included, but this was less an idle jaunt than a symbolic one. Every step made him feel better about himself, filled in the ugly hole that had been punched in his resolve upon meeting The Barber. As sweat painted half-moons in the armpits of his shirt and trickled in cold rivulets down his sides, he felt as if he were reestablishing his domain simply by traversing it, reclaiming the cobblestone walkways and the solemn shuttered buildings for himself in defiance of the interloper.

  And on the way, he knocked on each and every door and exchanged pleasantries with those who opened them, commented on the weather, asked them how their children were doing, until it came time to steer the conversation to the matter at hand.

  “There is a stranger in town,” he told them. “A man who proclaims himself a barber. I fear he may be more than that, though it would not be proper to share what it is I suspect. Not yet. Suffice it to say I have reason to believe that he is here under false pretenses and that to give him your patronage would be to make yourself indirectly complicit in whatever unsavory schemes he has in mind.”

  He delivered his words with enough gravity and solemnity to have them taken seriously and to dissuade requests for elaboration on the part of the listener, though of course some of the less disciplined among his constituents tried anyway.

  “Is he a commie or something?” Bill Stewart the mechanic said, notable only because he was the only one who hadn’t invited Hawkes inside. Instead, he stood blocking the doorway, squinting and absently rubbing oil from hands that would never be clean.

  “Not that I can tell, but he’s such a walking vault of possibilities, it’s difficult to say what he might yet resolve to be,” Hawkes replied. “I’m sure all will become clear in due course.”

  And though he left his people—for that was how he saw them, how he needed more than ever to see them—with more questions than answers on their tongues, he returned home at twilight satisfied that he had done his work and done it well. With the war abroad, paranoia was already at an all-time high, the seeds of mistrust and suspicion already planted. All he’d had to do to achieve his goal had been to water them, to tame the wild focus and direct it toward the newcomer with the grublike skin and unfriendly eyes.

  As Venus burned a phosphorescent hole in the darkening sky of evening, Hawkes began to whistle. That, ladies and gentlemen, he thought, is what becomes of those who cross Ronald J. Hawkes.

  —

  Over breakfast the next morning, he found it hard to restrain the satisfaction he felt warming him from the inside out, though Gladys seemed less than impressed when he told her what he’d done.

  “And what if he’s just a reserved, perfectly nice young man?”

  He gave her a withering look. “You do remember my report upon meeting him, yes? The odds of him being anything other than a miscreant seem increasingly unlikely.”

  “Are you going to run all newcomers out of town if they give you a less-than-stellar first impression?”

  He shrugged, punctured the yolk of his egg with his fork just to watch it bleed. “If they give me sufficient reason, and if I don’t think them adequate for our fair town, then I should say it’s my responsibility to run them off. Isn’t that what a good mayor does?”

  Gladys was annoyed. “A good mayor is a fair mayor. Can you say you’re being fair?”

  He frowned at her. “You haven’t even met the man in question, Gladys. You haven’t seen him. So, while I appreciate your devil’s advocacy, perhaps you might wish to hold your tongue until your mouth has been sufficiently educated on the matter.”

  Though emboldened by the renewed sense of power, he was nevertheless aware that he had offended her, but he decided she was tough enough to handle it and smart enough to know there was no venom in his words. He did not interfere with her sulking as he finished his breakfast and headed out the door into the morning sunshine to inspect the results of his handiwork.

  He decided he would pick up some flowers for his wife on his way back, perhaps a bottle of wine, too. They could celebrate. After all, soon there would be ample reason.

  —

  As promised, The Barber was in his shop when Hawkes arrived at eight o’clock. The mayor guessed the man had probably been there all night because the place looked immaculate. The revolving porcelain enameled barber’s pole outside had been repainted and was spinning atop its column once again, the thick red, white, and blue lines moving eternally upward toward the bulb
ous white globe at the top. Everything had been cleaned and polished, and even from outside Hawkes could see the steel of the hydraulic chairs reflected in the floor tiles.

  The young man was determined. He had to give him that.

  There was only one customer in the store, and though it initially bothered Hawkes that anyone had dared patronize the barbershop in the wake of his diligent efforts to ensure the contrary, he relaxed somewhat when he realized it was only Ellard Scott, the town crazy, someone Hawkes had not encountered in his door-to-door canvassing. Ellard was of little consequence and might not have heeded a warning even if he had been given one.

  From his vantage point across the street, Hawkes leaned back against the brick wall and folded his arms, a small smile on his lips as he watched The Barber applying shaving cream to Scott’s chaotic black beard. He imagined the foul smell radiating from the dirty drunk but saw no evidence of displeasure on the face of The Barber. If anything, he seemed content to be doing what it was he had come here to do.

  “Enjoy it,” Hawkes muttered disdainfully. “It’ll be over soon.”

  Though there was no way The Barber could have heard him, the pale man looked up from tending to his customer and glanced at Hawkes through the mayor’s own reflection as if he had. The two men’s eyes met and abruptly Hawkes felt as if someone had threaded a long piece of cold wire down his throat and into his belly, leaving him with a sour taste in his mouth and a tightening in his gut. Nausea surged within him, his smile fading. Determined not to give in to the sudden sickness for fear of appearing weak, Hawkes resisted the urge to double over, even as sweat broke out all over his body and his stomach gurgled acidly.

  The eggs, he reasoned. I ate them too fast, and they were a little undercooked.

  The Barber’s face was made even paler by the pane of glass between them, the mayor’s own likeness superimposed on it so that it appeared as if one inhabited the other.

  It’s inside you, a voice not his own whispered in Hawkes’s mind. The very thing you feared, you simpleminded old goat. He snapped his head around to locate the speaker and found none. Around him the streets were deserted, just as he’d hoped, although now he might have been relieved to see somebody on whom he could blame the insidious whisper that had risen around him, inside him, but the town was not yet fully awake. The roof of the barbershop obscured the rising sun and kept the cobblestones, and Hawkes, in shadow.

  Composure rapidly ebbing away, Hawkes let the wall support him and let his folded arms drop to his sides. His knees had turned to jelly, his legs quivering uncontrollably. It was getting difficult to breathe. He did not want to look at The Barber, did not want confirmation of the thing some primal part of him had already concluded. Somehow, impossibly, The Barber’s voice was in his head, mocking him.

  Go home now, old man. Go home and see what your ignorance has wrought on your beloved town.

  And now, stunned by the impossibility of it all, sickened by the feeling of violation, he put a trembling hand to his temple and looked across the street and through the window at The Barber.

  It’s a fever. Food poisoning. Or the heat. Both, perhaps. Sunstroke. Yes, that’s it. That has to be it.

  But he knew intrinsically, in the cold, stony place within himself immune to the feeble light of spurious reasoning, that it was no such thing.

  The Barber was still watching him, his eyes dark, round holes in the suffused white oval of a powdered face. He had not ceased his work. He stood behind Ellard, a straight razor in one hand, a clump of tangled hair the size of a bird’s nest in the other. Reclined in the hydraulic chair, the drunk looked complacent beneath his white smock and the mask of white shaving foam that covered three-quarters of his face, enviously oblivious to the mental tug-of-war in which his barber was engaged.

  Hawkes was going to vomit, and the certainty filled him with alarm. Bile ran in dual channels beside his tongue, filling his mouth, forcing him to abandon his pretense of calm to spit. His body felt as if an electrical current had been shot through it. He needed to leave before he collapsed unconscious right there on the sidewalk, his conviction bolstered by the thought of what the townspeople would say if they found him there. He imagined The Barber laughing as he recounted the tale to a shop full of customers who no longer believed in their leader and would gladly support any efforts to supplant him.

  The Barber would have won.

  As he struggled to maintain the posture of a man not stricken with a debilitating illness and turned to walk away, he heard The Barber’s voice in his head one last time, as clear and loud as his own heartbeat tapping at his temples.

  Neither of us has won, Mr. Hawkes, and you’ve mistaken your enemy.

  —

  Home became an oasis that seemed destined to forever remain out of reach in the cruel desert of panic his day had abruptly become. The feeling was aided by the heat shimmering off the asphalt as the day began to age, the sun an interrogation lamp blazing into his face. But at last the house swung around a corner made sharper by his clumsiness and he stumbled desperately toward it, then up the path between his wife’s hydrangeas, squinting against the multitude of suns trapped in the windows as he slumped against the door, where he released a sigh of relief that smelled worrisomely rank.

  The door was unlocked and he all but fell inside. “Gladys,” he moaned, the single utterance enough to make his throat clamp shut against the same danger of vomiting that had plagued his passage home.

  The house was quiet but for the hollow tock of the clock.

  Hawkes collapsed onto the cushioned loveseat in the hallway and lay down, drawing his knees up like a child waiting for a violent storm to pass and take the terror and confusion along with it. He was saturated with sweat, his good shirt fit only for the trash now. There was an aggravating tickle in his throat that refused to abate, a condition made worse by the persistent nausea, which made it difficult to clear his throat without fear of regurgitating his breakfast all over himself.

  Eggs must have been rotten. Even as he told himself this, he knew it wasn’t true. Had it happened any time before he’d locked gazes with The Barber, the lie might have stuck. But it hadn’t, and he knew, as impossible as it seemed, as ridiculous as it would sound if spoken aloud to anyone but himself, that somehow the creepy young man had poisoned him with nothing more deadly than a look.

  Boxley sent him, he thought feverishly and with sudden conviction. Somehow Boxley brought that man here to rid the town of me, to force a vacancy in the office he so desperately wants.

  A cramp brought his chin down lower, his knees up higher, and he whimpered.

  Perhaps The Barber’s touch alone had been laced with mercury, or arsenic. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. But that would be murder, and everyone would know, wouldn’t they?

  He had a sudden flicker of Ed Boxley’s porcine face grinning malevolently at him. No, he realized. No, they wouldn’t. They’ll find me dead and no one will think to make the connection between me and the vile young man. Gladys might, but he suspected her testimony would be buried for the town’s sake, in accordance with the long-standing tradition of such things.

  And who was to say that the town wasn’t complicit in his undoing? An idea that might have seemed preposterous a few short hours ago now seemed entirely probable, since his paranoia was fueled by the black fever burning through his veins. No, he decided, clenching his teeth against the agony. No, he was not a stupid man, nor a naïve one. It was inconceivable that he could have ascended to his position of authority by so egregiously misjudging his constituents. He was the man that kept the town humming, kept the people safe and happy. They loved him.

  Boxley again, his pudgy face swimming through the darkness behind his eyes. If so, then where are they now, Hawkes? Where are they when you need them?

  He brought his trembling hands up and rubbed his eyes, opened his mouth to call for his wife again—for surely she had not abandoned him—but stopped when something tickled his lip. Frowning, h
e dropped his hands, brought one of them to his mouth, probed until he located the source. It was a hair, and when he tugged it, he gagged, not because he had pulled enough of it out to see that it was too dark to be one of his own, but because he felt it move deep down in his throat. He sat up in a hurry and bent over just in time to vomit, his stomach constricting as if squeezed by rough hands. But rather than being dissuaded by the emptiness in his stomach, he continued to retch at the sight of what had been expelled.

  Long black hair scratched its way up his throat, almost choking him. It swaddled his tongue and had snagged in his teeth, and now it hung from his mouth to the floor like a veil of wet black wool. Horrified, he grabbed handfuls of the slippery hair and pulled, terrified that it might be anchored to his insides and that tugging it might rip them free, killing him before he realized what he had done.

  He pulled, hand over hand, and still the hair kept coming, the strands getting thicker, denser, until he felt as if it was his mind that he was unraveling. He moaned, his body convulsing, his throat throbbing and aching as peristalsis worked against him. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he gagged and choked, and still the hair kept coming.

  No man could have made this happen, he thought, and felt something inside his brain snap with the horror of it all.

  He wanted to laugh.

  He wanted to choke.

  He wanted to die.

  The first of those wishes inadvertently granted the second, and reinforced the terrifying awareness that the third might yet come true.

  Overhead, he heard creaking as footfalls crossed the polished wood floorboards of the upstairs bedroom. He paused, blind with tears, hair-veiled heart hammering in his throat.

  Slowly he turned his head toward the stairs, hope blossoming through the weeds of terror. Realizing he had assumed Gladys was out, he was surprised and relieved to see her appear on the steps. She was partially encased in shadow, silhouetted by the window in the wall where the risers leveled out into a small landing before turning sharply up to the right. She was dressed in her nightgown, which registered as a little odd for her, given the time of day, but as the observation came while he was holding two dripping fistfuls of somebody else’s hair that ran down through his mouth and into his stomach, he quickly disregarded it in favor of asking for help.