Dark Screams, Volume 8 Read online

  “Doctuh…Sheen,” he managed to choke out. “Geh him…Hlease.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, and he saw her hands fly to her mouth as she took a single step toward him. He waited for her to scream, to ask him what was wrong, to rush to his aid, but she did none of these things. Instead, she stepped unsteadily free of the shadow, allowing him to see how long her hair had become, to realize that she wasn’t seeing him at all, had been drawn to him only by the sound of his horror.

  She raised a trembling hand and tried to speak his name.

  He screamed around the thickening obstruction in his throat at the sounds she made and realized that his own protests sounded the same, which made delirious, sickening sense, now that someone else’s hair was growing from her mouth, too.

  —

  Elsewhere in Milestone, the citizens who had heeded the mayor’s warning began to find themselves similarly stricken.

  Bill Stewart, the mechanic, was elbow-deep in the guts of an old Buick sedan when he gasped and reared back, a sudden sharp prickling behind his eyes, as if his optic nerves had caught fire, causing him to drop his wrench in pain. His only other employee, the bespectacled young Mac Boxley, son of Hawkes’s rival, started to ask what was wrong when a peculiar sensation forced him to examine his own hands. Long, dark filaments of hair were worming their way out from under his fingernails at the rate of an inch per second. He began to scream, the terror intensifying when he saw the flood of hair pouring liquidly out around Bill’s eyes as the older man cried blood for what seemed like an eternity before finally falling silent and pitching lifelessly forward onto the engine of the Buick. Mac stood paralyzed, his hands raised before his face as the hair flowed from beneath his nails until it was long enough to have gathered around his feet. He opened his mouth to scream, and like eels freed from a trap, thick black braids shot forth from his throat into air misted with his blood. With his eyes wide with terror and madness, he fell to his knees, the bones of which had started to fracture and crumble, the marrow weakened by the same threads of alien matter that were by now winnowing their way out through his pores. Mercifully, the asphyxia took seconds before the emerging hair tore him asunder, liquefying his body so that only the location would aid in identifying the remains.

  Across the street, Father Garrety, Milestone’s representative in matters of the spirit and the only man more incensed than Hawkes had been about the implied nature of their visitor—for it classified The Barber as an ungodly abomination whose intent could only be the corruption of his flock—was alone in the sacristy of his church when his ears began to tickle. Over the course of three minutes, it graduated from an irritation to panic when he tugged hard on one of the long hairs that had sprouted from his right ear and felt a dull pop in his skull. As he flailed and shrieked, his eyes hemorrhaged, then his brain burst, as every vein in his body became a canal of swift passage for the invading threads.

  On the second floor of a lonely house on Winter Street, a mere alley squeezed between tall quiet houses, Jackson Petrie, who had once worked as a foreman in the mines and was now, no doubt as a result of a life spent in that poisonous dark, slowly dying of lung cancer, rose from the soiled bed in which he had been confined for the past six months and appraised himself in the stained oval mirror on his bedroom wall. He was weak, his face a mere charcoal sketch of a former watercolor, his eyes gray stones filmed with white, and he had to brace one hand against the wall to look into the glass. His knees quivered and he knew he could not maintain this stance for long before his legs betrayed him and dropped him to the floor. But a peculiar sensation like ghostly fingertips brushing over the hairs all over his body had bid him rise to see if there might be any visible sign of its cause. He assumed that if there was, it would be nothing good. Perhaps his skin was sloughing off, eager to be free of him. Perhaps he had died and his body was still there on the bed while his new incorporeal self peered into the mirror.

  But no, he was there, pitiful as he was, still living, though living was hardly what it could be called. And as he stood there, his breathing so faint it scarcely clouded the glass, another sensation prickled through him, a sensation he had not felt in many years: amusement. Because Jackson had been bald since his mid-twenties, a hereditary curse, and now, no doubt as some kind of mutation initiated by his cancer, the hair was coming back. Atop his liver-spotted skull, he watched the dark follicles break through his scalp like the threads of a diligent seamstress. He smiled as the bristles flourished into a shock of hair in what seemed no time at all. Welcome back, he thought. A chuckle devolved into a coughing fit, and when he straightened, eyes watering, he saw that the tears running down his cheeks were threaded with strands of hair that extended from his pupils.

  He was still smiling when the new growth first shrouded and then stopped his grateful heart.

  And so it went in almost every household in Milestone. Citizens enjoying early lunches while listening to news of the war and trying not to worry about the likelihood of foreign invasion found their own bodies usurped by something unknown and vicious that burst victoriously free of them to weave in the blood-scented air like underwater vegetation.

  By one o’clock on that afternoon, the population of the town had been reduced from ninety-three to sixteen, the survivors comprising families like that of Edwin Jones, who had left the morning before to attend an interview at a paper mill in Saddleback and had decided to make a weekend of it for his wife and their three children, whose spirits over the past few months had been as low as his bank balance. He would not learn of Milestone’s fate until Monday morning, and when he did, it would be the motivation he’d sought to leave the accursed place for good.

  Seventy-one-year-old Agnes Delacroix had been visiting her daughter in Louisiana, struggling to reconnect after years of enmity, the source of which was no longer clear to either of them. The visit had been successful enough to convince Agnes that she was better off staying and spending the last of her golden years with a daughter she loved but hardly knew. She dispatched an emissary to Milestone to put her house on the market. Later, that emissary would tell her the horror story he had found in the town.

  In a development that would have galled Ronald Hawkes had he lived to learn of it, his competitor, Ed Boxley, also survived. While the mayor had been staggering home in a fever earlier that day, Boxley stopped by the barbershop to get a shave and a cut, and to let the young man know that he was a valued addition to the town, even if his competitor vehemently disagreed. This was what saved him. Unfortunately, while he was enjoying the impressively professional services of the reticent newcomer, three blocks north his son was succumbing to the invasion, news of which would not become apparent until much later when Boxley realized something horrible was happening to the people he had hoped to one day call his constituents. Upon learning of Mac’s fate, Ed would sink into a depression that would turn him into an alcoholic and lead him to a shotgun suicide on the one-year anniversary of his son’s peculiar death.

  Others, some of whom were no fans of the incumbent mayor and did not share his prejudices, also sought out The Barber’s services and thus secured their survival. What they did not expect was the scene that unfolded outside The Barber’s window as they were enjoying a lather and a shave. One of them, Peter Danielson, the teacher who had filled the vacancy left by Ellard Scott at Saddleback Elementary, was among the three other men who watched in horror as the mailman, Judd Loomis, staggered up the street, his blue uniform soaked red, his head thrust back as what looked like a small, wiry tree grew from his mouth. His throat was distended, his blood-filled eyes bulging, his hands hooked into claws and trailing hair. The patrons of the barbershop were unable to look away, though reason suggested they should, as the man fell forward and appeared to shatter into gobbets of meat on the cobblestones.

  “Jesus Christ,” Danielson said and found himself trying to rise, despite the presence of The Barber’s razor under his chin.

  “Be still,” The barber told him in a voice
like velvet. “There’s nothing you can do for him.”

  “Did you see…?” began Sam Hopkins, the carpenter, his newly cropped hair gleaming from the recent application of Fixateur. Sam had come to the shop not only because he had long needed the services of a competent barber, but also because he was indeed homosexual, albeit secretly, and the narrow-minded mayor’s inferences about the newcomer’s suspected proclivities had rankled him.

  “It’s all right,” The Barber said, and his tone was so soothing it was hard not to believe him despite the evidence of their own eyes. He placed a tender hand on Danielson’s shoulder and he relaxed back into the chair.

  “Clearly it isn’t,” the teacher said, his heart pounding in his throat. “Someone should help him.”

  “He’s beyond help,” said The Barber. “They all are.”

  At this, the third man, the rotund and unfailingly cheery Doug Winterbourne, rose from his chair where he’d been waiting his turn, his face pale. “We can’t just leave him out there. For God’s sake, he’s…”

  “He’s dead,” The Barber said. “Everyone in town is dead by now.”

  Afraid to move now, though everything in him seemed to demand it as cold fear spread through him, Danielson swallowed against the razor. “What’s happening to them?”

  “They were told to fear me,” The Barber explained, his voice little more than a whisper, his attention on his work as he expertly drew the razor up over the bulb of Danielson’s Adam’s apple without nicking it. “Your mayor led them to believe that I was best avoided. He was wrong. I am not the invader, nor the usurper. I came ahead of it in an effort to save the people of Milestone. But I cannot force anyone to engage my services. They must make that decision of their own free will, as you did, which is why you’re untouched by the parasite that as we speak is rending your town apart.”

  “But…what is it? What’s doing this?” Winterbourne asked. “Is it some kind of chemical, some kind of…weapon?”

  Much to Danielson’s relief, The Barber finished shaving his throat. The teacher lowered his head and watched The Barber’s reflection as he spoke. The man looked like a ghost, his eyes as dark as the shadows that nestled in the hollows of his cheeks. He did not, Danielson would later attest, look human.

  “In my day, barbers were akin to priests. We were employed solely to remove evil spirits from our tribe.” He brought the blade to the teacher’s cheek, cocked his head slightly, his cold, smooth fingertips pressing lightly against Danielson’s jaw, indicating that he should turn his head slightly. Danielson obeyed, was suddenly afraid not to.

  “Your tribe?” Sam Hopkins asked, incredulous. “Where are you from where they still have tribes?”

  The Barber ignored the question, leaving it to hang in the air like the smell of shaving cream and hair tonic. “The spirits rose from the ground. They took root in the hair and fed their insidious whispers straight into the brain. The longer the hair grew, the more powerful and dangerous the spirits became. They drove men, women, and children mad. Made them do unspeakable things. The people came to us to cut them out. And we did. The spirits were never vanquished, though. No, they were, they are, too strong for that. They are merely excised for a time, driven back into the ground. And each time their expulsion makes them angrier. This is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. I felt the presence of these spirits, building as the fear in this town has built in tandem with conflict abroad. Fear of the war, fear of invasion, of interlopers and enemies among you…it opened the door for the spirits. They came, and I followed them.”

  “This is crazy,” Winterbourne said and tossed his newspaper down on the seat he had vacated. He was trembling. “You’re talking nonsense. Maybe Hawkes was right about you.”

  Danielson hardly heard the other man’s words. His attention was focused on the razor in The Barber’s hand. The blade was long and wickedly sharp. It hardly needed to touch his skin to raze the hair. The handle, he saw, was pearl, worn and old, and it bore intricate designs that looked like naked people captured in paroxysms of lust or agony. Up through the writhing men and women was a large tree laden with fruit, and it was toward this the desperate people appeared to be reaching for succor.

  “If you leave,” The Barber said calmly, “you will die. Let me cut the spirits from you first.”

  “You’re a fucking loon,” Winterbourne replied, and laughed without humor. When he received no response from either The Barber or the other men, who merely watched his reflection in the mirror with grave expressions, he cleared his throat and sat down.

  Outside, someone was crawling across the cobblestones toward the bloody remains of the mailman.

  —

  Oscar realizes he is standing still, the scissors in his hand, his mouth open. His reflection looks like a man puzzling over a riddle. He catches himself and coughs into a fist. In the mirror, the salesman is watching him.

  “Quite a macabre tale,” the barber says, and smiles shakily. “Quite macabre indeed. If you wrote it down, you could probably get it published.”

  The salesman shrugs. “This is not a tale that needs to be in a book or a magazine. This one needs to be up here.” He taps a fingertip against his temple, and when he lowers his hand, his gaze follows it. His haircut, as good a job as Oscar could do given the sparseness and wiriness of the hair, is done and has been for quite a while, but so enthralled was Oscar with the salesman’s story, he didn’t think to tell him. He rectifies that now.

  “A fine job,” the salesman says, pleased, but does not rise from the chair, leaving Oscar to sneak a glance at the window and a sky the color of ink. It’s almost full dark now, Venus a bullet hole in the twilight showing the long-gone sunlight on the other side. He is eager to be home, knows that as he watches the sky, his wife will be watching the clock and feeling unease of her own.

  “Did you know that the position of barber was once one of great esteem, Oscar?”

  The old man returns his attention to the salesman’s reflection in the mirror and offers him a wistful smile. “My father used to tell stories. I never knew how many were true and how many were just his way of glorifying the job.”

  “You might be surprised to hear the truth.”

  “I’m sure I would. Some other time, perhaps you can enlighten me further. As it is, I must be closing up for the day.”

  The salesman says nothing for a moment, and Oscar feels a twinge of alarm. Has he offended the customer? Surely the salesman will understand, unless he’s one whose vanity supersedes all other considerations. But then the rotund man nods curtly and stands. “Of course. I’ve been going on and on, haven’t I? My apologies.”

  Relieved, Oscar raises a hand. “Not at all. My wife is just a bit of a worrywart, with all the violence out there these days. I know she won’t relax until I’m safe at home.”

  “Understood.” The salesman whips the smock from around his neck with a practiced hand. In the other, he’s holding a straight razor with a pearl-handled grip, the blade long, wickedly sharp, and open.

  Oscars feels his blood freeze, his bowels turn to jelly. “What…?” he asks, with no idea what the question was he had intended to ask. The chair is between the two men, and for this at least he is thankful. He can only watch as the other man brushes himself off and straightens his tie.

  “Thank you, Oscar,” says the salesman, his eyes empty and cold.

  Oscar has never claimed to be good at reading people, even after all his years of dealing with them. Perhaps it is a naïve trait, particularly given the condition of the world in which he finds himself, but he has always entertained faith in his fellow man. The benefit of the doubt and all that. And perhaps today that same naïvety will finally prove to be his undoing. Whatever the case, it does not take a man talented in the art of physiognomy to see the hatred burning in the eyes of the salesman. His pupils are like smoldering embers as he stands before the old man and dons his hat.

  “You’re here to rob me, then,” Oscar says, and it is less a ques
tion than a statement of fact, for he is sure of this now, sure that his life is about to be cut short, as appropriate a term as was ever coined by a barber in his own shop.

  “I already told you I am not a thief,” the salesman says, and now the upper half of his face is lost to the shadow beneath the brim of his hat, his eyes a dull red gleam in the darkness there.

  “A murderer, then.”

  “No. You’ve mistaken my intent here today, Oscar, in much the same way the people of Milestone mistook the intent of their visitor.”

  His repeated use of Oscar’s name is a mockery of the fact that he was never given it.

  The old man clears his throat, considers the scissors in his right hand without sparing them a glance. He has, in truth, only just realized he is still holding them.

  “Then tell me what that is and ease an old man’s heart,” he says.

  “You have forgotten what your father told you, what was ingrained in you since birth. You’ve become weak, Oscar, forgotten your roots. Do you think I visit random establishments spinning gruesome stories about a forgotten town and the things that happened to the people there just for my own amusement? Do you think I fancy myself a great orator, a man whose cadence alone should command attention, thereby validating some misguided egotism on my part? Do you think I find myself that interesting, hmm?” His voice raises a notch and yet at once seems deeper. “Let me tell you this truth, old man: I am sick and tired of telling the same old story, year after year after year after year, again and again and again, until my throat is hoarse, my tongue is swollen, and my own ears ring from repulsion and pain at the familiarity of the words.”

  “Then why keep telling it?” Oscar braves.