999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [307]
What many readers may not know is that Blatty (who received the Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1998) had a distinguished career in the movies before The Exorcist, producing screenplays for such films as What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? and A Shot in the Dark.
After the success of The Exorcist, he continued his film success, writing and eventually directing ("Killer” Kane and The Exorcist III); he also continued to produce fiction, which brings us to the stunning piece that follows.
It is not only fitting hut just that we end a book like this with a new short novel from William Peter Blatty. Elsewhere is a slick, extremely well written, unsettling, and at times terrifying haunted house story; it also evidences the sly and sophisticated humor that is Blatty’s hallmark. I was very lucky to obtain it for you—you’re even luckier to read it.
I was with a tribe on Mount Elgon, in East Africa. … During a palaver, I incautiously uttered the word selelteni, which means “ghosts.” Suddenly a deathly silence fell on the assembly. The men glanced away, looked in all directions, and some of them made off.
CARL JUNG, Psychology and the Occult
Once I was afraid of dying. Now what I fear are the dead.
Why did I come to this place? Was it loneliness? Pride? The money? The creak of the floors, the color of the air, all things are a terror to me here. The house is bright, my companions amusing; why do I find myself thinking in whispers? Is it merely that the dark is coming on? I doubt it; I have touched the other side many times, it’s my business. But this time it’s different: something is wrong, something unfixable, like an ancient grief, like hell.
The rain has finally stopped, there’s the sun, hate-red and breathing silent at the rim of the world. I ask why I’m frightened? Listen! Voices. Whispers. They’re coming from the walls. Inside them.
Jesus save me from this night!
From the Diary of Anna Trawley, Tuesday, 8:22 P.M.
PART ONE
Chapter One
A pale pink telephone wedged at her chin, Joan Freeboard edgily stood at her desk while she rustled through message slips, frowning and impatient, as if searching for the one that would explain why she’d been born. A second line began to flash. She eyed it.
“Yeah, I know you already said you’re coming,” she scolded in a petulant, husky voice; in her accent one heard organ grinders strolling through the tenements, the flapping of a wash hung out to dry upon a roof. “So what? You need constant reminding, Terry,” she hounded. “You remember what night and what time?”
She listened, pursed her lips, then tossed the slips to her desk. “I knew it. Write it down: Friday night at six o’clock. And remember, don’t bring the freaking dogs!”
She punched into the flashing line.
“Yeah, Freeboard.”
She wrinkled up her nose in distaste.
“Harry?”
Freeboard shifted her weight and fiddled with an earring, a southwestern dangle of stone and blue beads. Thirty-four, she wore short blond hair in bangs and had lost green eyes in a Kewpie doll face that masked a will with the grip of gravity. She lifted an incredulous eyebrow. “Co-list a contemporary in Greenwich, Harry? Are you out of your freaking mind? Ever since that cookbook lady bought a Tudor all the yuppies ever want there is something ‘authentic,’ meaning dark and depressing and falling all to shit. Look, you go and get the cookbook lady to build herself a house made out of glass, something round or triangular or shaped like a saucer and looks like it probably landed in Greenwich and then maybe after that we can talk, okay? So what else? Make it quick would you please? I’m in a hurry.”
A middle-aged secretary quietly entered, despondent, her hair in a bun, just divorced. Freeboard handed her the copy for an ad, mouthing “Times.” The secretary nodded and drooped away.