999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [90]
At first Carole didn’t understand. She drew her legs back and inched away along the wall. And then she saw what had happened.
Three splintered spindles had remained fixed in that half of the broken seat, and those spindles were now firmly and deeply embedded in the center of the Bemadette-thing’s chest. She wrenched wildly at the chair seat, trying to dislodge the oak daggers but succeeded only in breaking them off at skin level. She dropped the remnant of the seat and swayed like a tree in a storm, her mouth working spasmodically as her hands fluttered ineffectually over the bloodless wounds between her ribs and the slim wooden stakes deep out of reach within them.
Abruptly she dropped to her knees with a dull thud. Then, only inches from Carole, she slumped into a splay-legged squat. The agony faded from her face and she closed her eyes. She fell forward against Carole.
Carole threw her arms around her friend and gathered her close.
“Oh, Bern, oh, Bern, oh, Bern,” she moaned. “I’m so sorry. If only I’d got there sooner!”
Bernadette’s eyes fluttered open and the darkness was gone. Only her own spring-sky blue remained, clear, grateful. Her lips began to curve upward but made it only halfway to a smile, then she was gone.
Carole hugged the limp cold body closer and moaned in boundless grief and anguish to the unfeeling walls. She saw the leering faces begging to crawl away from the window and she shouted at them though her tears.
“Go! That’s it! Run away and hide! Soon it’ll be light and then I’ll come looking for you! For all of you! And woe to any of you that I find!”
She cried over Bernadette’s body a long time. And then she wrapped it in a sheet and held and rocked her dead friend in her arms until sunrise.
With the dawn she left the old Sister Carole Hanarty behind. The gentle soul, happy to spend her days and nights in the service of the Lord, praying, fasting, teaching chemistry to reluctant adolescents, and holding to her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was gone.
The new Sister Carole had been tempered in the forge of the night and recast into someone relentlessly vengeful and fearless to the point of recklessness. And perhaps, she admitted with no shame or regret, more than a little mad.
She departed the convent and began her hunt.
Chet Williamson
EXCERPTS FROM THE
RECORDS OF THE NEW ZODIAC
AND THE DIARIES
OF HENRY WATSON FAIRFAX
Chet Williamson is a funny guy, and here he’s produced a story that’s both funny and horrifying at the same time. He has worked in both humor and horror (fields which are oddly compatible); in another book I edited years ago, I was able to reprint a piece he had originally written for The New Yorker titled “Ghandi at the Bat.”
Horror readers know Williamson mainly by novels such as Ash Wednesday and Dreamthorp, as well as by such short stories as “Yore Skin’s Jes’s Soft ‘N Purty … He Said,” which originally appeared in the landmark anthology Razored Saddles and which is one of the most singularly brilliant and disgusting tales ever published in the field—and not funny at all.
(Note: The Zodiac was a New York City dining club established in 1868 and consisted of twelve gentlemen active in New York society. At least two volumes of the collected minutes of the meetings were privately published.)
September 18th, 20—:
Before I retired last night, I read a column which suggested that many of the outrages perpetrated by both children and adults might be due to the lack of civility in society. I cannot help but agree.
The final decades of the previous century witnessed a dreadful decline in civility, and this new century promises to be no more refined. We are on every side beset by adversarial imagery. The media poses everything in terms of battles, wars, and combat, and I find myself falling into this modem-day vernacular.
I recall (with chagrin) speaking before the board of our computer company just yesterday,