Moonchasers & Other Stories Read online

  MOONCHASERS AND OTHER STORIES

  By Ed Gorman

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 / Ed Gorman

  Copy-edited by: Anita Lorene Smith

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Ed Gorman is an award-winning American author best known for his crime and mystery fiction.

  Book List:

  A Cry of Shadows

  Bad Moon Rising

  Black River Falls

  Blood Moon

  Breaking Up is Hard to Do

  Cast in Dark Waters (with Tom Piccirilli)

  Cold Blue Midnight

  Dark Whispers

  Different Kinds of Dead

  Everybody's Somebody's Fool

  Famous Blue Raincoat

  Fools Rush In

  Harlot's Moon

  Hawk Moon

  Moonchasers and Other Stories

  Murder in the Wings

  Murder on the Aisle

  Murder Straight Up

  New Improved Murder

  Night Screams

  Nightmare Child

  Prisoners and Other Stories

  Rough Cut

  Save the Last Dance for Me

  Serpent's Kiss

  Several Deaths Later

  Shadow Games

  Showdown

  Survival

  The Autumn Dead

  The Babysitter

  The Dark Fantastic

  The Day the Music Died

  The End of It All

  The Forsaken

  The Girl in the Attic

  The Long Midnight

  The Long Ride Back

  The Long Silence After

  The Night Remembers

  The Poker Club

  The Silver Scream

  The Zone Soldiers

  Ticket to Ride

  Toys in the Attic

  Voodoo Moon

  Wake Up Little Susie

  What the Dead Men Say

  Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

  Wolf Moon

  http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com/

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  Moonchasers

  This book is a belated thank-you to four professors whose wisdom and kindness helped me become a writer:

  Charles Cannon, Burton Kendle, Robert Renk, and Todd Zeiss.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Moonchasers

  Turn Away

  Seasons of the Heart

  En Famille

  Mother Darkness

  The Beast in the Woods

  One of Those Days, One of Those Nights

  Surrogate

  The Reason Why

  The Ugly File

  Friends

  Bless Us O Lord

  Stalker

  The Wind from Midnight

  Prisoners

  Render unto Caesar

  Out There in the Darkness

  Afterword by Dean Koontz

  INTRODUCTION

  These stories are, at least in an oblique way, a record of my time on the planet.

  A lot of the people you'll meet here, I've known in life.

  The dwarf woman of "The Wind from Midnight," for instance, is a dwarf woman I used to work with in a hotel. At day's end we frequently pushed a pint of cheap bourbon back and forth, a forlorn pair of scared drunks. She died long ago, when we were young. I still occasionally visit her grave and talk to her. She was a lovely, endearing woman.

  The hero of "Moonchasers" is a kid I grew up with, one who, at fifteen, knew more about honor and wisdom than I know today.

  The old man in "Render unto Caesar" did in life what he does in my story—walk around the neighborhood looking for dead cats, which he then gave decent burials. A strange old guy, to be sure, but a profoundly decent soul for all his oddness. And, yes, the young woman existed, too, and her husband really was that violent with her.

  What happens to the married couple in "Stalker" happened to friends of mine. Their daughter was murdered. The couple never recovered. That happens a lot, as people in the victims' rights movement will tell you. Look at the face of Ron Goldman's father sometime. I hope that someday he'll find peace again.

  "The Ugly File" is based on a woman I did a documentary film about. She gave birth to a terribly deformed baby. She felt estranged from the entire human race. She didn't think even her husband could understand what she was going through, as perhaps he couldn't.

  The woman in "Prisoners" is based on a bright, elegant, talented young woman who used to work with me—and who spent several long sad years visiting her husband in prison.

  And so on.

  None of these stories is literally autobiographical, of course. I'm a storyteller, not a diarist.

  But in choosing the tales for this collection, I tended to select those pieces that had personal meaning for me. I didn't choose any that relied strictly on plot. The older I get, the less those stories interest me as either reader or writer.

  A number of editors should be thanked here: Janet Hutchings, of Ellery Queen, who is not only an astute editor but one of the gentlest people I've ever known; Kris Rusch, of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who knows how to get the best from me; Rich Chizmar, of Cemetery Dance, who helps me push against the constraints of the predictable; and Greg Cox, of Forge, who is a past master at handling writers. He makes you think that all those great ideas were yours, not his. Thanks for everything, Greg.

  Finally, I'd like to thank my beautiful wife, Carol, for her patience, support and encouragement; and my beautiful mother for driving me to the library all those years ago when she probably had much better things to do.

  I had a good time writing these stories. I hope you have a good time reading them.

  MOONCHASERS

  "THERE ARE MEN WHO CAN LUST WITH PARTS OF THEMSELVES. ONLY THEIR BRAIN OR THEIR HEARTS BURN AND THEN NOT COMPLETELY. THERE ARE OTHERS, STILL MORE FORTUNATE, WHO ARE LIKE THE FILAMENTS OF AN INCANDESCENT LAMP. THEY BURN FIERCELY, YET NOTHING IS DESTROYED."

  —NATHANAEL WEST, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST

  For my son Joe from the old man with love and pride

  And for Robert Mitchum

  i

  Yes, sir, it was just about the best sort of summer you could ask for, when you were fifteen, that is, and it was 1958 and you were living in Somerton, Iowa, which is forty miles due east of Waterloo, where just a month earlier I'd seen Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps all perform at the Electric Light Ballroom.

  Of course, neither Barney nor I let on that it was a good summer because if there is one thing that Barney and I liked to do it was bitch about living our lives out in Somerton, Pop. 16,438. There were maybe five pretty girls our age, none of whom would have a darn thing to do with us, and one mean and muscular seventeen-year-old named Maynard whom Barney and I had in some way offended (if Maynard wanted to be pissed at anybody, it should have been his parents for giving him that name). Fortunately for us, Hamblin's
Rexall had a good supply of science fiction magazines and Gold Medal suspense novels and Ace Double Books. And the Garden Theater likewise had the usual good supply of movies with monsters in them. And Robert Mitchum.

  That was the big thing Barney and I had in common. Sure we liked Amazing and Fantastic with all those nifty Valigursky covers, and sure we liked all those teen monster movies with all those Southern California bikini girls, and sure we thought that Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift and the late James Dean were really cool, but the coolest guy of all was Robert Mitchum. The Garden brought back Thunder Road for a week and Barney and I went four days running. And the same for when the Garden brought back Night of the Hunter and Blood on the Moon. We were there because Mitch was there.

  Anyway, that's sort of the picture of how things were in our lives before that hot August night when Barney and I walked along the railroad tracks out on the east edge of town, smoking on a fresh contraband package of Lucky Strikes, and sipping at two ice-dripping eight-cent bottles of Pepsi.

  We'd pretty much decided that this was going to be the night we broke into the abandoned warehouse and found out just what was in there. According to most of the little kids in Somerton, the warehouse was home to various kinds of spooks. Older kids, who didn't just have driver's ed learner permits like ours, took a different slant. They said that the migrant workers from the next town over snuck their daughters in there at night and ran a whorehouse that put all others to shame.

  In the moonlight, the railroad tracks shone silver for a quarter of a mile. The air smelled of hot creosote from the railroad ties that had baked all day in the sun. Between tracks and warehouse was a winding creek, along the dark banks of which you could smell summer mud and hear throaty frogs and see the silhouette of the willow tree bent and weeping.

  "We're gonna get our butts kicked," Barney said, "if they catch us."

  Of course that's what Barney said before just about everything we ever did. Everything that was any fun, anyway.

  But I didn't like to think uncharitable thoughts about Barney because he had it rough. His father had tried and failed in business several times. The family was pretty poor. And whenever his father quit going to his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, he always got drunk for two or three days and beat up Barney's mom pretty bad.

  A couple of times somebody had to call the chief of police and have him come over.

  The warehouse was this big corrugated steel building with loading docks on both the west and east sides. There was a large window on the north end revealing the shadowy space where the office had been.

  The window had long ago been smashed out, of course, and most of the exterior warehouse walls bore the chalk scrawlings of various kids—Class of '58, BG + FH, I Luv Judy! The kind of stuff, I'm told by my army corporal and former Eagle Scout brother, Gerald, is proof positive of immature minds.

  So there it sat like a big monument left behind by some alien species. When the warehouse was first closed down, back in '56, kids of every age trooped out there to smash windows and hurl rocks at the steel walls, which were pretty obliging about making neat sounds when the rocks struck. But then the kids got sort of bored with the place and quit coming. Now they mostly spent time at the abandoned grain elevator on the west edge of town. The elevator was more fun because it was more dangerous. One kid had already fallen off the interior ladder and broken a leg and an arm. It was only a matter of time till some poor overenthusiastic kid got killed in there and so the place had developed a certain dark aura that the warehouse could never match.

  As we were climbing through the office window, Barney said, "You don't really think there are ghosts and stuff in here, do ya?" I just shook my head. Barney just kept moving.

  We spent the first ten minutes inside walking around the front of the place and stepping on crunchy little rat droppings. It was pretty neat, actually, sort of like in those movies where they drop the atomic bomb and the few survivors walk around inside empty grocery stores and places like that and take everything they want.

  Of course, there wasn't much to take inside this warehouse.

  I remember my dad, who owned the haberdashery in town, saying once that the two guys who built this warehouse had no head for business, which was why they went broke so fast. And their creditors must have cleaned them out because when we went through the door leading to the back, all we saw was this huge empty concrete floor with moonlight splashing through six dirty, broken windows.

  "This is where I'm going to bring Janie Mills," Barney said, "and screw her brains out."

  "Good idea," I said, "and I'll double with you and bring Sharon Waggoner."

  Barney had the grace to laugh. Janie Mills and Sharon Waggoner were the two most stuck-up girls in our class. They wouldn't come out here with us if we had them at gunpoint.

  The place smelled of dust and heat and rain-soaked wood and truck oil and a turd-clogged toilet somewhere that hadn't been flushed in a long time.

  "Hey!" Barney shouted suddenly.

  And then laughed his ass off when the word echoed back to us through the moonlight and shadows.

  "Hey!" I shouted, too, and listened as my own sound likewise began repeating itself.

  This was another Somerton bust and we both knew it, which was why we'd both been shouting. Because there was nothing else to do. Because, as usual in Somerton, nothing was as it had been advertised. There were no spooks, no ghosts; and there were most definitely no voluptuous whores eager to free us from the prison of our virginity.

  Barney took the Lucky Strike pack from the pocket of my short-sleeved shirt (we traded off the privilege of carrying the pack) and took a book of matches from his own shirt and lit up and that was when I saw the door move.

  The door was way at the other end of the wide, empty warehouse floor, some kind of closet, I guessed. Barney's match had pointed my eye in that direction and that was how I came to notice the partially open door move a few inches closer to the frame.

  Or I thought I had, anyway. Maybe, because I was so bored, I just wanted to think that something like that had happened.

  "Let's go," Barney said. "We still got time to hit Rexall for a cherry Coke."

  I nudged him in the ribs and nodded toward the end of the moon-painted floor.

  "Huh?" he said out loud.

  I whispered to him, "Somebody's in the closet up there." He whispered back. "Bullshit."

  "Bullshit yourself. I saw that door move."

  Barney squinted his eyes and looked down the length of floor. He stared a long time and then whispered. "I didn't see it move."

  "Somebody's in that closet."

  And this time when he looked at me, I saw the beginnings of fear in his eyes.

  You're in a shadowy, empty building on the edge of nowhere and you suddenly realize that not too far away is somebody or something lurking in a dark closet. Probably watching every move you make.

  "Let's go," Barney whispered.

  I shook my head. "I want to find out who's in there."

  Barney gulped. "You're crazy."

  "No, I'm just bored."

  "You really gonna walk up there?"

  I nodded and started walking.

  At first it was sort of a lark. I could sense Barney behind me, watching with a kind of awe. That crazy sumbitch Tom was going to walk right up to that closet door, just the way Mitch would, and back here stood that A-1 chicken Barney. He would positively be ashamed of himself.

  It was a great feeling, it really was. For the first twenty steps or so anyway.

  Then I felt this sickening feeling in my stomach and bowels and a cold shudder went through me.

  Hell, I wasn't brave. I was just some dumb-ass fifteen-year-old from Somerton, Iowa, and if I really believed that somebody was in that closet then I should turn around and get the hell out of here.

  "I'll tell you, you're one ballsy guy and I mean that," Barney said.

  And then I knew I would go over and open that closet door because Barney's a
dmiration was just too much to lose.

  Besides, I was starting to convince myself that I had just imagined the door moving anyway.

  We reached the metal door and I put my hand out and took the knob.

  "God, Tom, you really gonna open it?"

  For an answer, I yanked the door open.

  And there, in the middle of the chill deep closet darkness, sitting with his back against the far wall, was a man holding in his left hand a big cop-style flashlight and in his right a big criminal-style pistol.

  "God," Barney said.

  "Anybody else with you?" the man said. And right away he looked sort of familiar but I wasn't sure why. He was a tall guy, a little on the beefy side, with a kind of handsome face and dark hair and the saddest eyes I'd ever seen on a man except for maybe my Uncle Pete when Doc Anderson told him that Aunt Clarice had only two months to live.

  The guy was pointing the gun directly at me. Or so it seemed. "N-no, sir."

  "How'd you boys find out about me?"

  "We didn't find out about you, sir," I said. "I mean not till we got in the warehouse here."

  He asked our names and we told him.

  And then for the first time I saw him get all seized up and heard him give out with a hard little grunt, the way you do when somebody hits you in the stomach. Or when you're in an awful lot of pain.

  He tried to sit up and still keep both his gun and his flashlight on us but he wasn't having an easy time of it. I knew right away it was because of the blood all over the side of his dirty white shirt, and the green pussy stuff that was all mixed up in it.

  I'd seen enough gangster movies to know what was going on here, especially when I let my eyes wander over to the big canvas bag sitting maybe half a foot from him, just on the edge of the light.

  "You going to kill us?" Barney said.

  Which was just like something Barney would say.