The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 3: Dialing the Wind (Neccon Classic Horror) Read online

  The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant

  Volume 3: Dialing the Wind

  by

  Charles L. Grant

  Necon Classic Horror #23

  Introduction by Tim Lebbon

  Cover by Matt Bechtel

  A digital edition published by

  Necon E-Books

  This Edition Copyright 2012 The Estate of Charles L. Grant

  Introduction Copyright 2012 Tim Lebbon

  Cover Copyright 2012 Matt Bechtel

  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. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Introduction

  I probably don’t need to tell you what a nice guy Charles L Grant was. But I’m going to tell you anyway. He was the sort of person who made you want to tell your ‘Charlie story’, and now I’ve been asked to write an introduction to this new Necon Ebooks edition of Dialing the Wind, I get to tell my own. Maybe it’s not much of one. We met, we talked. But it’s mine.

  I only actually met Charlie once. It was at the World Horror Convention in Chicago in 2002. Charlie was the Grand Master. In Denver two years before I’d completely failed to meet him (that was my first trip to a US convention, and I’d completely failed to meet a lot of people I’d hoped to bump into), so in Chicago I wanted to put that right.

  The chance came the evening after a signing trip out to a bookstore somewhere in Chicago. Forgive my memory ... it was over ten years ago, and sometimes one convention fades into another, fades into another. What I do remember is that the bus journey out to the signing seemed to take, oh, maybe six weeks. It was like something out of the Twilight Zone ... time lost meaning, day and night seemed to fade into each other, and perhaps if we had been in one of those splendid episodes we’d have started forming into tribes and considered eating each other. It was tortuous. But after many wrong turnings we arrived, and when we got there, there was one bloody huge queue for some bloke called Neil Gaiman, and few people interested in anyone else. The rest of us sat there playing with ourselves for a while, then suffered another six week bus journey back to the convention hotel.

  Meanwhile, those who’d decided not to go to the signing had instead attended a fantastic gig at a local blues club. There was great music, good liquor. My friend got laid.

  By the time we arrived back at the hotel, boy, I needed a drink. I was probably dehydrated and should have stuck to water, but I grabbed a beer. At the time I was still smoking, and I needed a cigarette too. And it was outside the hotel entrance, beer propped on a planter, cigarette in hand, that I met Charlie.

  I can’t remember how the conversation started, but once it did, it didn’t stop for some time. We gassed. We talked about lots, and of course that conversation always revolved around to writing, what we were working on, and our hopes for it. Charlie was very gracious, and he was as interested in my work as, of course, I was in his.

  I was working with an indie publisher at the time that Charlie was also considering working with, and he asked me some probing questions about them. Really probing. The sort you’d ask someone who was a good friend. Do they pay well? Do they pay on time? Do you trust them? There was trust there, right from the off, because Charlie was a decent guy, and I hope he saw decency in me too. For a while there was just the two of us outside talking, and ... you know sometimes at conventions, there are so many people you want to catch up with, so many friends you haven’t seen for ages, that you often feel torn in many directions? Right then, I was happy to stand out there and talk all evening.

  We didn’t, of course. Might have been half an hour, give or take. And though we chatted a few times after that over the course of the weekend, for me that was my Charlie moment. He was honest, complex, endearing, fascinating ... just like his work.

  Just like Dialing the Wind.

  Admission time here ... I haven’t read even nearly everything Charlie has written. Who the hell has? He was incredibly prolific, writing many novels under his own name and several pseudonyms. But perhaps some of his most popular works of fiction were those set in his fictional town of Oxrun Station. Of which Dialing the Wind is one.

  This book is in fact four linked stories, layered through and around each other so beautifully that the lines become blurred, the places where they start and end ambiguous. Much like real life, really. One tale echoes while you’re immersing into another, and there’s a real feeling that Oxrun Station is a genuine place, where voices and faces can live many stories. There’s a fluidity to this collection that gives real depth and soul to the tales therein, and that’s the mark of a master. There’s a clever linking device between these four stories––or perhaps I should call it book-ending, as it consists of a Prologue and Epilogue––which isn’t, as is often the case with collections like this, simply there to neatly tie the book together. It wraps the four novellas beautifully, and forms a story in itself, featuring two guys whose relationship, in just a few pages, is drawn as complex and deep. But to say any more about it would be wrong.

  There’s a flow to the writing here that echoes the feel these stories might leave you with. As I read, I felt like a bird hovering over Oxrun Station. Or perhaps a ghost. Dipping down and into a character’s life, not at the beginning of their story––because really with each individual there’s only one real beginning, and one end, in birth and death––but somewhere in the middle, and then lifting up and away again. Sometimes the end I witnessed was the true end of their story, sometimes not. And sometimes ... it wasn’t so easy to tell.

  He’d been dreaming he was dead, and the dark was so deep and the silence so vast and the touch of air so absolutely flat that he was more terrified than if he’d found himself walking through hellfire.

  The thematic connection between these four novellas is loss. In the first story Dialing The Wind, the main character Caroline’s husband was taken from her by cancer, and she is struggling to come to terms with her loss and move on. But it’s a lesser kind of loss––her friend Stacy’s estrangement from her boyfriend––that present Caroline with a strange, haunting way to reach out and perhaps touch her dead husband again.

  The next story, The Sweetest Kiss, features Bruce, a guy who’s suffering something of a mid-life crisis. What he’s mourning is everything that might have been, and all the things he failed to do with his life. He’s haunted by the idea that, at forty-four, his life is almost over, and this haunting manifests in the strangest ways.

  And then As We Promise, Side by Side. This is probably the strangest tale in the book, and is also my favourite. Again there are links ... the main character Lois used to work in Bruce’s (from the previous story) law firm, but now she’s gone out on her own in business. Her husband has departed––he was a mean, angry man––and left her the house. But when he decides to come back and reclaim the house for himself, and Lois panics, her friends rally around to help her.

  And so does her house.

  In the fourth story, The Chariot Dark and Low, Nelson suddenly seems to have everything he wants but then loss pays him a visit. Loss, again. A strange, haunting, disturbing tale, this one is also nasty in that subtle way of which Bradbury was such a master.

  And back to that
linking story again, because there’s a tune that wends its way through all of these stories, hanging over the Station like a patient observer waiting for fate to deal its hand. A loose band of musicians, unseen, perhaps unknown, but they’re always there.

  He heard a painfully sweet dulcimer of sweet mountain air that matched his mood and temper, covering him, floating him safely above the darker tones of a doleful guitar and the sawing cautions of a somber fiddle and the prank of a mandolin that played a humorous dirge behind it all; filling the Cove so quietly he barely knew the song was there, not knowing the words but hearing them just the same until they slipped away, returned, slipped away like spring replaced by sudden winter-a spiritual, then a jig, then a two-step, then a hornpipe, then a melody the dulcimer settled over him like a veil, chilling him pleasantly, calling him by name.

  Their music is a theme to loss.

  Grant’s fiction has often been called ‘quiet horror’. But it would be so wrong to assume that quiet means gentle, or tame, or diluted, because that’s not the case at all. In this instance, quiet means something far different––it’s in the presentation and description, not the effect and outcome. You won’t find buckets of gore and high body counts here. But what you do find will haunt you for much longer, and will pick its way beneath your defences.

  It’s said that backward masking on albums can subconsciously affect the listener. The theory goes that you hear the words without consciously understanding them, but while you’re wondering what that strange, backward voice was getting at, your mind is busy unravelling the message and implanting it, insidiously, secretly. Play ‘Satan is God and you love him’ backwards a thousand times, and without realising it, the listener will believe those words.

  I’m not sure I believe that at all. But what Charlie Grant does with his writing is similar to that strange backward masking theory. Because he gets inside you, often without you realising. He’ll tell you a tale in his poetic, beautifully descriptive language, and the tale will end, and slowly over the next few days you’ll find yourself thinking about it more and more until... bam! That’s what he meant! And it’s both chilling and beautiful at the same time.

  It’s a rare writer who can affect you like this.

  And I wish I could thank Charlie very much.

  Tim Lebbon

  Goytre

  July 2012

  Prologue

  Sometimes it’s best to leave memories alone. They’ve already been set in amber, slightly blurred, slightly tinted; they’ve already been through a dozen revisions, each more gentle unless the mood has been bitter, each more kind to the actual fact until the fact itself becomes personal legend — a nugget of truth embellished by the telling, the remembering, the lying in bed and wondering what had happened, what went wrong, what went right.

  Photographs are the same.

  Take an old one, somewhat crinkled, maybe faded, maybe touched with aging brown, and there’s a scene there (in amber) despite the truth the camera saw. The odd dress, the puzzling expression, the ought-to-be familiar background that nudges but never quite comes home. Turning it does no good. Holding it up to the light only makes you squint. Looking on the back doesn’t prove a thing. It raises at the end more questions than it ever can answer, and so is put away, or thrown away, or simply forgotten.

  Callum Davidson thinks I’m crazy. He’s told me that a hundred times over the past seven days; every chance he gets, in fact, including calling me every night.

  I haven’t minded; I’ve only laughed.

  “So what did you find out?” he asked tonight. He hadn’t called this time; he didn’t have to. As soon as the theater had closed, receipts taken care of and staff sent home, he had come over wondering why I hadn’t shown up for the late show. The film was an old one, god-awful by repute and experience, and one of my personal, all-time favorites. There had been, he told me as he settled on the porch, glass in hand, whiskey in glass, exactly fifteen people in the audience, and none of them had the appreciation of the purely bad that we did.

  “Not a single genuine laugh,” he complained, looking out at the front yard, cocking his head when something muttered in the tree that made a hazard of the end of the drive, and which I’ve refused to trim or cut down for that very reason. “I shudder to think that they took the thing seriously.”

  “No sense of the fine,” I said from the other chair, feet up on the railing.

  “Damn right.”

  An automobile braked harshly in the middle of the street, sat for several seconds, and drifted off, almost silent.

  “An admirer?” he suggested, pointing his glass toward the car, eyebrow up in the tone of his voice.

  “If it was, you scared her off.”

  I didn’t look, but I know he mock-glared. He’s a large man, Callum is, in height as well as heft, a tumble of dark brown hair only making him seem taller. He owns the Regency Theater on Chancellor Avenue, and as such is sole proprietor of a great many of the village’s fantasies. He takes his job seriously, which was why he was here — to find out why I hadn’t been around, as I usually am when the work doesn’t go well and I need something to distract me.

  He sipped his drink.

  I reached down beside my chair and picked up a photograph album, placed it on my lap, touched its stained, red-leather cover with one finger, and drew away.

  Callum saw it. Sighed softly. Sipped again, and shifted.

  Another automobile ghosted past, one headlamp extinguished, music from its radio hanging in its wake.

  “He was a good man, Abe was,” Callum said at last, nodding toward the album. “A bit of a crank sometimes, but what the hell, right? A man his age, he had a right to be whatever he wanted.”

  A nightbird called out of the dark.

  A leaf floated from above the porch, was caught in the light that spilled from the living-room window like fog. I watched it waver, rock, vanish below the railing.

  In a tumbler on the other side of my chair, ice melted, clinked together, settled, and the glass sounded then as if it were cracking in half, slowly. I almost reached to take it up, changed my mind, and wondered how many others in the Station, remembering Abe Stockton, thought him a crank, or a fool, or someone who had just outlived his time. He was . . . had been . . . chief of police, just one in a long line of Stocktons who had made the Station their home, their family, the object and target of their protection. No one ever complained. It was, here in Oxrun, the natural order of things.

  But he was gone now. And the task of cleaning out his small house had fallen to me, probably because I’m the one who most listened to his stories, his gripes, put up with him and put his words down and let them be judged. In the process, which was taking forever because work, and reluctance, didn’t give me the time, I had uncovered several cartons of memorabilia tucked away in the attic. They’re now in my cellar, where Callum had discovered them last week.

  And in the discovery, found the album.

  It was an ordinary thing, like mothers and grandmothers keep in their desk drawers and closet shelves for dragging out at reunions, at exactly the time when no one wanted to be reminded how cute they looked in diapers and short pants, frilly dresses and pigtails. The cover was smooth and uncracked, with no lettering on either front, back, or spine. There weren’t many pages, and the photographs taped and cornered on them weren’t spectacular, just there. We spent a long time trying to figure out who was who, since neither Abe nor anyone else had bothered to scribble any information on them.

  “If you looked like that,” Callum had said, pointing to something that might have been a woman in a dress that reached in folds to the ground, “would you want the world to know you ever existed?”

  “Unkind,” I said.

  “Crap,” he answered.

  Then he noticed that the back cover was slightly fatter than the front. He probed a bit. He held it up to the light, shook it, rubbed it, and sliced open his thumb discovering a flap whose partially loose end was even with the in
ner spine.

  It took both of us ten minutes to stop the blood’s flow, another ten minutes to stop laughing at our helplessness.

  Inside the pocket the flap had concealed were photographs, and thin pages of thin writing done in ink that seemed impossibly fresh.

  Callum, holding up his damaged and ludicrously bandaged thumb, had announced that he had done the first bit; it was my tum now to do the second.

  “Thanks,” I’d muttered.

  “It behooves you,” he’d declared.

  “Screw off.”

  He’d laughed.

  And every night without fail, just before and after each show, and after closing time, he called to find out what, if anything, I’d learned.

  Tonight I had called him.

  He sniffed, sneezed, blew his nose, sneezed again. “I hate pollen,” he said, waving his glass at the air. “I hate air-conditioning. I hate sitting here with you when I know my one true love is out there somewhere, waiting for me to bash down her door, sweep her off the couch, and bear her wondrous lithe body up to heaven, in my arms.” He glowered at the night. “So. As long as I’m sacrificing all for you, you might as well let me know what the problem is.”

  I blinked. “I just asked you to come over. How did you know there’s a problem?”

  He gave me a look that told me to grow up. “If there wasn’t a problem, you jackass, you would’ve come to the theater and sat through that atrocious film with me. You called me, remember? You never call. Ergo, there’s a problem.”

  It would have been easy then to laugh, to pass with a smart remark, tell a joke, demand to know what his one true love would say when she saw him naked; it would have been easier still to close the album and put it down, pick up the tumbler and drain it while I watched the dark street and listened to the darkened village and waited for the night to bring me a moon.