It was a woman.
She stood by the window in a white silk dress that could neither compete with nor distract from her ethereal beauty, her porcelain skin. When the lights came on, she turned toward me, eyes widening, lips parting slightly. Her breasts swayed ever so slightly as she gracefully raised a bare arm to offer me a lily. “Hello, Donald,” she said huskily. “I’m yours for the night.” She was absolutely beautiful.
And dead, of course.
Not twenty minutes later I was hammering on Courtney’s door. She came to the door in a Pierre Cardin dressing gown and from the way she was still cinching the sash and the disarray of her hair I gathered she hadn’t been expecting me.
“I’m not alone,” she said.
“I didn’t come here for the dubious pleasures of your fair white body.” I pushed my way into the room. But couldn’t help remembering that beautiful body of hers, not so exquisite as the dead whore’s, and now the thoughts were inextricably mingled in my head, death and Courtney, sex and corpses, a Gordian knot I might never be able to untangle.
“You didn’t like my surprise?” She was smiling openly now, amused.
“No, I fucking did not!”
I took a step toward her. I was shaking. I couldn’t stop fisting and unfisting my hands.
She fell back a step. But that confident, oddly expectant look didn’t leave her face. “Bruno,” she said lightly. “Would you come in here?”
A motion at the periphery of vision. Bruno stepped out of the shadows of her bedroom. He was a muscular brute, pumped, ripped, and as black as the fighter I’d seen go down earlier that night. He stood behind Courtney, totally naked, with slim hips and wide shoulders and the finest skin I’d ever seen.
And dead.
I saw it all in a flash.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Courtney!” I said, disgusted. “I can’t believe you. That you’d actually… That thing’s just an obedient body. There’s nothing there—no passion, no connection, just… physical presence.”
Courtney made a kind of chewing motion through her smile, weighing the implications of what she was about to say. Nastiness won.
“We have equity now,” she said.
I lost it then. I stepped forward, raising a hand, and I swear to God I intended to bounce the bitch’s head off the back wall. But she didn’t flinch—she didn’t even look afraid. She merely moved aside, saying, “In the body, Bruno. He has to look good in a business suit.”
A dead fist smashed into my ribs so hard I thought for an instant my heart had stopped. Then Bruno punched me in my stomach. I doubled over, gasping. Two, three, four more blows. I was on the ground now, rolling over, helpless and weeping with rage.
“That’s enough, baby. Now put out the trash.”
Bruno dumped me in the hallway.
I glared up at Courtney through my tears. She was not at all beautiful now. Not in the least. You’re getting older, I wanted to tell her. But instead I heard my voice, angry and astonished, saying, “You… you goddamn, fucking necrophile!”
“Cultivate a taste for it,” Courtney said. Oh, she was purring! I doubted she’d ever find life quite this good again. “Half a million Brunos are about to come on the market. You’re going to find it a lot more difficult to pick up living women in not so very long.”
I sent away the dead whore. Then I took a long shower that didn’t really make me feel any better. Naked, I walked into my unlit suite and opened the curtains. For a long time I stared out over the glory and darkness that was Manhattan.
I was afraid, more afraid than I’d ever been in my life.
The slums below me stretched to infinity. They were a vast necropolis, a neverending city of the dead. I thought of the millions out there who were never going to hold down a job again. I thought of how they must hate me—me and my kind—and how helpless they were before us. And yet. There were so many of them and so few of us. If they were to all rise up at once, they’d be like a tsunami, irresistible. And if there was so much as a spark of life left in them, then that was exactly what they would do.
That was one possibility. There was one other, and that was that nothing would happen. Nothing at all.
God help me, but I didn’t know which one scared me more.
THE DEAD KID
by Darrell Schweitzer
Darrell Schweitzer is the author of the novels The Shattered Goddess and The Mask of the Sorcerer, as well as numerous short stories, which have been collected in Transients, Nightscapes, Refugees from an Imaginary Country, and Necromancies and Netherworlds. Well-known as an editor and critic, he co-edited the magazine Weird Tales for several years, and is currently co-editing anthologies with Martin H. Greenberg for DAW Books, such as The Secret History of Vampires.
Schweitzer says one of the inspirations for “The Dead Kid” was the true story of the “Boy in the Box,” whose corpse was found in a woods in northeast Philadelphia in 1957. The case remains unsolved, and there are police detectives who have obsessed over it throughout their entire careers and into their retirement. “They don’t even know his name,” Schweitzer says. “He is a complete mystery.”
Schweitzer joked that given the mystery surrounding this case, the zombie tale he imagined is as good an explanation as any. Turns out that an informant—who is deeply unreliable—said that the boy’s name was Jonathan… just like in this story.
So perhaps he has the real answer after all.
I
It’s been a lot of years, but I think I’m still afraid of Luke Bradley, because of what he showed me.
I knew him in the first grade, and he was a tough guy even then, the sort of kid who would sit on a tack and insist it didn’t hurt, and then make you sit on the same tack (which definitely did hurt) because you were afraid of what he’d do if you didn’t. Once he found a bald-faced hornet nest on tree branch, broke it off, and ran yelling down the street, waving the branch around and around until finally the nest fell off and the hornets came out like a cloud. Nobody knew what happened after that because the rest of us had run away.
We didn’t see Luke in school for a couple days afterwards, so I suppose he got stung rather badly. When he did show up he was his old self and beat up three other boys in one afternoon. Two of them needed stitches.
When I was about eight, the word went around the neighborhood that Luke Bradley had been eaten by a werewolf. “Come on,” said Tommy Hitchens, Luke’s current sidekick. “I’ll show you what’s left of him. Up in a tree.”
I didn’t believe any werewolf would have been a match for Luke Bradley, but I went. When Tommy pointed out the alleged remains of the corpse up in the tree, I could tell even from a distance that I was looking at a t-shirt and a pair of blue-jeans stuffed with newspapers.
I said so and Tommy flattened me with a deft right hook, which broke my nose, and my glasses.
The next day, Luke was in school as usual, though I had a splint on my nose. When he saw me, he called me a “pussy” and kicked me in the balls.
Already he was huge, probably a couple of years older than the rest of the class. Though he never admitted it, everybody knew he’d been held back in every grade at least once, even kindergarten.