“I thought I heard you scream, Russell, are you okay? Why is the door locked? You never lock the bathroom door, Russell.”
“I’ve got some bad gas pains, that’s all. I—I didn’t want to disturb you, honey. I’ll be out in a minute.”
He looked down to the floor and saw that the little bones had been moving while he spoke to his wife, gathering themselves together like a small herd of animals. They were arranging themselves into letters, like tiny runic symbols, which at first were indecipherable. But the more Russell stared at the configurations, he could read the message that was forming:
PUNISH WITH DEATH
He wanted to scream again, and he held the sound in his throat only by the greatest force of will. He could taste bile at the back of his mouth as he bent down and scooped up all the little white pieces, throwing them into the toilet and flushing it repeatedly, until all the bones were sucked into the small porcelain maelstrom.
Luckily, when he returned to bed, Mitzi was already asleep.
He could not bring himself to tell his wife about the delusions he had been suffering, and he was ashamed to call up a psychiatrist, especially someone he played golf with on occasion. Since no real, hard evidence, no proof actually existed, Russell had convinced himself that what had been happening to him was the product of an overworked mind, a heavily wracked, guilty conscience, and too much displaced imagination. And so he tried to ignore the messages which Tnen-Ku sent him: the warning headline on the New York Post which disappeared when he picked up the paper from the subway newsstand; the skull-like configuration of the coffee grounds in his cup at Nedick’s in Grand Central; the pair of dark eyes which seemed to be staring at him through the glass of the speedometer of his Monte Carlo; the familiar, half-whispering voice that he thought he could hear in the telephone in between the beeps of the touch-tone dial; the movie marquee he glanced at from the corner of his eye on 56th Street, which for a moment, until he had looked for a second time, had said: “Tnen-Ku Is Coming!”
Normally Russell Southers would have been greatly disturbed by the portents and omens jumping up unexpectedly from all parts of his everyday life. But he was becoming almost accustomed to the preternatural for one simple reason: he was losing his mind. Simply and totally. He just didn’t care anymore.
Let her come, goddamn it! he thought as he rode the train home that night. Let her come, ’cause I’m sure as shit ready for her…
The conductor called out his stop, and he stood up in ritual-commuter fashion, single-filing out of the car and onto the platform with his fellow riders. Descending the staircase to the parking lot below, Russell scanned the amassed cars for his white Monte Carlo where Mitzi would be waiting to pick him up. It was wedged in between a big Ford station wagon and a TR-7, and as Russell approached the familiar vehicle he was shocked to see the dark eyes and long straight hair of Tnen-Ku watching him from behind the wheel. His first impulse was to stop in shock and surprise, but instead he forced himself to walk naturally, even waving and smiling as he approached the car. Better, he thought, not to let the little shit think she had rattled him. He would take the element of surprise and twist it back into her face. Surely the girl would not expect him to act so naturally.
He tried to keep thoughts of Mitzi from his mind, tried not to think about what that young brat might have done with his wife so that she could be replaced behind the wheel. No, it was better to concentrate on what must be done…
“Hello, Second-Papa Russell…” she said as he opened the passenger’s side door and slid in beside her.
She was smiling and leaning forward as though she would like him to kiss her. The little tramp! Russell looked past her face to her slim neck, then reached out and wrapped his fingers around it. As he began to squeeze and he felt her struggle helplessly under his grip, he smiled slowly, feeling a wellspring of elation bubble through his mind.
“I’ve got you!” he screamed. “I’ve got you now, and you won’t get away this time!”
Tnen-Ku opened her mouth, no longer a tart, sly curve to her young lips, but a silent circle of panic and pain. Russell tightened his grip on her neck and began to yank her back and forth. His hands and forearms were enveloped in a numbness, an absence of sensation, as though he were watching someone else’s hands strangling the darkly tanned woman-child.
As her face seemed to become bloated and puffy, the color of her cheeks turning gray and her bottomless eyes bulging whitely, Russell’s other senses seemed to desert him. The lights from the station parking lot grew dim, and he could barely discern the features of the dying face in front of him. He could hear nothing but the pounding of his own pulse behind his ears and was not aware of the excited shouts of people who were crowding around his Monte Carlo. Nor did he feel the strong, capable hands grabbing him, separating him from his dead wife, pulling him from the car.
Hitting the hard surface of the parking lot, Russell looked up at the ragged oval of faces peering down at him. Someone called for the police as he lay still, feeling the shadows of evening and fear crawl across his eyes. When the sound of the sirens pierced the night, Russell began to scream, spiraling down into the mind-darkness of defeat.
Somewhere in Manhattan, someone opened to a full-page ad in The Times Magazine.
THE NEW RAYS
by M. John Harrison
Horror and science fiction are by no means mutually exclusive, and when a story does cross genre lines, the results are often memorably frightening—as witness “The New Rays.” Of course, “The New Rays” is not typical science fiction—but then, M. John Harrison’s fantasy/horror stories can scarcely be termed traditional, either. A question often asked of editors is, “Why did you choose this particular story?” In this case because, after reading “The New Rays” before going to bed, it gave me recurrent nightmares of the most disquieting unpleasantness. Harrison accepted this as a compliment: “I’m glad (if you see what I mean) that ‘The New Rays’ gave you nightmares; it was built out of a couple of mine, and if you can spread it around a little…”
When not spreading nightmares about, M. John Harrison amuses himself by running where it’s level and by rock-climbing where it’s not. Born in 1945 near Catesby Hall, Harrison was educated at Rugby and lived for several years in London. Between 1968-75 he served as literary editor of the New Wave science fiction magazine, New Worlds. Harrison sold his first story in 1966 and until recently was primarily considered a science fiction writer, through such well-regarded novels as The Committed Men and The Centauri Device and the collection, The Machine in Shaft Ten. His most recent novel is In Viriconium, the third novel of a sequence that includes The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings. Harrison lives with his wife Di in a cottage in the Holme Valley, on the edge of the Peak District National Park. A new collection of his short fiction would be most welcome.
When I first arrived here it was after a hideous journey. We were ten hours on the train, which stopped and started constantly at provincial stations and empty sidings. It was packed with young conscripted soldiers shouting and singing or else staring desperately out of the windows as if they wished they had the courage to jump. We got one cup of coffee at a halt in the Midlands. In the confusion of getting back into our seats I took out the little gilt traveling clock which W.B. had given me the first time I was ill, and somehow lost it. A young boy pushing his way down the carriage helped us look for it. For a moment he seemed to forget where he was; then he looked round suddenly and lurched off. I was inconsolable. Two nights in succession I had dreamed the name of a street, Agar Grove.