Gallery of Horror by Charles L. Grant

Author:Charles L. Grant [Grant, Charles L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Cycling, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Sports & Recreation, Horror Tales; American, Horror
ISBN: 9780451455154
Google: E3aqQgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0451455150
Publisher: Roc
Published: 1984-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

In the lovely April evening that Russell Smithson, Jim Rawley, and their many macho cohorts assemble their front-wheel-drive pickups at Sam Kelsall's feed store, here to load their shotguns, check out their spotlights, and bolster one another's fidgety courage, Mary carries Tiffany to the hospital to warn Amadeus Howell and the other inmates to escape. She also places a long-distance call to the highwaypatrol headquarters in Pueblo, Colorado, three hours away on the sagebrush-punctuated western periphery of the Great Plains. Will representatives of the patrol arrive in time to beard the male townsfolk at their ill-organized vigilantism? No. But by the time of the actual assault every last one of the bewildered hebephrenics has already fled .

Amadeus, honorary president of their Fenris Society, leads the other patients up into the snow-mantled peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range.

(Slavering like beasts, they lope along on all fours under a gibbous moon.) Meanwhile, Russell and his revengeful henchmen, unaware that Mary and Tiffany are huddling inside the building, blast away at the walls with buckshot and mull the various methods by which they might be able to burn the hospital to the ground. They know in their bones that at this point in the proceedings a conflagration is obligatory, but no one has yet determined how to set the bleak, imposing structure afire.

Burnt-out matches litter the roadside, and the aroma of randomly splashed gasohol emanates in waves from the building's foundations. Mrs.

Hutton's institution will not catch. Finally, sirens screaming, four state patrol cars come hot-rodding into Carrion City. Almost simultaneously Mary appears on the battlements with Tiffany in her arms, an Opheliaesque madonna high above the shameful anarchy of the townsfolk. Abashed by this brave and melancholy show, Russell borrows a bullhorn and begins to talk Mary down by reciting from long-repressed memory the entire first part of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Twenty minutes before he has finished, the state troopers and Russell's colleagues-in-arms have all departed for home .

The siege is over. The Smithsons are reunited. But at what cost?

Patientless, the hospital must temporarily close its doors and release its staff. Mary, more fortunate than most, receives an interim appointment (salaried) to the board of the Helen Hidalgo Hutton Benevolent Foundation. Soon thereafter Russell learns that on the basis of his first two chapters an agent of the Wealthy Ghostwriters School, Inc. has negotiated a six-figure advance from a reputable New York publishing house for The Autobiography of Amadeus Howell, which will be marketed as a novel. He has eighteen months in which to deliver the finished manuscript. Mary disguises her chagrin as best she can. Elated but calculating, Russell hires a light aircraft and the services of an experienced bush pilot to help him find the absconded patients, among whom resides the only living being who can bring his incomplete narrative to a fitting and truthful end. During the third week of Russell's absence (his search has not gone well at all), Tiffany is delivered of three tiny malamute puppies with endearing creamcolored eyebrows.

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