Nasty Stories by Brian McNaughton

Nasty Stories by Brian McNaughton

Author:Brian McNaughton [McNaughton, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: terror, clive barker, Horror, stephen king, H.P. Lovecraft
ISBN: 9781434446701
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-04-08T07:00:00+00:00


THE DUNWICH LODGER

Dedicated to Benjamin Adams

* * * *

I thought I wouldn’t be sick after what we did with Old Man Gray, but the way Johnny was slamming the Dodge pickup over the ruts made me want to throw up so bad that I just pushed the door open.

“You goddamn moron!” He tromped on the brake and I banged my shoulder into the dashboard.

“I gotta—” He knew what I had to do, and he helped me with a shove out the door. Turning his wife into a whore, killing his father, and all the rest of it, that was okay, just so long as he didn’t get his precious pickup dirty.

Me, I never felt so dirty in my life, heaving on all fours, choking for air that was nothing but swamp-fog laced with gasoline fumes. When he turned off the engine—he was as bad as his father, so cheap he didn’t want to waste a nickel on gas—crickets and frogs hammered the night with a crazy chant.

I heard him get out. He always got the most noise he could out of his beloved steel-toed motorcycle boots. He even wore them with his three-piece suit at work. He stood over me, smoking a cigarette. “You about finished?”

I grabbed a handful of weeds and scrubbed my mouth. No, not weeds, it was mint growing by the roadside, and it was so sweet and clean and normal that I suddenly wanted to cry. I knew that would be all Johnny needed, so I held in the tears.

“Let’s just don’t do it, Johnny.” I hadn’t even known I was going to say that, it just squeezed out in a very small voice.

“Yeah, don’t do it. After all the other shit? Jesus!”

He didn’t sound as mad as I figured that would make him. Maybe he was having second thoughts. I had to lean on the truck when I stood up, my legs shook so much.

“Money isn’t everything,” I said.

“But it’ll do. Stop talking dumb and get in the fucking truck.”

He drove more carefully. I don’t think he was being considerate of me, or even of his precious axles, but that he was beginning to feel genuinely uneasy now that we were so close to his Daddy’s house. Red eyes flashed in the high beams, so many more of them than usual that I wondered if they were the foxes and raccoons they pretended to be.

“All I have to do is say one word,” he said, as if to convince himself. “After everything else, what’s that? It’s nothing. And the rest of it, that wasn’t so bad.”

“Yeah, it was real fun.”

“Don’t get sarcastic with me! It’s over, that’s all that matters, it’s behind us. The past—it’s like the doll you had when you were six, it’s like the scrape you got on your knee when you were ten, it ain’t there no more, it don’t exist, so why fuss about it?”

My husband had got philosophical since falling under Old Man Gray’s spell, and I didn’t like it.



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