Tom Allen & Mitchell Galen - Tales From the Darkside.pdf - Tom Allen & Mitchell Galen - widez2

TALES FROM THE

DARKSIDE

Tom Allen and Mitchell Galen

America’s Most Frightening TV Show!

VOLUME ONE

CONTENTS

Story 1: THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE by Michael McDowell

Story 2: THE WORD PROCESSOR OF THE GODS by Stephen King

Story 3: A CASE OF THE STUBBORMS by Robert Bloch

Story 4: INSIDE THE CLOSET by Michael McDowell

Story 5: PRINTER’S DEVIL by Ron Goulart

Story 6: LEVITATION by Joseph Payne Brennan

Story 7: HALLOWEEN CANDY by Michael McDowell

Story 8: THE SATANIC PIANO by Carl Jacobi

Story 9: SLIPPAGE by Michael P. kube-McDowell

Story 10: THE SHRINE by Pamela Sargent

Story 11: IN THE CARDS by Michael McDowell

Story 12: THE BITTEREST PILL by Frederik pohl

Story 13: HUSH! by Zenna Henderson

Story 14: THE CIRCUS by Sydmey J. Bounds

Story 15: DISTANT SIGNALS by Andrew Weiner

Story 16: THE ODDS by Michael McDowell

It’s not quite a smile. “Still here, Richard,” her mouth said to him.

“And don’t you forget it.”

He typed: MY WIFE’S PICTURE HANGS ON THE WEST WALL OF MY STUDY.

He looked at the words and liked them no more than he liked the picture itself. He punched the

DELETE button. The words vanished. Now there was nothing at all on the screen but the steadily pulsing

cursor.

He looked up at the wall and saw that his wife’s picture had also vanished.

He sat there for a very long time—it felt that way, at least—looking at the wall where the picture had

been. What finally brought him out of his daze of utter unbelieving shock was the smell from the CPU—a

smell he remembered from his childhood as clearly as he remembered the Magic Eight Ball that Roger

had broken because it wasn’t his. The smell was essence of electric-train transformer. When you smelled

that, you were supposed to turn the thing off so it could cool down.

And so he would.

In a minute.

He got up and walked over to the wall on legs that felt numb. He ran his fingers over the Armstrong

paneling. The picture had been here, yes, right here. But it was gone now, and the hook it had hung on

was gone and there was no hole where he had screwed the hook into the paneling.

Gone.

The world abruptly went gray, and he staggered backward, thinking dimly that he was going to faint, like

an actress in a bad melodrama. He reached down into his crotch and squeezed himself, suddenly and

brutally. The pain was terrible, but the world came back into sharp focus.

He looked from the blank place on the wall where Lina’s picture had been to the word processor his

dead nephew had cobbled together.

“You might be surprised,” he heard Nordhoff saying in his mind, “You might be surprised, you might be

surprised.” Oh, yes; if some kid in the fifties could discover particles that travel backward through time,

you might be surprised what your genius of a nephew could do with a bunch of discarded word

processor elements and some wires and electrical components.

You might be so surprised that you’d feel as if you were going insane.

The transformer smell was richer, stronger now, and he could see wisps of smoke rising from the vents

in the CRT housing. The noise from the CPU was louder, too. It was time to turn it off—smart as Jon

had been, he apparently hadn’t had time to work out all the bugs in this crazy thing.

But had he known it would do this?

Feeling like a figment of his own imagination, Richard sat down in front of the screen again and typed:

MY WIFE’S PICTURE IS ON THE WALL, WHERE IT WAS BEFORE.

He looked at this for a moment, looked back at the key board and then hit the EXECUTE key.

He looked at the wall.

Lina’s picture was back, right where it had always been.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

He rubbed a hand up his cheek, looked at the screen (blank again except for the cursor) and then typed:

MY FLOOR IS BARE

He then touched the INSERT button and typed:

EXCEPT FOR 12 SPANISH DOUBLOONS IN A SMALL COTTON SACK.

He pressed EXECUTE.

He looked at the floor, where there was now a small white-cotton sack with a drawstring top.

“Dear Jesus,” he heard himself saying in a voice that wasn’t his. “Dear

Jesus, dear good Jesus—“

He might have gone on invoking the Savior’s name for minutes or hours if the word processor had not

started steadily beeping at him. Flashing across the top of the screen was the word OVERLOAD.

Richard turned off everything and left his study as if all the devils of hell were after him.

But before he went, he scooped up the small drawstring sack and put it in his pants pocket.

When he called Nordhoff that evening, a cold November wind was playing tuneless bagpipes in the trees

outside. Seth’s group was downstairs, murdering a Bob Seger tune. Lina was at Our Lady of Perpetual

Sorrows, playing bingo.

“Does the machine work?” Nordhoff asked.

“It works, all right,” Richard said. He reached into his pocket and brought out a coin. It was heavy and

crudely uneven, wavering from an eighth of an inch on one side to almost a quarter of an inch on the

other. A conquistador’s head was embossed on one side, along with the date 1587. “It works in ways

you wouldn’t believe.” He giggled. He put a hand to his mouth, but the giggle came through anyway.

“I might,” Nordhoff said evenly. “He was a very bright boy, and he loved you very much, Mr.

Hagstrom. But be careful.

A boy is only a boy, bright or otherwise, and love can be misdirected.

Do you take my meaning?”

Richard didn’t take his meaning at all. He felt hot and feverish. That day’s paper had listed the current

market price of gold at $514 an ounce. The coins had weighed out at an average 4.5 ounces each on his

postal scale. At the current market rate, that added up to $27,756. And he guessed that was perhaps

only a quarter of what he could realize for those coins if he sold them as coins.

“Mr. Nordhoff, could you come over here? Now? Tonight?”

“No,” Nordhoff said. “I don’t think I want to do that, Mr. Hagstrom. I think this ought to stay between

you and Jon.”

“But—“

“Just remember what I said. For Christ’s sake, be careful.” There was a small click, and Nordhoff was

gone.

He found himself in his study again half an hour later, looking at the word processor. He touched the

ON/OFF key but didn’t turn it on. The second time Nordhoff had said it, Richard had heard him. “For

Christ’s sake, be careful.” Yes. He would have to be careful. A machine that could do such a thing- How

could a machine do such a thing?

He had no idea, but in a way, that was no bar at all to acceptance. It was, in fact, par for the course. He

was an English teacher and a sometime writer, not a technician, and he had a long history of not

understanding how things worked:

phonographs, gasoline engines, telephones, televisions, the flushing mechanism in his toilet. His life was a

history of understanding operations rather than principles. Was there any difference here, except in

degree?

He turned the machine on. As before, it said:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD!

JON.

He pushed EXECUTE, and the message from his nephew disappeared.

This machine is not going to work for long, he thought suddenly. He felt sure that Jon must have been

working on it when he died, confident that there was time; Uncle Richard’s birthday wasn’t for three

weeks, after all- But time had run out for Jon, and so this totally amazing word processor, which could

apparently insert new things or delete old things from the real world, smelled like a frying train

transformer and started to smoke after a few minutes.

Jon hadn’t had a chance to perfect it. He- Confident that there was time?

But that was wrong, and Richard knew it. Jon’s still, watchful face, the sober eyes behind the thick

spectacles . .

there was no confidence there, no belief in the fullness of time. What was the word that had occurred to

him earlier that day? Doomed. It wasn’t just a good word for Jon; it was the right word. That sense of

doom had hung about the boy so palpably that there had been times when Richard had wanted to hug

him, to tell him to lighten up a little bit, that sometimes there were happy endings and the good didn’t

always die young.

Then he thought of Roger’s throwing his Magic Eight Ball at the

sidewalk, throwing it just as hard as he could; he heard the plastic

splinter and saw the Eight Ball’s magic fluid—just water, after

all—running down the sidewalk. And this picture merged with a picture

of Roger’s dusty mongrel van, HAGSTROM’S

WHOLESALE DELIVERIES written on the side, plunging over the edge of some dusty, crumbling cliff

out in the country, hitting dead squat on its nose. He saw—though he didn’t want to—the face of his

brother’s wife disintegrate into blood and bone.

He saw Jon burning in the wreck, screaming, turning black.

No confidence. Always exuding that sense of time running out. And in the end, it had been Jon who

turned out to be right.

“What does that mean?” Richard muttered, looking at the blank screen.

Tom Allen & Mitchell Galen - Tales From the Darkside.pdf

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