Free Totentanz by Al Sarrantonio Page B

scream that he was screaming was ripped raw and
bleeding from his throat.
     

SEVEN
    Reggie felt someone's eyes on him.
    In the closet, with his comic collection
spread around him, something cold settled on his neck. But when he
turned, there was nothing to see. He brushed at his collar; the
washing-instruction labels on his shirts sometimes dug into the
back of his neck and irritated it. But the label had been ripped
out.
    A curl of cool air passed over him. Again he
turned from the closet to find nothing there. Even the window was
closed, the air conditioner off, since the day had stayed so
cool.
    I'm here . . . .
    The thought brushed across him, as that cold
breath had. Suddenly he felt dissociated from himself, as light as
air. He hadn't felt this way since the day he had been hit by the
truck. He was half in the world and half out of it; he felt like he
was back in the tunnel with those two figures, one reaching to
whisper horribly in his ear, the other watching impassively. And
then, as if a cloud had passed over him, the feeling was gone.
    He shrugged and turned back
to the closet. It was a small cubicle, barely a couple of feet
deep, but all the walls were lined with stacked comic books. These
were things he didn't even let the rest of the Three Musketeers put
their hands on. They were carefully arranged and cataloged, with
big hand-lettered labels his mother had helped him with (after she
had finished her calligraphy course and wanted to try it out), and
they were stacked according to date. Knowing that the really
expensive and famous comics were beyond him, and not really
interested in them anyway, he had started gathering some of the
more available, although weird, titles. He had all issues of Superman published in
the 80s, and he also had the whole short run of Nukla , about a superhero who got his
powers from a dose of lethal radiation. He had all of the Twilight Zone comics
published in the 1960s.
    The thing that separated him from other
collectors, though, and made him a blasphemer in most eyes, was
that he actually read his comics. As far as he was concerned, he
wasn't collecting so that someday he could unload the whole mess
and make some money—he collected comics simply because he loved
them. A lot of people didn't understand this, including Pup, who
couldn't see the use in doing anything unless you got something out
of it. He often asked Reggie why he was always taking his books out
of their protective glassine bags and reading them—"junking them
up" was the way Pup put it—and Reggie couldn't make Pup understand
that he did it because he loved them not for what they were as
possessions, but for what they were in themselves.
    "There's great artwork in these books, and
some of the stories are as good as the stuff you read in regular
books, and the way it all goes together makes it like nothing
else," he'd say, but Pup would give him that blank look,
half-put-on and half-serious, and Reggie would give up. Pup's
problem was that he had too much, since his parents seemed to own
half of Montvale and he got anything he whined for. "Too much,"
Reggie's mother always said, and no one had ever denied it.
    I'm here. . . .
    Reggie was lifting the last two books from
his "Toss-in" box, where he threw them after he'd finished reading
them and where they waited for him to re-file, when a cold hand
slipped around his neck and tightened slightly before letting go.
He gave a yell and jumped up, but there was no hand and no one
there for it to be attached to.
    The feeling that he was
back in the tunnel returned, and Reggie looked up to see in the
corner of the room, up near the ceiling, a pair of huge eyes
staring at him. They gazed unblinking until they faded, like the
Cheshire Cat, into the sharp corners of the ceiling and nothing was
there. I'm here, I'll be
here , he heard, and then the feeling of
dissociation disappeared as if it had never been, and he was
alone.
    A real shadow caught his eye at the window,
moving