Offbeat Read online

  RICHARD MATHESON

  OFFBEAT

  UNCOLLECTED STORIES

  Edited by

  WILLIAM F. NOLAN

  Introduction by

  DAVID J. SCHOW

  Afterword by the Author

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Offbeat: Uncollected Stories

  First published by Subterranean Press in 2002

  This edition first published 2017

  Copyright © 2002, 2017 by The Estate of Richard Matheson

  Introduction © 2017 by David J. Schow

  Afterword © 2002 by Richard Matheson

  “Two O’Clock Session” © 1991 by Richard Matheson

  “Always Before Your Voice” © 1999 by Richard Matheson

  “Relics” © 1999 by Richard Matheson

  “And in Sorrow” © 2000 by Richard Matheson

  “The Prisoner” © 2001 by Richard Matheson

  “Blunder Buss” © 1984 by Richard Matheson

  “And Now I’m Waiting” © 1983 by Richard Matheson

  “The Last Blah in the Etc.” © 2002 by Richard Matheson

  “Phone Call From Across the Street” © 2002 by Richard Matheson “Maybe You Remember Him” © 2002 by Richard Matheson

  “Mirror, Mirror . . .” © 2002 by Richard Matheson

  “Life Size” © 2002 by Richard Matheson

  “That Was Yesterday” © 2002 by Richard Matheson

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  Cover by Henry Petrides

  INTRODUCTION

  Matheson, Senior

  I have forgotten whether it was an article or editorial or introduction, but many years ago I once wrote a piece furiously stumping I Am Legend as one of the two most critically fundamental vampire novels of the 20th century; my other choice was Leslie Whitten’s much more obscure Progeny­ of the Adder. This pair of ground-breakers did the heavy lifting, modernizing the mythos of the bloodsucker and providing a sturdy foundation for every derivative work that followed. There are other classics, sure; some arguably more popular, but none which did not bootstrap the writers who planted the flag, who innovated rather than recycled—and who got there first.

  Richard Matheson had a knack for that kind of thing: simple prescience, and a common sense approach to the “single aberrant idea” that made him a mainstay go-to scenarist­ for Rod Serling. The twist, the potent “what-if.” The essence of a Matheson tale is the oft-cited “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances” springboard; everything is recognizable except for that one little nudge that skews the story into nightmare territory. Call it Twilight Zone thinking.

  Along with his cohort and brother-from-another-mother Charles Beaumont, Matheson helped to gift an entire generation of eager drive-in customers with a refreshed Edgar Allan Poe canon.

  The Matheson landmarks and accomplishments are legion, and you don’t need me to cite chapter and verse. His influence was global. He remains a titan.

  So whether you call it science fiction, or horror, or fantasy doesn’t matter all that much, when what we’re talking about here is plain, damned good writing, reliably delivered, decade after decade.

  I was a total stranger when I first contacted Richard, by mail, seeking simple-minded biographical data so I could cobble together an entry on him for an encyclopedia called The Fantasy Almanac, by Jeff Rovin (Dutton, 1979). He surprised me by responding with a hand-written letter detailing his lineage and family—directly from the pen of the man himself!

  “Richard Burton Matheson was born in 1926 in Allendale, New Jersey, the son of Bertolf Mathieson and Fanny Svengningsen, both of Oslo, Norway. A 1949 graduate of the University of Missouri (taking a degree in journalism), Matheson’s first sale was the short story ‘Born of Man and Woman’ (later the title of his first collection), which was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1950 . . .”

  . . . and so on. He was twenty-four years old when he made that sale, and had already sweated out World War Two as an infantryman. Insert brief pause here, so you may reflect upon what you were doing at that age, what your aspirations or accomplishments might have been. Now imagine a world where you cannot Google this data instantly, that it may feel more special to you, as it did to me.

  Many of his novels stand as benchmarks of their respective categories to this day—Matheson was, after all, the writer who tried to beat Shirley Jackson at her own game with Hell House—but it was his short fiction that particularly enthralled me during a time when I began to attempt the very same discipline myself. To this day, short stories don’t get the respect of the “heavies”—novels—and I am frequently compelled to remind people that once upon a time, when Beaumont published in Playboy or Bradbury had a new tale in the Saturday Evening Post, damned near everybody was talking about that story the next day, at the lunch counter or ’round the water cooler.

  The accepted wisdom of the times was that one broke ice with short fiction; then, if luck or taste prevailed, a nascent writer might step up to novel-length in a time-consuming, counter-intuitive, lock-stepped fashion that was just the way things were done, in the glacial timeline of publishing.

  Matheson blew that thinking away by competently producing not only fiction short and long-form, but teleplays and screenplays as well, becoming one of the very few writers who could adroitly juggle all forms. As influence, he quickly became omnipresent.

  It was in the early 1990s, while a flurry of Richard’s Westerns (old and new) were flowering to a fresh audience, that he resurrected a project titled 7 Steps to Midnight. Our mutual publisher at the time sent along an advance proof of this “new” Matheson novel, which upon reading seemed a bit more vintage to me. Sure enough: its first iteration had been ten years earlier, when Matheson was touring Europe; his itinerary had become his character’s. But the astonishing part was that the publisher, seemingly tone-deaf, requested that I provide a blurb for the book. I had just published my first novel and was staggered by the sheer wrongness of the purported need for a new book by no less than The Matheson to be shilled by the likes of me—if anything, the flip-side rule applied; my work stood to benefit far more from a Matheson quotation. The situation was so embarrassing that I never asked him for sell copy, ever.

  A year or two later, I got invited to dinner, instead.

  Joe Lansdale was along for that ride (Joe was visiting L.A., staying at my apartment at the time) as well as Richard­ Christian Matheson, whom I have now known for so long that I can’t remember a world without him in it. After dessert we repaired to my Hollywood rathole, where I was subjected to the surreal sight of Richard Matheson himself, checking out my library and pulling books while making little humming noises. (I have never been prouder, or more relieved, by already having an entire Matheson shelf). He plucked my Gold Medal paperback edition of I Am Legend from its fellows and kindly inscribed it to me. Later—later, when I could afford more pricey hardcovers, I dutifully accumulated a few more signatures, autographs, inscriptions, the byproduct of subsequent get-togethers versus other favored titles, but I still have that little softcover with the unmistakable aroma of foxed paper, and it’s a personal treasure, a souvenir of that bygone time.

  Across the ensuing years we encountered each other many more times, and there was always the dispensation of being treated not as another reader or fan,
but (as Robert Bloch once put it) as a “colleague.”

  Now that is empowering and encouraging.

  Richard died, as our fathers and icons do, leaving us with the burden and duty of encomia. This is where it gets tricky. Hyperbole for the dead is too facile, too easy, and more or less inevitable once a career is celebrated posthumously. But I know that Richard was notoriously critical of much of his work—particularly adaptations made from it—and would scoff at or dismiss many of the adjectives tossed around too freely in his wake. It follows therefore that not every entry was a masterwork or brilliant classic, since that umbrella denies the sense of exploration, experimentation, and yes, occasional failure that denotes a lifetime invested in the pursuit of good storytelling.

  Yet at the same time, the hazard of under-sell looms threateningly, when assessing the status of an celebrated figure. Statistics can (and will) be cited until your eyes bleed.

  Offbeat—back in print following a hiatus of about a decade and a half—presents (for the most part) the younger Richard on the rise, still making his bones, ever-experimenting. You can read Richard’s own Afterword for pedigree.

  Among those refugee tales presented here (like the exhibits in “Relics”; please remember to keep your children in line) are:

  “And Now I’m Waiting”—the source material for one of my very favorite Twilight Zone episodes was the outright horror tale (seen here) which evolved into a comedy for TV. It was still unpublished when the episode made from it (“A World All His Own”) was broadcast as the season one closer to the series. It was also, as Matheson himself noted, “the only TZ episode in which one of the characters broke in on Rod’s final narration and altered it!”

  “And Now I’m Waiting” first saw print in the eponymous Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1983, as did “Blunder Buss” the following year—another tale that shows Matheson’s lighter side to advantage.

  “Relics” (first appeared in Cemetery Dance #31, 1999) is another of Matheson’s delicious black-as-pitch ruminations that coils back on itself from where you think it might have been going.

  “The Prisoner”’s first publication was as a 2001 Gauntlet Press chapbook whose cover illustration was rendered by a friend and ally of mine, Marcelo “Buddy” Martinez (1962-2009), one of the progenitors of the short-lived Iniquities Magazine … which no doubt would have brought new Matheson to the world had it survived beyond three issues. “The Prisoner” tackles another of Matheson’s favorite topics, blurred identity, in a scenario that deliberately evokes Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” … until it plunges into a dark, a science-fictional detour.

  “Always Before Your Voice” was a trunk story Matheson resurrected on behalf of California Sorcery (ed. William F. Nolan & William Schafer, Cemetery Dance, 1999)—another mainstream tale about frustration and desire, written in 1954 while he was writing The Shrinking Man in a rented house on Long Island.

  How many baseball stories did Matheson write? Answer: one, and you’ll find it here as “Maybe You Remember Him.”

  Intrepid Matheson bibliographers searching in vain for a story titled “All and Only Silence” will find it here under its original title, “The Last Blah in the Etc.”

  “Two O’Clock Session” was written for inclusion in a Ray Bradbury tribute volume, The Bradbury Chronicles (ed. William F. Nolan & Martin H. Greenberg, ROC, 1991). Nobody-but-nobody working in the realm of fantastic fiction from the 1950s onward was able to escape the Bradbury influence, including members of Matheson’s own Green Hand and the Group. In the late 1990s, Matheson claimed a personal moratorium on writing short fiction “since 1970.” Here, he is back at full strength, refreshed and ready to deliver a short, sharp shock not unlike those that became the stock in trade of his son, Richard Christian.

  So, full circle: after nearly thirty years since being asked, here I am, blurbing Richard Matheson at last, with what I hope is at least a passing mock of humility.

  This is what I take away: Richard Matheson was a friend. His uncommon kindness and (often-invisible) generosity was a real basis for genuine respect. And the reason we do books such as this one is to keep him alive in our hearts. It is up to the reader to judge whether we have honored his legacy to a standard that Richard himself might have appreciated. He might have even made one of those little humming noises.

  David J. Schow

  December 2016

  Special thanks to John Scoleri for all things Matheson.

  David J. Schow is a multiple-award-winning writer who lives in Los Angeles. The latest of his nine novels is a hardboiled extravaganza called The Big Crush (2017). The newest of his nine short story collections is a monster-fest titled DJSturbia (2016). He has written extensively for film (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Hills Run Red) and television (Masters of Horror, Mob City). One of Fangoria magazine’s most popular columnists, he is also the world’s foremost authority on a terribly obscure 1960s TV series, The Outer Limits. As editor he has curated both Robert Bloch (The Lost Bloch, three volumes, 1999-2002) and John Farris (Elvisland, 2004) as well as assembling the legendary anthology Silver Scream (1988). His recent nonfiction works include The Art of Drew Struzan (2010) and The Outer Limits at 50 (2014). He can be seen on various DVDs as expert witness or documentarian on everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon and Psycho to I, Robot and King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen. Thanks to him, the word “splatterpunk” has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2002.

  For all the good Mathesons, for all the good years.

  Relics

  The sun hadn’t made a move all morning.

  It was hiding behind a thick carpet of clouds that was stretched over the sky. Waves of damp chilling wind swept over the sidewalks as the little group marched in scattered formation.

  Her eyes roamed listlessly over the ranks of her pupils.

  Already she was exhausted and they hadn’t even gone into the museum yet. She lifted her gaze and looked at the massive grey building they approached.

  “Stay together!” she ordered for what seemed the hundredth time.

  She wanted to strangle all the little boys for running into the streets and hiding behind trees and popping out to frighten the little girls. She wanted to strangle the little girls for shrieking in delight when it happened. Be a teacher, Mother told me, she thought, overwhelmed by irritation.

  The pupils bunched together momentarily and hurried on across the wide square. As they reached the building, they flung themselves up the wide marble steps in a frontal attack on the entrance.

  “Stay together!” she howled after them.

  She hurried up the steps and swished through the door. The children were dispersed and ogling in the high-ceilinged lobby. She flew about, huddling them in a mass like a herder flocking sheep.

  “You’ll all stop this nonsense or back to school we’ll go,” she threatened breathlessly as she counted heads and glared at innocent blandness.

  They were all present.

  “Now stay here,” she ordered, “I’m going to look at the directory.”

  She started away, turned. “Don’t move!”

  In front of the high white-lettered directory she stood breathing heavily.

  “Children,” she muttered, scanning the words. Reptiles, she read with her lips and thought of the children again. The prospect of the long maddening ride ahead, back to the school made her groan inside. Her eyes flitted over the letters­.

  Behind her came the sound of someone flopping soundly on the floor. She turned, jade-eyed, to see what new outrages were being committed.

  The army had cracked.

  Three boys ran a furious game of Catch Me Catch Me around a case of ancient beadwork.

  Two girls stood far across the lobby speaking to the attendant at the souvenir stand.

  Two other boys were making a serious attempt to pry up a tile with their knives.

  The rest were drifting about like hawser-cut sh
ips in erratic currents.

  She groaned deeply and rushed over the dark floor. Angrily she dragged up the two probers and shook them. Her urgent hiss sped to the three boys skidding around the exhibit case. They scuffed back into the tightening group, cringing under her cold-eyed surveillance.

  “Stay. Together,” she said. She turned away and moved toward the stand.

  The two little girls turned as she approached.

  “We were just asking,” one of them said timidly.

  “I told you to stay with the what are you pointing at?”

  She looked around and her mouth dropped.

  “You just went a little while ago,” she snapped.

  “I have to again,” said the little girl.

  She slumped in disgusted weariness. Go one, go all, she thought. “Pity’s sake,” she droned.

  She bought a guide book before escorting the girls back to the restless assemblage.

  “How many have to, I say have to go to the bathroom?” she inquired.

  All of them. Why do I bother asking? she thought, they’ll probably get more enjoyment out of flushing toilets than they do out of all the centuries on display.

  A weary pied piper of the glands, she led them across the lobby. She dropped off the little boys with a harsh gestured reminder that they absolutely had to be back in the hall in five minutes, no more. She watched them fly through the swinging door like a charging herd of horses. Inside, the muffled whoops and giggles of lifted restraint billowed high.

  She grunted in submission and ushered the girls through the next entrance down.

  Inside the anteroom she sank down on a seat and moaned. She looked, half asleep, at the opposite wall. The guide book slipped from her grasp and thumped on the floor.