Richard Matheson: Ride the Nightmare

Not only had the sonata record been in stock, there had been three different ones to choose from. Moreover, Chris had initiated a practice which, only later, other record stores began to utilize—that of offering unplayed records to customers. Until that time, Helen had always found what she was looking for on the shelves—the records, unsheathed, inserted directly into their cardboard jackets. Chris had taken the records out of the jackets and placed them alphabetically behind the counter in plastic envelopes. He had, in addition, moved the turntable behind the counter and connected it to the one booth so that the record might be heard without the danger of a customer injuring it.

Had it been a coincidence that no customers were in the store that afternoon? Sometimes, Helen thought so. Sometimes, contrariwise, she had the feeling that, in any case, they would have seen each other again. As it was, the absence of customers enabled him to ask her if she’d like to have a cup of coffee and she’d accepted.

Only now did she wonder if he had realized what she was beginning to feel, if he knew as clearly as she did, what was starting between them. Had he fought the desire to ask her out for that cup of coffee? Or had it seemed the thing to do; had he been lulled into ignoring or forgetting his past?

There seemed no answer to that. It had been done and everything had commenced which, now, had ended in a dead man being buried in the night.

The cup of coffee had led to an invitation to dinner by Helen; ostensibly to listen to some records Chris had mentioned, actually as an excuse to see him again. Chris had been hesitant about accepting—she remembered that now. (It seemed as if, now, a hundred different incidents were clarified.) He had only accepted when he’d seen that his apparent attempt to back out was embarrassing her.

Again, who was to blame? Would it have been better if he had ignored that embarrassment and not accepted anyway? At least, then, this horror might not have occurred. Had he been kind to accept that invitation—or weak, thinking more of her opinion of him than of the pain to which he might be exposing her?

None of which she was aware of at the time, of course. There was, at the time, only that sweetly uncomfortable sensation of allowing an attraction to become fatal. That burgeoning struggle between the impulse to love and the desire to remain unharmed. Not that she bore the scars of any past romantic wounds. Far from it. Men had not existed in her life to any degree. Her mother had tried, often enough, to change this. But men seemed to Helen, if not frightening, somehow uninviting. The only man she had ever given her heart to had left her mother for another woman. This had not enhanced, for Helen, the attractions of men.

This plus an undefined fear of sex through her teen years had always kept her to herself or with a group of girls. Occasionally, there had been dates, some of them enjoyable. Still, at those moments when conversation ended and dates expected physical affection. Helen was half-frightened, half repelled by the artificiality of the moment. Love, when she thought of it, seemed to her an emotion that needed size and scope, one which should envelop and beautifully so—not a feeling which one could forcibly arouse on the back seat of a car, a beer-can cluttered blanket on the sands.

Maybe it was Chris’s love and knowledge of music, Helen thought. His quiet refinement. Maybe it was his reticence bringing out what aggressiveness Helen had not completely repressed in herself. Something had to explain her asking him to dinner. More amazingly, something had to explain her anxiety for him to like her, for something more than friendship to develop between them.

Sometimes, she convinced herself that she was one of those females who never loved until the right man came along. At other times, with more logic, she decided it was probably closer to the truth that she was getting older and the desire for companionship was outdistancing timidity. It was not, she admitted to herself on those occasions, a union consummated in heaven. It was, under the circumstances of her life, simply a desirable and sensible relationship.

Whatever the explanation, her falling in love with Chris had been continuous and certain—to her, remarkably devoid of complications. Chris’s holding back she accepted as faint heart; she overlooked it. She loved him and was, soon, convinced that he loved her in return. It seemed a very positive enterprise.

Still, there had been little things—things she’d chosen to ignore or, worse, to rationalize. Things like Chris’s unwillingness to discuss his background. She tried, occasionally, to find out about his family but, outside of an infrequent comment about his mother, he was unwilling to talk about it.

One day, in talking with her mother about Chris, she had to admit that, not only did she not know where his relatives were, she didn’t even know who they were or if they existed at all. A few nights later, at dinner, her mother tried to get Chris to answer specific questions about this. He was uncomfortably reluctant about it and said little. Strangely (it seemed now), Helen didn’t question his reluctance but only felt a startled irritation with her mother. Later that night, she told her mother so. Her mother only shrugged and smiled.

“Well, if it’s a mystery man you want,” was all she said.

How fantastic that, until this moment, she had completely forgot about that incident. Forgotten that Chris always questioned, never answered. His past had all been unknown to her. She had accepted this lack of knowledge, feeling, in the security of her love, that she knew him just as well as if she were apprised of the statistical data of his past. These formed the surface of a man, she decided, not the core. The core, she felt, she understood. Had she been right? Did she really understand Chris? Was this revelation, for all its hideousness, only a belated filling in of really unimportant details? Was he still the man she’d believed she knew? Or had the filling in of his background revealed basic differences in him? In short, must she allow that she had been living with a stranger for all these years? This was the thought that tortured her in the dark silence of—

Silence.

She was chilled with the sudden awareness. That meant that Chris had finished digging the grave. Now he was lowering the body into it. In a moment or two, he would be…

She shuddered as the first shovelful of dirt was thrown. She sat there rigidly, listening, all the past swallowed in the black pain of the present. All she could think of now was that Helen Martin was lying in that grave too. She tried to think of something else but she couldn’t. There was only the one thought.

Helen Martin was dead.

Chris opened his eyes.

Overhead, a DC-7 was circling for International Airport. He listened to the burring stridency of its engines until the noise had faded. It was a dream, he told himself, but the thought did not deceive him.

Sluggishly, he turned his head and looked over at the clock on his bedside table. It was a little after eight. He stared at the second hand as it pointed at the numbers—eleven, twelve, one.

Exhaling, Chris turned his head and looked at the ceiling. He didn’t have to get up yet. For that matter he didn’t have to go to the store at all. Jimmy could handle it well enough without him. Maybe he wouldn’t go. Maybe he’d just—

Abruptly, he realized that Helen wasn’t in bed with him.

He pushed up on one elbow and looked around the room. Hastily, he threw the blankets back and dropped his legs across the edge of the mattress.

The floorboards were chilly beneath his feet. He shivered as he hurried across the room and opened the door. Stepping out into the hall, he looked into Connie’s room. The tension faded instantly.