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    Backteria: & Other Improbable Tales
    Backteria: & Other Improbable Tales
    Backteria: & Other Improbable Tales
    Ebook210 pages

    Backteria: & Other Improbable Tales

    By Richard Matheson

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    About this ebook

    An essential collection of rare tales of terror from the multi-award-winning Twilight Zone scripter and I Am Legend author—only available in ebook format.
     
    A researcher encounters an exotic new strain of “Backteria” that causes the infected person to vanish—leading the doctor on a path of discovery deep into a past he should have left buried.
     
    A simple “Haircut” that starts off as a routine trim becomes a dark and terrifying experience when a barber is confronted with a sick customer who seems otherworldly.
     
    A case of mistaken identity leads to a darkly farcical story of marriage, murder, and a love that knows no bounds in “Getting Together.”
     
    Backteria & Other Improbable Tales gathers these and sixteen more uncanny short stories from master storyteller Richard Matheson, “one of the great names in American terror fiction” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
     
    Stories include: “Backteria”, “He Wanted to Live”, “Life Size”, “Man with a Club”, “Professor Fritz and the Runaway House”, “Purge Among Peanuts”, “The Prisoner”, “The Last Blah in the ETC”, “Counterfeit Bills”, “1984 ½”, “Pride”, “Now Die In It”, “Leo Rising”, “Where There’s a Will” (written with Richard Christian Matheson), “Getting Together”, “Person to Person”, “CU: Mannix”, “Haircut”, “An Element Never Forgets”
     
    “The author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson.” —Stephen King
     
    “Perhaps no other living author is as responsible for chilling a generation with tantalizing nightmare visions.” —The New York Times
     
    “Matheson’s a writer who just has the special knack, the deft skill to imagine terrifying scenarios on any scale, large and small, and give them chilling possibility.” —Los Angeles Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 8, 2011
    ISBN9780795315824
    Backteria: & Other Improbable Tales
    Author

    Richard Matheson

    Richard Matheson was one of the great writers of modern science fiction and fantasy. A New York Times bestselling author and screenwriter, his novels included I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man and many others. Stephen King called Matheson 'the author who influenced me the most as a writer'. A Grand Master of Horror and past winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, He also won multiple other awards including the Edgar, the Hugo, the Spur, and the Writer's Guild awards. Richard Matheson passed away in June 2013.

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      Book preview

      Backteria - Richard Matheson

      He Wanted to Live

      And in the early morning when he had just about managed to fall into a troubled sleep—Lucy woke him up.

      He was all curled up like a fetus in one corner of their bed. He jumped when she touched him. He jumped as if he’d been stabbed. He stared at her in terror. He wanted to shout at her—Don’t you dare come near me! She was used to his nerves and she didn’t know it was more than nerves now. She said—Breakfast—and she went out of the bedroom.

      He lay back on the pillow and looked at the ceiling with hopeless resignation. He looked until his heart slowed down and his hands stopped shaking. He looked out of the window at the gray silence of another morning. Another day. Another collection of wracking hours.

      The process began. His brain had hardly dragged itself from darkness. But it started to leave him. He couldn’t control it. It thought everything he didn’t want it to think.

      There was the ceiling and there were the walls. Look at that crack in the ceiling. Suppose the roof gave. Suppose the attic with its dusty forgotten contents showered down on him. Suppose he were crushed as he lay there, the stored away relics breaking every bone.

      Maybe the house would catch fire. Lucy was in the kitchen. She gets careless. A flame shoots out from the stove. Ignition. Conflagration.

      He dressed and he was afraid. He might catch a germ from the clothes. The tie, the shirt, the coat might get caught in some machinery somewhere—who knew where. It might twist his flesh and cut off his breath, make his veins and arteries stand out in stark relief like pulsing tubes of blue spaghetti. His shoes might force a nail to grow back in. There might be poisoning in his system, blood rotting at the edges and flowing deep in congested waves.

      He washed carefully and, when he shaved, his hand shook for fear he would cut his throat. He’d meant to get an electric razor. Why did he always forget? He looked in the cabinet. It was full of death. An unwary opening of bottles, a swallow and quick finish. He slammed the cabinet door shut and hurried out of the bathroom.

      He descended slowly on the stairs so he wouldn’t fall and shatter his body at the foot of the steps. His house was a trap, a snare set by himself and all the men and women who made it what it was. Shifting rugs and loose connections. Smooth floor and smoother bathtubs, burning radiators and fireplaces and furnaces. Broken glass and razor blades and splinters and sharp knives. Man built himself a home and filled it with menace. It was all right when you didn’t think about it. But then something happened and you thought about it all the time.

      At breakfast he wondered if maybe Lucy was poisoning him. She loved him. He knew that. She had married him and borne him two fine children. But maybe she was poisoning him. Maybe there was poison in the orange juice, sprinkled in with the salt and pepper and the sugar. Maybe he was packing death into his veins shouting—Here! Run riot in my blood!

      He shuddered when she brushed against him. He was afraid for the children. And he was afraid of the children. They were his. He loved them with all his heart. He was afraid of them. Breakfast and supper on weekdays were agonies of wretched ambivalence. It got so he hated everyone at some time or another.

      The subway station was very crowded. There were people lined up at the edge of the platform. The train whistled far away. They all shifted on their feet and moved closer to the edge. They touched him, pushed him, shoved him. He wanted to scream. They were trying to push him over the

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