“No offense, pal, but she’s gorgeous. Hey guys, look at this.”
Jackie walked back to us. It was interesting to notice that no one else was eager to sidle up to Mr. Strange, gorgeous piece-of-ass wife or not.
But Jackie flashed us a look. We came over warily as he passed the picture.
Even in a little snapshot, she was stunning. Like a freakin’ movie star. Absolutely beautiful. If this guy lost her, then he was one stupid son of bitch, no matter what her problems were.
Jackie walked back and handed the guy his picture.
“Too bad. She’s some looker.”
Again, a smile. More secrets. Then:
“Oh, yes. Beautiful. And she knew it. I thought I was pretty lucky having her.” Then slowly, deliberately, he repeated the last words: “pretty…lucky.”
“Something happened?”
Jackie, digging in, curious, his words slurred. Opening up a box that I thought, even after all my vodka, was best left shut.
Shit….
“Oh yes. Something happened. She cheated on me. More than once. I think she had a problem. So beautiful and wanting that attention all that time. And the sex. From guys who were blown away by her.”
I kept waiting for the jokes. The jokes about “blowing,” and her changing riders in the saddle. All that ribbing that we always do to each other in The Two Jays.
But this time—there was none of it.
“So, you kicked her ass out?”
Jackie looked back at us, as if looking for our approval on how the interview was going. I just rolled my eyes, but I think he was too far gone to see that.
“Nope. Didn’t do that. After all, I had forgiven her lots of times. So this time…I tried something different.”
Quiet—then.
Waiting.
For stupid fat-ass Jackie to ask…what else?
But he didn’t have to.
Not this time.
* * *
The guy spun around.
“Yup, forgave her beautiful ass so many times. I mean, wouldn’t you? Until it was just impossible to do that anymore. Was definitely time to try something else.”
I noticed that—standing—the guy was big, kinda built, powerful…you know? The sweat stains under his arms had dried. I had a thought…whatever made him sweat had happened before he put that shirt on.
It was a clean shirt.
A small clue there. A tiny clue.
But about to be overtaken by so much more.
“No, enough with forgiveness. Enough humiliation. It was time for something very old and ancient, I thought.”
Another pause. None of us saying shit.
“Punishment. So I gave her a few of her pills ground up in a glass of wine, and when she woke up she was taped and tied to a kitchen chair.”
“Christ. Didn’t she yell or something?”
The guy’s smile broadened.
“Not with the silver tape across her pretty mouth. And then I went to work. Started a little after 7 o’clock. Little cuts mixed in with my talking, remembering each time she fucked someone who wasn’t me, reminding her. Just little cuts at first....”
“Christ,” one of the guys behind me said.
“Got to tell you. I wasn’t sure where I was going with it. Kind of improvised. But it felt damn good when I started. So very…satisfying.”
Ray leaned over to me, whispering. “This guy on the level? Some kind of nut? Should I call…?”
The guy saw the move. “Don’t worry. It’s done now. I’m just, well, sharing what I did.” The smile again. “With some of my new friends in the bar.”
Ray backed away.
“And the little cuts, led to bigger cuts, until—well she certainly didn’t look beautiful anymore. I never knew that there so many places you could slice and not kill someone. Though the blood loss…I guess that would have gotten her sooner or later. So—that’s when I removed the tape from her lips.”
My head pounded.
This was not fucking happening.
I slipped my phone out of my pocket.
I dialed 911 without looking and held it. Thinking: the police must have some kind of GPS crap, don’t they? To find the bar, get this nut. And all the time I’m thinking, do not bullshit a bullshitter. Is this guy making this all up? A bar story to shock the bums who hung out here?
“I ripped the tape off fast”—and here he made the move with his hand, showing us what that was like. “She tried to scream, but I think something was wrong with her lungs or—wait, yeah, I had cut a hole in her throat, such a sleek throat. One sexy throat. So—not much sound came out. Just this bubbling noise.”
“Fucking freak…,” Charlie said behind me.
The guy heard that.
“Maybe. But you weren’t in my shoes. Least now I could see her mouth open, fish-like, begging for help. That was good. And the tears. Mixing with blood. I was covered in it. Until—well, all good things come to an end. And my cuts didn’t do shit anymore. It was over.”
Ray went to his phone.
The guy saw him.
“Yeah, guess you better call the cops.”
Unless, I thought, it’s all some bullshit story.
“They’ll find me anyway. But if I take this…they will find me sooner.”
He threw down the phone.
“Took a lot of pictures with this. I thought…”—he threw twenty down on the bar—“someone might want to see.”
Nobody picked it up at first, as if the cell phone was contaminated. Then Jackie did, looking down, clicking.
“God. Christ. Shit.”
About all you could say.
The guy strolled to the door.
“Gotta go. Oh—for the last bit? I took a little video. You can see that too.”
I walked over to Jackie. He had found the video file on the camera phone. The video played. The video, the sounds the woman-thing—cause that’s what it was—tried to make.
No fucking way to tell it was the same woman from the snapshot. But whoever it was…was in hell.
Hell, the way we always imagined it when Father Gately laid out the whole deal to us in 8th Grade.
The bloody video ended.
Then—the guy stopped at the door. I doubted any of us were about to stop him, I mean, would you really expect that we’d do something crazy like that?
“Great phone, hm? Amazing what they do with technology these days.”
With that, he pushed open the door and walked out of The Two Jays.
And all you gotta do—to believe me, or any of us—is take a look at those pictures.
Word of advice though, kemosabe. No bullshit here.
Just make sure you don’t look at them after you’ve eaten…know what I mean?
Why sure you do….
HELL HATH ENLARGED HERSELF
By Michael Marshall Smith
I always assumed I was going to get old. That there would come a time when merely getting dressed left me breathless, and I would count a day without a nap as a victory; when I would go to a barber and some young girl would lift the remaining grey stragglers on my pate and look dubious if I asked her for anything more than a trim. I would have tried to be charming, and she might have thought to herself how game the old bird was, while cutting off rather less than I’d asked. I thought all that was going to come, some day, and in a perverse sort of way had even looked forward to it. A diminuendo, a slowing down, an ellipsis to some other place.
But now I know it will not happen, that I will remain unresolved, like a fugue which didn’t work out. Or perhaps more like a voice in an unfinished symphony, because I won’t be the only one.
I regret that. I’m going to miss having been old.
I left the facility at 6:30 yesterday evening, on the dot, as had been my practice. I took care to do everything as I always had, collating my notes, tidying my desk, and leaving upon it a list of things to do the next day. I hung my white coat on the back of my office door as usual, and said g
oodbye to Johnny on the gate with a wink. For six months we have been engaged in a game which involves making some joint statement on the weather every time I enter or leave the facility, without either of us making recourse to speech. Yesterday Johnny raised his eyebrows at the dark and heavy clouds, and rolled his eyes—a standard gambit. I turned one corner of my mouth down and shrugged with the opposite shoulder, a more adventurous riposte, in recognition of the fact this was the last time the game would ever be played. For a moment I wanted to do more, to say something, reach out and shake his hand; but that would have been too obvious a goodbye. Perhaps no-one would have stopped me anyway, as it has become abundantly clear that I am as powerless as everyone else—but I didn’t want to take the risk.
Then I found my car amongst the diminishing number which still park there and left the compound for good.
The worst part, for me, is that I knew David Ely and understand how it all started. I was sent to work at the facility because I am partly to blame for what has happened. The original work was done together, but I was the one who had always given creed to the paranormal. David had never paid much heed to such things, not until they became an obsession. There may have been some chance remark of mine which made him open to the idea. Just having known me for so long may have been enough. If it was, then I’m sorry. There’s not a great deal more I can say.
David and I met at the age of six, our fathers having taken up new positions at the same college—the University of Florida, in Gainesville. My father was in the Geography Faculty, his in Sociology, but at that time—the late Eighties—the departments were drawing closer together and the two men became friends. Our families mingled closely, in countless back-yard barbecues and shared holidays on the coast, and David and I grew up more like brothers than friends. We read the same clever books and hacked the same stupid computers, and even ended up losing our virginity on the same evening. One spring when we were both sixteen, I borrowed my mother’s car and the two of us loaded it up with books and a laptop and headed off to Sarasota in search of sun and beer. We found both, in quantity, and also two young English girls on holiday. We spent a week in courting spirals of increasing tightness, playing pool and talking fizzy nonsense over cheap and exotic pizzas, and on the last night two couples walked up the beach in different directions.
Her name was Karen, and for a while I thought I was in love. I wrote a letter to her twice a week, and to this day she’s probably received more mail from me than everyone else put together. Each morning I went running down to the mailbox, and ten years later the sight of an English postage stamp could still bring a faint rush of blood to my ears. But we were too far apart and too young. Maybe she had to wait a day too long for a letter once, or perhaps it was me who without realising it came back empty-handed from the mailbox one too many times. Either way the letters started to slacken in frequency after six months, and then, without either of us ever saying anything, they simply stopped altogether.
A little while later I was with David in a bar, and, in between shots, he looked up at me.
‘You ever hear from Karen anymore?’ he asked.
I shook my head, only at that moment realising that it had finally died. ‘Not in a while.’
He nodded, and then took his shot, and missed, and as I lined up for the black I realised that he’d probably been through a similar thing. For the first time in our lives we’d lost something. It didn’t break our hearts. It had only lasted a week, after all, and we were old enough to begin to realise that the world was full of girls, and that if we didn’t hurry we’d hardly have got through any of them before it was time to get married.
But does anyone ever replace that first person? That first kiss, first fierce hug, hidden in sand dunes and darkness? Sometimes, I guess. I kept the letters from Karen for twenty years. Never read them, just kept them. Last week I threw them all away.
What I’m saying is this. I knew David for a long, long time, and I understood what we were trying to do. He was just trying salve his own pain, and I was trying to help him.
What happened wasn’t our fault.
I spent the evening driving slowly down 75, letting the freeway take me down towards the Gulf coast of the panhandle. There were a few patches of rain, but for the most part the clouds just scudded overhead, running to some other place. I didn’t see many other cars. Either people have given up fleeing, or all those capable of it have already fled. I got off just after Jocca and headed down minor roads, trying to cut round Tampa and St Petersburg. I managed it, but it wasn’t easy, and I ended up getting lost more than a few times. I would have brought a map, but I’d thought I could remember the way. I couldn’t. It had been too long.
We’d heard on the radio in the afternoon that things weren’t going so hot around Tampa. It was the last thing we heard, just before the signal cut out. The six of us remaining in the facility just sat around for a while, as if we believed the radio would come back on again real soon now. When it didn’t we got up one by one and drifted back to work.
As I passed the city I could see it burning in the distance, and I was glad I had taken the back way, no matter how long it took. If you’ve seen what it’s like when a large number of people go together, you’ll understand what I mean.
Eventually I found 301 and headed down it towards 41, towards the old Coast Road.
Summer of 2005. For David and me it was time to make a decision. There was no question but that we would go to college—both our families were book-bashers from way back. The money was already in place, some from our parents but most from holiday jobs we’d played at. The question was what we were going to study.
I thought long and hard, but in the end still couldn’t come to a decision. I postponed for a year and decided to take off round the world. My parents shrugged, said ‘Okay, keep in touch, try not to get killed, and stop by your Aunt Kate’s in Sydney.’ They were that kind of people. I remember my sister bringing a friend of hers back to the house one time; the girl called herself Yax and her hair had been carefully dyed and sculpted to resemble an orange explosion. My mother just asked her where she had it done and kept looking at it in a thoughtful way. I guess my dad must have talked her out of it.
David went for computers. Systems design. He got a place at Jacksonville’s new center for Advanced Computing, which was a coup but no real surprise. David was always a hell of a bright guy. That was part of his problem.
It was strange saying goodbye to each other after so many years in each other’s pockets, but I suppose we knew it was going to happen sooner or later. The plan was that he’d come out and hook up with me for a couple of months during the year. It didn’t happen, for the reason that pacts between old friends usually get forgotten.
Someone else entered the picture.
I did my grand tour. I saw Europe, started to head through the Middle East and then thought better of it and flew down to Australia instead. I stopped by and saw Aunt Kate, which earned me big brownie points back home and wasn’t in any way arduous. She and her family were a lot of fun, and there was a long drunken evening when she seemed to be taking messages from beyond, which was kind of interesting. My mother’s side of the family was always reputed to have a touch of the medium about them, and Aunt Kate certainly did. There was an even more entertaining evening when my cousin Jenny and I probably overstepped the bounds of conventional morality in the back seat of her jeep. After Australia I hacked up through the Far East for a while until time and money ran out, and then I went home.
I came back with a major tan, an empty wallet, and still no real idea of what I was going to do with my life. With a couple months to go before I had to make a decision, I decided to go visit David. I hopped on a bus and made my way up to Jacksonville on a day which was warm and full of promise. Anything could happen, I believed, and everything was there for the taking. Adolescent naiveté perhaps, but I was an adolescent. How was I supposed to know otherwise? I’d led a pretty charmed life up until then, and I didn’t
see any reason why it shouldn’t continue. I sat in the bus and gazed out the window, watching the world and wishing it the very best. It was a good day, and I’m glad it was. Because though I didn’t know it then, the new history of the world probably started at the end of it.
I got there late afternoon and asked around for David. Eventually someone pointed me in the right direction, to a house just off campus. I found the building and tramped up the stairs, wondering whether I shouldn’t maybe have called ahead.
Eventually I found his door. I knocked, and after a few moments some man I didn’t recognize opened it. It took me a couple of long seconds to work out it was David. He’d grown a beard. I decided not to hold it against him just yet, and we hugged like, well, like what we were. Two best friends, seeing each other after what suddenly seemed like far too long.
‘Major bonding,’ drawled a female voice. A head slipped into view from round the door, with wild brown hair and big green eyes. That was the first time I saw Rebecca.
Four hours later we were in a bar somewhere. I’d met Rebecca properly and realised she was special. In fact, it’s probably a good thing that they’d met six months before and that she was so evidently in love with David. Had we met her at the same time, she could have been the first thing we’d ever fallen out over. She was beautiful, in a strange and quirky way that always made me think of forests; and she was clever, in that particularly appealing fashion which meant she wasn’t always trying to prove it and was happy for other people to be right some of the time. She moved like a cat on a sleepy afternoon, but her eyes were always alive—even when they couldn’t co-operate with each other enough to allow her to accurately judge the distance to her glass. She was my best friend’s girl, she was a good one, and I was very happy for him.
Rebecca was at the School of Medical Science. Nanotech was just coming off big around then, and it looked like she was going to catch the wave and go with it. In fact, when the two of them talked about their work, it made me wish I hadn’t taken the year off. Things were happening for them. They had a direction. All I had was goodwill towards the world and the belief that it loved me too. For the first time I had that terrible sensation that life is leaving you behind and you’ll never catch up again; that if you don’t match your speed to the train and jump on you’ll be forever left standing in the station.
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