Psychomania: Killer Stories

by Stephen Jones

  “You may be wondering why I’ve asked you here,” said Parrish abruptly.

  It wasn’t difficult to guess. Stanhope glanced at the clippings. “I imagine those may have had something to do with it,” he replied.

  The director nodded and pushed them towards the journalist. Stanhope didn’t need to pick them up to see they were the series of articles he had written for a major newspaper on the alleged incompetence of the staff in large mental institutions.

  “I only wrote what I was told,” he said. “Ex-patients, cleaners, porters. They all had stories to tell.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that,” said Dr Parrish, leaning forward. “What always worries me in all these articles you’ve written is the unquestioning belief that what you have been told is true.”

  “It’s unlikely that they all lied independently,” replied Stanhope.

  “No,” said Parrish, “but this was a series of articles published over many months and under such circumstances it’s conceivable that some of them may have got wind of just how much your paper was paying for such information, and realized they might be on to something if they could come up with the kind of story you were looking for.”

  Stanhope crossed his legs, a slight smirk on his face. “And have you invited me here today to prove them all wrong?” he asked.

  “As you are well aware, not all these articles were about my institution,” said Parrish. “But a couple of them were and, Mr Stanhope, I can tell you now that I and my staff were deeply offended by the claims made within them. Deeply offended. And as for the patients ...”

  “You’re not trying to tell me your patients were upset by them?” Stanhope replied, stifling a chuckle.

  Dr Parrish narrowed his eyes. “Most of the patients at Crowsmoor are going to be here for a very, very long time, Mr Stanhope. It is therefore not unreasonable for many of them to think of this place not as a prison but as a home.” He pointed at the clippings. “It can be most upsetting to see this sort of thing written about the place where you live and about the people who care for you.”

  “Fine, fine,” said Stanhope, once again wondering where this was leading. “So you asked me here for an interview and here I am.” He pointed at his Dictaphone. “And there’s my machine, all ready and waiting now that you’ve turned it off. So perhaps we could stop procrastinating and get started? Or are you hoping if you delay things for long enough, spin out how hurt and upset you and all your patients are, that I’ll get fed up and leave?”

  “Oh, you’re not going anywhere,” said Parrish with such vehemence that Stanhope turned and looked at the door. “I don’t mean that.” Now it was Parrish’s turn to chuckle. “What I mean is, there is so much for me to tell you that we are both going to be here for quite a while. Would you like some tea?”

  Stanhope shook his head.

  “Let me assure you, it won’t be drugged. You’re not going to wake up in some white-walled room with no chance of ever seeing the outside world again. The thought makes you nervous though, doesn’t it?”

  Stanhope stopped fidgeting in his seat. “All right then,” he said defiantly. “I will have a cup of tea. Lots of milk and two sugars.”

  “I might have guessed,” said Parrish, reaching for his intercom and relaying the instructions to his receptionist.

  “Well?” said Stanhope, once Parrish had finished.

  “Well what?”

  Stanhope reached out a hand. “Can I have my dictating machine back?”

  Parrish grinned. “Surely the correct usage is ‘May I’?”

  Once he showed no intention of relinquishing the device, Stanhope gave in. “Okay, may I have my machine back?”

  “Of course!” said Parrish, handing it over. “We wouldn’t get very far if you couldn’t record what I was going to say, would we?”

  “Thank you,” said Stanhope, pressing record and giving the machine his details, the date, and an index number for whichever secretary back at his paper would presumably be typing it up. “I’d like to start by asking you your name, and how long you have been the director of Crowsmoor?” he said, pointing the tape recorder at Parrish.

  The director sat in silence for a moment before shaking his head.

  “What’s the matter now?” said Stanhope, pressing the off button.

  “That’s not the way we’re going to do things,” said Parrish. “You are going to have to earn the answers to any questions you want to ask me.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?” Stanhope was starting to get annoyed now.

  “Oh, it should be fairly easy,” said Parrish with a trace of amusement. “You see, my concern is that you can’t tell truth from fiction, or at least these articles of yours seem to suggest as much. So I have a proposition for you.”

  Stanhope didn’t look taken with the idea. “Go on,” he said.

  Parrish gestured to the rest of the room. “In this office are all the case records of all the patients who are here now or ever have been here, including those who have been released and those who, sadly, ended their days within these walls.”

  Stanhope looked around him at the towering bookcases crammed with ring binders and box files, and then at the filing cabinets behind him. “And ...?” he said.

  Parrish got to his feet. “Over the last few months, in fact since I began reading those articles of yours,” this time he pronounced the word “articles” with disdain, “I have been adding a few cases of my own. Fictional ones. Ones I have created, made up with the intention of inviting you here to put you to a little test.”

  “What sort of test?” Stanhope sneered, not at all happy that Parrish had once again taken control of his interview.

  “I propose to read some of them to you, and all you have to do is tell me whether or not you think the case I am describing actually happened, or whether it is, in fact, the product of my somewhat overactive imagination.”

  “You have one then, do you?” said Stanhope. “In my experience most of the doctors I’ve met don’t even read.”

  “Do you think if they did they would tell you about it?” said Parrish with a raised eyebrow. He crossed to the bookcases on Stanhope’s left and rested a hand on a battered lilac-coloured box file. He glanced at his desk, and then at the bay window behind it.

  Beyond the glass lay gloomy rain-washed fields, the few bare trees battered and twisted by the constant buffeting winds of this exposed place. “You’d be surprised how much time there is to think up such things in a place like this, Mr Stanhope, and no - you are not allowed to put that in your interview. At least, not yet.”

  “Go on then,” said Stanhope, realizing there was nothing for it but to accede to the man’s wishes. He looked at his watch and found himself wishing the tea would hurry up. “Read me a story and I’ll tell you what I think.” After all, how difficult was it going to be to tell the difference between a proper clinical case history and some nonsense this man had made up in a hurry, to try and prove some sort of ridiculous point?

  “Good!” Parrish lingered by the bookcase for a moment as if considering something, and then moved to the filing cabinet nearest the door. He pulled open the top drawer and began to leaf through manila folders, talking all the while. “What shall we begin with? I wonder,” he said, giving no sign of whether he was talking to Stanhope or himself. “A wife-beater? A child-strangler?”

  Stanhope shrugged. “I don’t care, but let me warn you right now - if you start reading me something that’s filled with maniacal gibbering laughter, I’ll know you’re making it up from the start.”

  Parrish put down the file he was holding and gave Stanhope a severe look. “Let me assure you, Mr Stanhope, that there is not much laughter of any kind in these files. Tears - yes, sadness - of course, and screams ...” Parrish paused, a faraway look in his eyes for a moment. “Too many screams, Mr Stanhope, all locked away here in the dark.” He gave the filing cabinet a pat that was almost affectionate. “All locked away
in the dark, all waiting for someone like me to come along and read them to someone like you. Are you ready?”

  Stanhope nodded.

  Parrish looked through the cabinet drawer once more before taking a battered folder from the very front.

  “May as well begin at the beginning,” he said with a smile, as he took out two sheets of paper held together with a rusty paper clip in the top right-hand corner. “How does a little whipping sound?”

  Stanhope narrowed his eyes. “Not really my sort of thing,” he replied. “But somehow it doesn’t surprise me that you’d want to start with something like that.”

  Parrish took the case notes back to his desk, sat behind it, and adjusted his desk lamp so he could better see the hand-written confession that began the document.

  “In that case,” he said, “let’s begin ...”

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  ~ * ~

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  I Tell You It’s Love

  For Lew Shiner

  The beautiful woman had no eyes, just sparkles of light where they should have been-or so it seemed in the candlelight. Her lips, so warm and inviting, so wickedly wild and suggestive of strange pleasures, held yet a hint of disaster, as if they might be fat red things skillfully molded from dried blood.

  "Hit me," she said.

  That is my earliest memory of her; a doll for my beating, a doll for my love.

  I laid it on her with that black silk whip, slapping it across her shoulders and back, listening to the whisper of it as it rode down, delighting in the flat pretty sound of it striking her flesh.

  She did not bleed, which was a disappointment. The whip was too soft, too flexible, too difficult to strike hard with.

  "Hurt me," she said softly. I went to where she kneeled. Her arms were outstretched, crucifixion style, and bound to the walls on either side with strong silk cord the color and texture of the whip in my hand.

  I slapped her. "Like it?" I asked. She nodded and I slapped her again... and again. A one-two rhythm, slow and melodic, time and again.

  "Like it?" I repeated, and she moaned, "Yeah, oh yeah."

  Later, after she was untied and had tidied up the blood from her lips and nose, we made brutal love; me with my thumbs bending the flesh of her throat, she with her nails entrenched in my back. She said to me when we were finished, "Let's do someone."

  That's how we got started. Thinking back now, once again I say I'm glad for fate; glad for Gloria; glad for the memory of the crying sounds, the dripping blood and the long sharp knives that murmured through flesh like a lover's whisper cutting the dark.

  Yeah, I like to think back to when I walked hands in pockets down the dark wharves in search of that special place where there were said to be special women with special pleasures for a special man like me.

  I walked on until I met a sailor leaning up against a wall smoking a cigarette, and he says when I ask about the place, "Oh, yeah, I like that sort of pleasure myself. Two blocks down, turn right, there between the warehouses, down the far end. You'll see the light." And he pointed and I walked on, faster.

  Finding it, paying for it, meeting Gloria was the goal of my dreams. I was more than a customer to that sassy, dark mamma with the sparkler eyes. I was the link to fit her link. We made two strong, solid bonds in a strange cosmic chain. You could feel the energy flowing through us; feel the iron of our wills. Ours was a mating made happily in hell.

  So time went by and I hated the days and lived for the nights when I whipped her, slapped her, scratched her, and she did the same to me. Then one night she said, "It's not enough. Just not enough anymore. Your blood is sweet and your pain is fine, but I want to see death like you see a movie, taste it like licorice, smell it like flowers, touch it like cold, hard stone."

  I laughed, saying, "I draw the line at dying for you." I took her by the throat, fastened my grip until her breathing was a whistle and her eyes protruded like bloated corpse bellies.

  "That's not what I mean," she managed. And then came the statement that brings us back to what started it all, "Let's do someone."

  I laughed and let her go.

  "You know what I mean?" she said. "You know what I'm saying."

  "I know what you said. I know what you mean." I smiled. "I know very well."

  "You've done it before, haven't you?"

  "Once," I said, "in a shipyard, not that long ago."

  "Tell me about it. God, tell me about it."

  "It was dark and I had come off ship after six months out, a long six months with the men, the ship and the sea. So I'm walking down this dark alley, enjoying the night like I do, looking for a place with the dark ways, our kind of ways, baby, and I came upon this old wino lying in a doorway, cuddling a bottle to his face as if it were a lady's loving hand."

  "What did you do?"

  "I kicked him," I said, and Gloria's smile was a beauty to behold.

  "Go on," she said.

  "God, how I kicked him. Kicked him in the face until there was no nose, no lips, no eyes. Only red mush dangling from shrapneled bone; looked like a melon that had been dropped from on high, down into a mass of broken white pottery chips. I touched his face and tasted it with my tongue and my lips."

  "Ohh," she sighed, and her eyes half-closed. "Did he scream?"

  "Once. Only once. I kicked him too hard, too fast, too soon. I hammered his head with the toes of my shoes, hammered until my cuffs were wet and sticking to my ankles."

  "Oh God," she said, clinging to me, "let's do it, let's do it."

  We did. First time was a drizzly night and we caught an old woman out. She was a lot of fun until we got the knives out and then she went quick. There was that crippled kid next, lured him from the theater downtown, and how we did that was a stroke of genius. You'll find his wheelchair not far from where you found the van and the other stuff.

  But no matter. You know what we did, about the kinds of tools we had, about how we hung that crippled kid on that meat hook in my van until the flies clustered around the doors thick as grapes.

  And of course there was the little girl. It was a brilliant idea of Gloria's to get the kid's tricycle into the act. The things she did with those spokes. Ah, but that woman was a connoisseur of pain.

  There were two others, each quite fine, but not as nice as the last. Then came the night Gloria looked at me and said, "It's not enough. Just won't do."

  I smiled. "No way, baby. I still won't die for you."

  "No," she gasped, and took my arm. "You miss my drift. It's the pain I need, not just the watching. I can't live through them, can't feel it in me. Don't you see, it would be the ultimate."

  I looked at her, wondering did I have it right.

  "Do you love me?"

  "I do," I said.

  "To know that I would spend the last of my life with you, that my last memories would be the pleasure of your face, the feelings of pain, the excitement, the thrill, the terror."

  Then I understood, and understood good. Right there in the car I grabbed her, took her by the throat and cracked her head up against the windshield, pressed her back, choked, released, choked, made it linger. By this time I was quite a pro. She coughed, choked, smiled. Her eyes swung from fear to love. God it was wonderful and beautiful and the finest experience we had ever shared. When she finally lay still there in the seat, I was trembling, happier than I had ever been. Gloria looked fine, her eyes rolled up, her lips stretched in a rictus smile.

  I kept her like that at my place for days, kept her in my bed until the neighbors started to complain about the smell. I've been talking to this guy and he's got some ideas. Says he thinks I'm one of the future generation, and the fact of that scares him all to hell. A social mutation, he says. Man's primitive nature at the height of the primal scream.

  Dog shit, we're all the same, so don't look at me like I'm some kind of freak. What does he do come Monday night? He's watching the football game, or the races or boxi
ng matches, waiting for a car to overturn or for some guy to be carried out of the ring with nothing but mush left for brains. Oh yeah, he and I are similar, quite alike. You see, it's in us all. A low pitch melody not often heard, but there just the same. In me it peaks and thuds, like drums and brass and strings. Don't fear it. Let it go. Give it the beat and amplify. I tell you it's love of the finest kind.

  So I've said my piece and I'll just add this: when they fasten my arms and ankles down and tighten the cap, I hope I feel the pain and delight in it before my brain sizzles to bacon, and may I smell the frying of my very own flesh...

  <