Psychomania: Killer Stories

by Stephen Jones

  The side of Ed’s car rubbed the other vehicle. “Scrape!” the car said, followed by a high-pitched metallic chuckle. The other car went up on to the concrete divider and flipped over just as Ed passed it. He watched in his rear-view mirror as other cars crashed into the first, spinning it on its rapidly crumpling hood.

  His car took the next exit, accelerated down the off-ramp and trundled over two homeless people stationed there with their cardboard signs. One of the wheels caught and spun, damp red debris spraying out from the wheel well. Ed began to scream.

  “Calm down! I’m trying to drive here!” the car said.

  The car took side streets and alleys, cutting across the occasional parking lot. Bits of metal and other trash dropped off here and there. Finally they pulled behind a building near a service entrance.

  “This is Jillian’s building. How did you ...” Ed began.

  “You’ve taken me here before, remember? Now go do what you have to. I, unfortunately, won’t fit in the elevator.” With that the car sputtered and stalled out.

  Ed climbed shakily from the car. Clearly, at least in this small part of the universe, there had been a rule change. He walked around his old automobile, now silent except for the steam escaping from the engine compartment. The paint was scraped off the length of it in several inch-wide, wavy silvery stripes that showed white-hot as they reflected the sun. They might even have been called “cool” under some new system of rules. Blood was spattered here and there with that randomness that never looks entirely random, but more like an artist’s interpretation of random.

  Clearly he’d have to kill Jillian now. Better to kill her than to have her see what he’d done to the car.

  He came into the building through the janitor’s entrance, which they never locked. Will the security guy, who’d once been a grocery-store manager until he retired and then gone back to work in security because he couldn’t survive on his small savings, dozed soundly at the front desk. There was no one else down in the lobby - most of the companies here conducted their business by phone or over the Internet. Ed reached down and removed Will’s gun from its holster. Will started, opened his eyes and looked at him. “Whoah,” he said. “You’re - you’re Jillian’s husband, right?”

  “Shoot me,” the gun said. Ed was confused. “Shoot me,” the gun repeated, then Ed understood.

  “You want me to fire you, right? Fire you and shoot him,” Ed said patiently. Will sat up quickly. “Are you even loaded?”

  “I feel loaded,” the gun replied, “but I always feel loaded.”

  “Will, is this gun loaded?”

  “Don’t... don’t point that at me!”

  Thinking that probably answered his question, Ed now wondered if he could even shoot a gun. He never had before. He looked for the safety - he’d seen pictures. He flipped it off.

  The recoil jerked his arm, so he missed where he was aiming. But he was so close, he took off part of Will’s head.

  He expected a great deal of alarm when he stepped off the elevator into the office where Jillian worked. Surely they’d heard the explosion downstairs? But everyone walked around as if nothing were wrong. Didn’t they understand that there was always something wrong? Several people nodded and smiled, no doubt recognizing him from an appearance he’d made at the last company picnic. He’d gotten quite drunk and Jillian hadn’t spoken to him for days.

  They didn’t even notice he had a gun hanging from his hand. Didn’t say a word.

  “Watch this guy, he’s coming too close,” the gun said, raising its long neck, staring up with its singular, deep dark eye. The fellow almost stumbled into Ed, and the gun shot itself, or rather fired itself, somewhere into the man, who fell screaming, and the bullet continuing, blasted through the desk of one of the secretaries.

  Now everyone noticed, and ran and screamed, and Ed continued down the hall toward Jillian’s office, feeling vague and headachy and a little sick to his stomach. “It’s not supposed to happen this way,” he told the gun. “Now she’s going to know everything.”

  “Secrets are a bad thing,” the gun replied. “Better to get everything out in the open and clear the air. Time to empty the gun, Ed.”

  Ed made a right at the corridor and walked briskly toward the end to where his wife’s office was. He held the gun out limply in front of him despite its admonitions to “Get a grip on that handle! Straighten out the barrel! A child could knock me out of your hand the way you’re holding me!” But he didn’t think he could withstand anyone’s attempts to disarm him, however firmly he held the weapon. He felt as if he could hardly walk as it was.

  With a last burst of energy (and bolstered by the gun’s cries of “Charge! Charge!”) Ed indeed charged the door. Then stopped short of its surface and knocked, none too loudly.

  “Come in.” Muffled. He knew the tone. Jillian was occupied with some important business or other, unwilling to spare more than a sliver of attention.

  He opened the door gently and slipped inside, pulling it shut behind him. The gun banged against the door and he stiffened, but Jillian didn’t even look up from her papers. “What was that noise out there, do you know?” She was looking down and busily writing. “Did someone knock over the water cooler again?”

  “Jillian.” He held the gun out, his finger trembling against the trigger. She looked up.

  “Jesus Christ, Ed!” She jumped up and scattered the papers everywhere.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said, going to pick the papers up off the floor, the gun dangling loosely from his thumb.

  “That’s no way to hold a firearm,” the gun grumbled.

  “Ed!” He looked up - she’d run into a corner. “What are you doing!”

  “I love you, Jillian. You know that, don’t you?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I love you but sometimes two people can’t live together even if they do love each other. Sometimes one person can’t be who they should be, live the life they might have, as long as they’re in that relationship with the other person.”

  “Ed, are you saying you want a divorce?”

  “No, of course not! It’s just that sometimes two people are so close, or at least one of them feels so very strongly about the other, that that person can’t be who they should be if the other person even exists, anywhere on the planet.”

  “Ed!”

  “You’re always taking care of me, Jillian. You’re always giving me great advice even if that advice isn’t always so great for me, personally. So I’m, I’m trying to think that maybe this—” He waved the gun at her. “This whole thing is just another way you can take care of me. I’m sorry, but I think maybe that’s just the way the universe works. Not much we can do about it.”

  “Less talking, more shooting,” the gun said.

  Ed took aim at the corner where Jillian was standing. He was pretty sure he couldn’t hit her from that distance. He was pretty sure he would have to advance on her, get much much closer, before he had any chance at all of hitting her. Which he did not want, to be so close he could see the fear in her eyes.

  He glanced at the huge window behind her, and then the other huge window along the adjacent wall. He’d always known Jillian was important to her company - he just hadn’t realized she was this important.

  But beyond the fact that she had such views it was the city itself, seen not quite as he had seen it before, all those windows, and behind those windows a countless number of secret rooms where people lived, breathed, died, as if their lives had been swallowed whole by this immortal creature, an immortal creature, of course, which all these mortal creatures had given up their lives to create, and in thanks it had stared at them all their lives with its universe of eyes, and eaten them, and condemned them to anonymity.

  “I would give anything to see you reach your dreams, Ed, whatever they might be, even if they didn’t include me. Don’t you know that?” Jillian said behind him.

  “I know
, I know,” Ed said, and began firing, thrilled as all that glass began to shatter and fall into the downtown streets. He heard the blare of the car horns, and the screams of the people, and Jillian’s own pleas behind him, and it was as if they were all cheering him on, as he threw the gun out of the pane-less window, and he himself moments later tried to follow it into the tumult below.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  BASIL COPPER

  The Recompensing of Albano Pizar

  I

  AFTER LEON FREITAS had been dead for several months, a literary agent of notorious dubiety, determined to extract the last ounce of gold from the great author’s accumulated dross, tracked down his widow, who was living in seclusion in a small resort in southern Italy. The Palazzo Tortini, though dilapidated and in disrepair, a relic of the great days of the Borgias and the Medicis, was real enough and the rent, modest in terms of today’s money, meant little to Mme Freitas who was more than well provided for from her husband’s estate.

  A well-preserved woman in her late-forties, Mme Freitas still retained traces of great and original beauty; her days were spent not in idle reminiscence or in vain recall of time gone by, as might have befitted a great man’s widow, but in the writing of her own memoirs, the annotating of her husband’s papers and in the indexing and cross-referencing of his work.

  Though she might have employed an army of secretaries for this purpose - thirteen volumes of her husband’s still remained to be issued posthumously - she preferred to do this herself and so found her days filled with satisfying literary labour and her nights with agreeable and diversified social life.

  Her only close friend in the small community in the resort she had chosen was a Dr Manzanares, who had once been called in to treat her for a minor ailment and had become her most intimate companion. Dr Manzanares, in addition to being an admirer of the work of Leon Freitas, was also a doctor of philosophy and had himself written a number of monographs on obscure philosophers. The atmosphere of the Palazzo Tortini was agreeably outré to one of his tastes and predilections; the charm of Mme Freitas undeniable; her cuisine excellent; and, above all, the ambience of literary endeavour and past greatness fascinating to a man of his character.

  The Palazzo Tortini stood on the banks of a canal, which gave it the atmosphere of Venice; the canal in turn drained into the sea at no great distance. It was thus necessarily tidal and indeed the canal overflowed into the great vaulted cellars of the Palace so that at the height of the two tides, every twenty-four hours, all the gloomy lower portions of the mansion were filled with the melancholy echo of the sea.

  Mme Freitas recalled little of Albano Pizar and it was her infallible rule not to see persons on business connected with her late husband’s estate; all his literary properties were pledged to the splendid houses in half-a-dozen countries who had published him during his lifetime. And yet there was something about Pizar’s cleverly worded prefatory letter that touched a chord of compassion somewhere in her being. As she read on, she remembered something of him, and recollected a pale, almost ethereal-looking young man who had originally been a publisher’s reader in Rome.

  But he had aspired to greater things and after - no one knew how - purchasing a share in a minor but greatly respected publishing house in Paris, had edited and issued finely illustrated collections of her husband’s then little-known short stories. That had been in earlier days, of course, when Pizar had become a prosperous and fairly successful young man and her husband had yet to make his way; ironically, as the name of Freitas had ascended and had eventually become one of the most resplendent in European literature and belles-lettres so Pizar’s star had gone into eclipse.

  The publishing house had failed, he had disappeared into obscurity for a time; but then, as sometimes happens when men of little talent but keen business acumen fall on hard days, this had acted as a spur to his industry and a sharpener of his abilities so that, like a drowning man, he had once again managed to raise himself above the flood.

  This time he had started a small literary agency; as is the way with many such businesses where partners come and go and authors, as they become successful, pass on to greater things, his fortunes had fluctuated. From year to year it had not been possible to foresee the swing of the pendulum, he wrote to Mme Freitas; presuming on an old friendship he hoped to visit her at a convenient date when he had a proposition to discuss.

  She gathered that, recalling with some emotion the success of the early short stories which had been issued under his imprimatur, Pizar was again hoping for a similar miracle. Among Freitas’s old papers he trusted to find some fragments not thought worthwhile by more august houses; these, with some introductory notes and addenda by himself, he would then bring out through a publishing house in which he had some interest and so retrieve his fortunes.

  All this, of course, he did not put into his letter, but that was what Mme Freitas read into it. When she had finished she put down the closely written pages with a sigh and clasped her hands together on the red-leather surface of the heavy desk on which she customarily worked. The brilliance of the Italian sun fell through the oriel windows of the big study and sparkled on the gilt bindings of the ancient leather volumes of the classics, which her husband had gathered together during the course of a long literary career.

  For more than an hour Mme Freitas hesitated over the contents of this letter; her secretary arrived at the study at the time she usually took notes, waited for a while, and was then dismissed. At last Mme Freitas became aware that her day, which usually ran so smoothly from dawn to its predestined end among the silver, brandy glasses and Sevres coffee cups of her dining room, was fatally disrupted. She rang for her car and was swiftly driven to the home of Dr Manzanares.

  The conversation, after passing lightly over topics which concerned them, at last turned to the literary agent Pizar; the letter was produced and the problem discussed. Normally Mme Freitas would have dictated a gentle letter of refusal but she felt she owed something to the shadowy figure that Pizar had been in those far-off days in Rome and Paris. And he had been instrumental in launching the earlier works of Freitas to the wider world. If he came to the Palazzo there could not be much for him; Freitas’s output was bound to certain publishing houses for ever. But there might be a few crumbs; the question was whether it would be worth his while to come. Mme Freitas did not want to hold out too much hope lest he might be disappointed.

  Dr Manzanares was not enthusiastic; his only contact with literary agents had been little short of disastrous. His voice rose and he gesticulated frequently as the conversation went on. His cry of ten per cent began to sound like a knell to Mme Freitas’s deafened ears. Eventually she burst out laughing; an outburst in which the learned doctor was at last persuaded to join. She would write then, she decided; she would leave it to Pizar as to whether he came. She would promise nothing; but there might be something. The friends left it at that.

  Mme Freitas wrote a short note to the agent and then, in the general press of a busy life, forgot the matter; she had no reply and as week succeeded week Pizar’s request faded to the back of her mind. But she had gone through some of her husband’s papers; there was little of value that was not already committed. An early poem or two; some youthful letters; two or three essays which had appeared in obscure magazines and had never subsequently been reprinted.

  Something might be made of this mélange, but she doubted it. Looking at the racks of bound memoirs, correspondence and confidential documents that flowed across the great room in unbroken ranks of blue, red, green and yellow, each colour denoting a different genre of her husband’s life-work, Mme Freitas rather hoped that Pizar would not come. The little that she could spare from this vast oeuvre would seem incomparably mean; then she shrugged her shoulders. Business was business and if Pizar could make a little from the scraps flung him - in any event there was no need for her to feel guilty. And she had not asked him to come.

  More than
a month had gone by before she got the letter; Pizar had been away from Paris; he understood her position; he would be delighted to make the trip. He suggested a date, said he would telephone when he arrived at the station. One afternoon of torpid heat when the sun shimmered like molten metal in even the darkest recesses of the cool rooms of the Palazzo, Mme Freitas was informed by her secretary that Pizar had telephoned to announce his arrival. She despatched the car to meet him, vaguely uneasy at something which could be only a routine matter. She went upstairs to change her dress; ordered some lemon tea, some minute sandwiches, the kind she liked most of all, and some éclairs, for an hour’s time. Then she went to her study and composed herself to wait.

  Mme Freitas rose to greet her guest when the woman secretary brought him to her; her first feeling was of ludicrous disappointment, though what she’d expected of the interview it would be hard to say. For Albano Pizar was a pompous man of decidedly vast proportions; the remains of a handsome head rested on massive shoulders, but the rest of him had run to flesh and the elegance of his well-cut grey suit could not conceal the huge pouches of his capacious stomach. The pale, interesting youth he had once been fled before Mme Freitas and in place of this blurred memory was the hard reality of the present: a commonplace fat man with hard blue eyes and a limp black moustache.