“One.”
Everything happened in the next second: Richard’s eyes flickered with disappointment and he tightened his grip on the knife’s handle. Then darkness - total and sudden - as the storm knocked out the power. Startled, I jerked, pulled the trigger. The gun snapped in my hand like something with teeth. In the muzzle flash I saw Lorna’s hair lift at the top (it bounced, the way it had when she’d swept out of Gee’s) followed by a haze of blood. I sagged. Maybe I screamed. The gunshot rang in my ears and all I could think of were the moths in the darkness, lost, looking for their light.
~ * ~
Including his wife, Richard Chalk murdered eleven women. Alexandra Locke was his final victim. Following my statement, the police found her dismembered corpse buried in Richard’s back garden, along with the remains of his other victims (except for his wife, of course, who’d been peacefully laid to rest at a cemetery in Little Marlow). For nearly three weeks Richard’s house was in the news, surrounded by police tape and with one of those white tent-things in the back garden. That was how long it took to disinter and correctly match all the body parts.
The press named Richard “The Chiltern Chopper”. He’s a celebrity now, like Harold Shipman and Fred West.
Me? I’m a mess. A psychological train wreck. Before all of this, I was a successful accountant working from my home in Thame. Recently separated, yes, but with my mind intact. Now I scream myself awake every night. I’ve lost nearly two stone. My hair is more white than grey. I shake a lot, too, and haven’t worked for over a year. The police called my actions heroic, but I don’t see a hero when I look in the mirror, and I don’t feel like one when I’m fumbling the cap off my Sertraline prescription. My psychiatrist endeavours to dig beneath the anxiety, to whatever supports it - a trestle, perhaps, of weaknesses and woes. Writing this account was his idea. “Explore,” he told me. “Uncover.” Leaf works to balance my chakras. Sometimes he sweats.
Lorna hates me. Still. The difference now is that she probably has cause to. After all, she would never have been in that predicament if not for me. I befriended Richard. I showed him her photograph. I debated for ten long seconds whether or not to pull the trigger. She wanted to press charges against me, but was told outright that it was a fight she would never win. She went on television, on some gauche talk show, and completely lost the plot. She threw her shoe at an audience member and had to be restrained by a beefy TV bouncer called Tim. Or maybe Jim. Her wig fell off. Everybody saw her scar. Yes, I shot her, but I saved her life, too.
It came down to millimetres, maybe even micrometres. I have a recurring nightmare in which I lower my hand a fraction before pulling the trigger, and in the muzzle flash I see the bullet rip through Lorna’s skull. A similar nightmare has me holding the gun a dash higher and watching Richard’s face disappear in a cloud of blood and bone. What actually happened was that my hand was at the perfect height, and the gun at the perfect angle, so that when I pulled the trigger I injured both, but killed neither of them.
The shot was analysed by ballistics experts on a BBC Newsnight special. According to their calculations, I have a one in two-point-six million chance of doing it again. A ridiculous number, if you ask me. But we’ll never know; I’m not doing it again.
The bullet scored the top of Lorna’s head. It burned through her hair, separated her scalp, and cut a groove in her skull deep enough to rest a pencil in. She required several surgeries - bone and skin grafts, mainly - and now has a thick scar running down the centre of her head. The bouncy, tawny hair will never grow back there. She buys her wigs from Les Cheveux in Amersham. I’ve heard they procure their product from human cadavers. I hope that’s true.
Richard was not so fortunate. The bullet struck his lower jaw and removed it completely. His tongue, too. Had its trajectory not been altered, albeit subtly, by Lorna’s hair and skull, it would have hit him in the throat and killed him instantly. He resides now in one of England’s finest high-security hospitals, locked in a tiny room, his hands strapped to the bed-rails so that he cannot disconnect the numerous tubes that keep him alive.
I visited him in the summer. My psychiatrist’s idea. “For closure,” he said. He wrote to the hospital on my behalf and reluctantly I went along. It was a brief visit. I stood with two of the burliest nurses I have ever seen in a room not unlike Richard’s garage: bleak, windowless, a single light in the ceiling glimmering behind mesh. There was a drain in the floor and the walls were coated with something that made cleaning blood and body waste from them easier.
Richard lay in his bed, his eyes (light brown with delicate orange flecks, still the same, even now) fixed upward. Below the nose, his face appeared to have been removed by some kind of human pencil eraser. Smudged away. No teeth. No mouth. Just a whorl of scar tissue. A trach tube jutted from a hole in his throat.
I looked at him, this man - “The Chiltern Chopper” - who enjoyed Beethoven and Glenfiddich, and who I once called a friend.
We’re nothing alike, I thought. I had intended to say this out loud - for closure, you understand - but couldn’t get the words out. I stuttered and covered my mouth.
He didn’t look at me. Not once.
“That’s what he does all day,” one of the nurses said. “Just stares at the ceiling. I’ve never seen him sleep. He hardly even blinks.”
I looked at Richard a moment longer and then turned to the nurses. “That’s enough,” I said. “I want to leave now.”
I drove home with my heart clamouring, beneath a cloudless summer sky, and as I pulled into the driveway of my lonely little house in Thame, it occurred to me that the nurse was wrong.
It wasn’t the ceiling Richard was staring at.
It was the light.
<
~ * ~
NEIL GAIMAN
Feminine Endings
MY DARLING, Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me, placed coins in the palm of my hand). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.
I write this in English, your language, a language I also speak. My English is good. I was some years ago in England and in Scotland. I spent a whole summer standing in Covent Garden, except for the month of Edinburgh Festival, when I am in Edinburgh. People who put money in my box in Edinburgh included Mr Kevin Spacey the actor, and Mr Jerry Springer the American television star who was in Edinburgh for an opera about his life.
I have put off writing this for so long, although I have wanted to, although I have composed it many times in my head. Shall I write about you? About me?
First you.
I love your hair, long and red. The first time I saw you I believed you to be a dancer, and I still believe that you have a dancer’s body. The legs, and the posture, head up and back. It was your smile that told me you were a foreigner, before ever I heard you speak. In my country we smile in bursts, like the sun coming out and illuminating the fields and then retreating again behind a cloud too soon. Smiles are valuable here, and rare. But you smiled all the time, as if everything you saw delighted you. You smiled the first time you saw me, even wider than before. You smiled and I was lost, like a small child in a great forest never to find its way home again.
I learned when young that the eyes give too much away. Some in my profession adopt dark spectacles, or even (and these I scorn with bitter laughter as amateurs) masks that cover the whole face. What good is a mask? My solution is that of full-sclera theatrical contact lenses, purchased from an American website for a little under 500 euros, which cover the whole eye. They are dark grey, of course, and look like stone. They have made me more than 500 euros, paid for themselves over and over. You may think, given my profession, t
hat I must be poor, but you would be wrong. Indeed, I fancy that you must be surprised by how much I have collected. My needs have been small and my earnings always very good.
Except when it rains.
Sometimes even when it rains. The others as perhaps you have observed, my love, retreat when it rains, put up the umbrellas, run away. I remain where I am. Always. I simply wait, unmoving. It all adds to the conviction of the performance.
And it is a performance, as much as when I was a theatrical actor, a magician’s assistant, even when I myself was a dancer. (That is how I am so familiar with the bodies of dancers.) Always, I was aware of the audience as individuals. I have found this with all actors and all dancers, except the short-sighted ones for whom the audience is a blur. My eyesight is good, even through the contact lenses.
“Did you see the man with the moustache in the third row?” we would say. “He is staring at Minou with lustful glances.”
And Minou would reply, “Ah, yes. But the woman on the aisle, who looks like the German Chancellor, she is now fighting to stay awake.” If one person falls asleep, you can lose the whole audience, so we would play the rest of the evening to a middle-aged woman who wished only to succumb to drowsiness.
The second time you stood near me you were so close I could smell your shampoo. It smelled like flowers and fruit. I imagine America as being a whole continent full of women who smell of flowers and fruit. You were talking to a young man from the university. You were complaining about the difficulties of our language for an American. “I understand what gives a man or a woman gender,” you were saying. “But what makes a chair masculine or a pigeon feminine? Why should a statue have a feminine ending?”
The young man, he laughed and pointed straight at me, then. But truly, if you are walking through the square, you can tell nothing about me. The robes look like old marble, water-stained and time-worn and lichened. The skin could be granite. Until I move I am stone and old bronze, and I do not move if I do not want to. I simply stand.
Some people wait in the square for much too long, even in the rain, to see what I will do. They are uncomfortable not knowing, only happy once they have assured themselves that I am a natural, not an artificial. It is the uncertainty that traps people, like a mouse in a glue-trap.
I am writing about myself perhaps too much. I know that this is a letter of introduction as much as it is a love letter. I should write about you. Your smile. Your eyes so green. (You do not know the true colour of my eyes. I will tell you. They are brown.) You like classical music, but you have also ABBA and Kid Loco on your iPod Nano. You wear no perfume. Your underwear is, for the most part, faded and comfortable, although you have a single set of red-lace brassiere and panties which you wear for special occasions.
People watch me in the square, but the eye is only attracted by motion. I have perfected the tiny movement, so tiny that the passerby can scarcely tell if it is something he saw or not. Yes? Too often people will not see what does not move. The eyes see it but do not see it, they discount it. I am human-shaped, but I am not human. So in order to make them see me, to make them look at me, to stop their eyes from sliding off me and paying me no attention, I am forced to make the tiniest motions, to draw their eyes to me. Then, and only then, do they see me. But they do not always know what they have seen.
I think of you as a code to be broken, or as a puzzle to be cracked. Or a jigsaw puzzle, to be put together. I walk through your life, and I stand motionless at the edge of my own. My gestures - statuesque, precise - are too often misinterpreted. I want you. I do not doubt this.
You have a younger sister. She has a MySpace account, and a Facebook account. We talk sometimes on Messenger. All too often people assume that a medieval statue exists only in the fifteenth century. This is not so true: I have a room, I have a laptop. My computer is passworded. I practise safe computing. Your password is your first name. That is not safe. Anyone could read your email, look at your photographs, reconstruct your interests from your web history. Someone who was interested and who cared could spend endless hours building up a complex schematic of your life, matching the people in the photographs to the names in the emails, for example. It would not be hard reconstructing a life from a computer, or from cell-phone messages. It would be like filling a crossword puzzle.
I remember when I actually admitted to myself that you had taken to watching me, and only me, on your way across the square. You paused. You admired me. You saw me move once, for a child, and you told a woman with you, loud enough to be heard, that I might be a real statue. I take it as the highest compliment. I have many different styles of movement, of course - I can move like clockwork, in a set of tiny jerks and stutters, I can move like a robot or an automaton. I can move like a statue coming to life after hundreds of years of being stone.
Within my hearing you have spoken many times of the beauty of this small city. How, for you, to be standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun. Also, you are concerned about your mother’s illness.
When you were an undergraduate you worked as a cook, and your fingertips are covered with the scar marks of a thousand tiny knife-cuts.
I love you, and it is my love for you that drives me to know all about you. The more I know, the closer I am to you. You were to come to my country with a young man, but he broke your heart, and still you came here to spite him, and still you smiled. I close my eyes and I can see you smiling. I close my eyes and I see you striding across the town-square in a clatter of pigeons. The women of this country do not stride. They move diffidently, unless they are dancers. And when you sleep your eyelashes flutter. The way your cheek touches the pillow. The way you dream.
I dream of dragons. When I was a small child, at the home, they told me that there was a dragon beneath the old city. I pictured the dragon wreathing like black smoke beneath the buildings, inhabiting the cracks between the cellars, insubstantial and yet always present. That is how I think of the dragon, and how I think of the past, now. A black dragon made of smoke. When I perform I have been eaten by the dragon and have become part of the past. I am, truly, seven hundred years old. Kings come and kings go. Armies arrive and are absorbed or return home again, leaving only damaged buildings, widows and bastard children behind them, but the statues remain, and the dragon of smoke, and the past.
I say this, although the statue that I emulate is not from this town at all. It stands in front of a church in southern Italy, where it is believed either to represent the sister of John the Baptist, or a local lord who endowed the church to celebrate that he had not died of the plague, or the angel of death.
I had imagined you perfectly pure, my love, pure as I am, yet one time I found that the red lace panties were pushed to the bottom of your laundry hamper, and upon close examination I was able to assure myself that you had, unquestionably, been unchaste the previous evening. Only you know who with, for you did not talk of the incident in your letters home, or allude to it in your online journal.
A small girl looked up at me once, and turned to her mother, and said, “Why is she so unhappy?” (I translate into English for you, obviously. The girl was referring to me as a statue and thus she used the feminine ending.)
“Why do you believe her to be unhappy?”
“Why else would people make themselves into statues?”
Her mother smiled. “Perhaps she is unhappy in love,” she said.
I was not unhappy in love. I was prepared to wait until everything was right, something very different.
There is time. There is always time. It is the gift I took from being a statue - one of the gifts, I should say.
You have walked past me and looked at me and smiled, and you have walked past me and other times you barely noticed me as anything other than an object. Truly, it is remarkable how little regard you, or any human, give to something that remains completely motionl
ess. You have woken in the night, got up, walked to the little toilet, micturated, walked back to your bed, slept once more, peacefully. You would not notice something perfectly still, would you? Something in the shadows?
If I could, I would have made the paper for this letter for you out of my body. I thought about mixing in with the ink my blood or spittle, but no. There is such a thing as overstatement, yet great loves demand grand gestures, yes? I am unused to grand gestures. I am more practised in the tiny gestures. I made a small boy scream once, simply by smiling at him when he had convinced himself that I was made of marble. It is the smallest of gestures that will never be forgotten.
I love you, I want you, I need you. I am yours just as you are mine. There. I have declared my love for you.
Soon, I hope, you will know this for yourself. And then we will never part. It will be time, in a moment, to turn around, put down the letter. I am with you, even now, in these old apartments with the Iranian carpets on the walls.
You have walked past me too many times.
No more.
I am here with you. I am here now.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 50
