He started to run, bursting into the living room. The main lights were off, the area illuminated only by dim lamps. He stopped, staring at the figure tied to the chair in the centre of the space, head slumped forward. At the pool of blood on the floor in front of it.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Jonathan whirled to see the woman standing right behind him. Her eyes were hard too but she looked amused. It was the girl his son had picked up from The Jury Room, and she was holding a long, sharp knife.
Seen closer, he half-recognized her. It was not Maria, however. “What... are you doing?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said, stepping closer. “It’s daddy. Huh.”
The figure tied to the chair raised his head. “Dad?” he said. His voice was hoarse. “Is that you?”
Jonathan saw that his son’s face was badly cut. One eye appeared punctured. When he took a step closer it became more evident that the liquid on the hardwood floor around him was not just blood, but urine too.
He turned back to the girl. “Let him go.”
“Sooooooo not going to happen,” she said, flipping the knife so it spun in a languid 360 degrees. The handle smacked back into her palm, loudly establishing her level of acquaintanceship with the weapon. “This isn’t good, Jonathan. This is ... not okay”
“I can make him stop.”
“Doubt it. That’s not the point anyway, as you well know. The point is that he’s crap at it. The cops in this town are dumb as a sack of rocks, but if you managed to put it together, sooner rather than later they will too. Then what?”
“He gets arrested. And it stops.”
“No. Then the police and the media start nosing around your family. Are you sure all your bodies are buried deep enough, Jonathan? That none of the girls you’ve met on your evening drives are ever going to be found? And are you sure Ryan won’t remember some evening when he was super-small and supposed to be asleep, a night you and Elaine held a party for our special friends, and little boy Ryan peeked out his window and saw bad funky stuff happening out there at the dark back-end of the garden? From what I hear Elaine was quite the party girl once, though she always left the wet work to you. Personally, that’s my favourite part.”
“He won’t talk. He never saw anything. I made sure of it.”
“No? So how come he’s out there hurting people? And how come he’s so fucking bad at it?”
The girl picked a bag off the nearest chair and put the knife inside. She didn’t put the bag back down, however, or pull her hand back out. “You know the deal,” she said. “Either the kids don’t know anything about what we do, or else you train them up so they’re better than you at it. Generation upon generation. This has not happened here, Jonathan. Your boy is the worst of both worlds - and whose fault is that?”
“Mine,” he said, numbly.
“Dad?” Ryan said, his voice slurred. “What are you talking about?”
“Let him go,” Jonathan asked, again. What was the girl’s name - Miranda? Cassandra? Something like that. He now recalled seeing her, briefly, at a very private party at someone else’s house, down in Los Angeles, seven or eight or ten years ago. She’d been very young then, not much more than a child, but laughed and clapped with ferocious glee when blood started to spill: the kid of someone who’d done a much better job of passing their secret world on. “I’ll make it right.”
“Too late,” she said.
“You’re nobody. You don’t get to make that call.”
“Screw you, and anyway I’m not making it. This is from the top. The Upright Man himself. You failed. End of story.”
“Not just me,” he said, grimly. “You think no one will remember you being with him in that bar tonight? If he dies, someone who looks like you will be suspect number one. The assholes in The Jury Room may be drunk out of their minds, but they’ll remember you - and they’ll talk to the cops.”
“It won’t get that far. Not with the neat fafher-ends-his-errant-son’s-miserable-life-and-fhen-takes-his-own scenario we’re going to be giving them.”
She brought her hand out of her bag, and held out a gun to him.
“Seriously? You expect me to do that?”
“I know you will. And not just because you understand the consequences if you don’t. You’ll do it because you’re one of us, and you know the rules.”
Jonathan took the gun. He looked at Ryan, still peering blearily at him with his terribly damaged little boy’s face. They hadn’t wanted him to kill. He and Elaine had done everything they could to keep him from the life, in fact, going against everything the group was supposed to stand for. They had loved Ryan, very much, even when he was bad and ill-tempered. Even when he’d been hard to love. Jonathan had tried to be a good father. He’d tried to bring his son up to be happy and healthy, even at the risk of putting himself in danger by failing to mistreat the boy in the ways prescribed.
In vain, it turned out, because somehow Ryan had found his own path to the same destination.
“Elaine’s already dead, isn’t she?”
The woman gestured toward a side-table. On it, Jonathan now realized, lay a copy of the current issue of Sunset Magazine. He doubted this was a periodical that Ryan read, and he knew where he’d very recently seen it, and in whose hands, and he remembered the 4Runner he’d seen parked just down the road from the house when he came out.
“You bitch. Why?”
“We tie up the loose ends. Have to. You know that.”
Jonathan took the gun and walked over to Ryan. He put his hand on his son’s head, gently.
“I loved you,” he said.
“Dad?”
Jonathan shot the boy through the temple. Then he raised the gun to his own head, and closed his eyes. “And I loved you most of all, my dear,” he whispered quietly, to Elaine. “I’ll fight through all the ghosts we made, until I am by your side.”
He pulled the trigger a second time.
~ * ~
When she was convinced that neither of the men was going to move ever again, the girl - whose name, the one she used most often at least, was indeed Cassandra - left the house, and walked away down the driveway.
She took the copy of Sunset Magazine with her.
She hadn’t read that issue yet.
<
~ * ~
KIM NEWMAN
The Only Ending We Have
THE WINDSHIELD WIPERS squeaked ... like shrilling fiddles, scraped nerves, the ring of an unanswered phone. Another reason to trade in her ‘57 Ford Custom. For 1960, she’d like something with fins. Not that she could afford next year’s showroom model.
Unless Hitch coughed up the ransom.
For the thing it was all about. The MacGuffin.
The thing the audience doesn’t care about, but the characters do.
“Good eeeev-ning,” Hitch said, every goddamn’ morning ... like in his TV show with that nursery/graveyard tune burbling in the background. “Funeral March of the Marionettes”. Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump ...
“Good eeeev-ning, Jay-y-ne ...”
His gargling-with-marbles accent was British. Not like David Niven or Peter Lawford, but British crawled out from under a rock. Hitch was a wattled toad in a grey-flannel suit, with inflating cheeks and jowls. His lower teeth stuck out like the Wolf Man’s. His loose, babyish lips got moist when she came on set. Even before she took off the bathrobe. When she unwrapped the goods, he was spellbound. After a half-hour, he’d have to gulp down drool with a little death-rattle.
“Jayne Swallow? Do you swallow, Jayne ... do you?”
Every morning the same routine. Even before the robe came off.
“Take a bird name, chickie,” her agent, Walter, had said ... “bird names are good.”
So, goodbye Jana Wrobel... hello, Jayne Swallow.
She should have gone with Joan Sparrow or Junie Peacock. By the time she signed on for Hitch, it was too late. She’d hea
rd all the lines.
The set was festooned with dead birds. They stank under the hot lights. Chemicals. The glass eyes of the mountain eagle perched above a doorway reminded her of Hitch’s watery ogling.
Hitchcock. That was a bird name, too. And a dirty meaning, which no one threw in the director’s face every morning.
“Good morning, Mr Softcock ... Good afternoon, Mr Halfcock ... Good eeev-ning, Mr Cocksucker ... how do you like it?”
He’d screech like a bird at that... Scree! Scree! Scree!
There was a bird name in his damn’ movie. Janet Leigh’s character. Jayne’s character. Crane. Marion Crane.
... which made Jayne and Janet Hitch’s Marion-ettes. The whole shoot was their funeral, scored with the slow, solemn, ridiculous tune. Jayne danced and strings cut into her wrists and neck.
In the end, the wires were snipped and she fell all in a heap, unstrung. Over and over. Like a sack of potatoes. Like a side of beef with arms and legs. Chocolate oozed from her wounds. Then she got up and died all over again.
Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump ... Scree! Scree! Scree!
She drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway
To disguise herself, in case anyone from the studio should be crossing the road in front of the car, she’d worn sunglasses and a headscarf. Marilyn’s famous I-don’t-want-to-be-recognized look. She’d taken off the disguise when she was safely out of Los Angeles and the rain got heavy.
Even without the shades, it was hard to see the road ahead. Short-lived clear triangles were wiped into the thick water on the windshield. A deluge. Mudslide weather. After months of California sun, you found out where the ceiling leaked. There wasn’t much traffic, which was a mercy. The car weaved from side to side as the wheel fought her grip. Her tyres weren’t the newest. She struggled, as if she’d been force-fed booze by a spy ring and set loose on a twisty cliff road to meet an unsuspicious accident.
The squeak of the wipers. The beat of her heart.
The voices in her head. Hitch’s. Her agent’s. Hers.
“Do you swallow, Jayne ... do you?”
Tony Perkins’s. “I like stuffing ... birds.”
Scree! Scree! Scree!
The window-seals were blown. Water seeped into the car, pouring in rivulets over the dash and inside the doors. Droplets formed this side of the glass, too many to wipe away with her cuff. Her seat was damp. She shivered. She’d been fighting the flu since her first day in the shower. With all the water, no one noticed her nose was streaming ... except Becca, the make-up woman, and she kept secrets like a priest in a confessional.
She could still feel water on her body. For days, she’d been pounded by studio hoses. The temperature varied from lukewarm to icy. The pressure kept up. Extra steam was pumped in, to show on film. She’d been scalded and she’d been frozen, but most of all she’d been soaked. She thought she’d never be dry again.
Before Jayne got into the fake bathtub each morning, Becca had to apply three moleskin patches which transformed her into a sexless thing, like that new blonde doll her niece had, Barbie ... or a dressmaker’s dummy with a head.
She might as well not have a head ... her face would not be in-the film. Janet Leigh’s would be. The most Jayne would show was a tangle of wet blonde hair, seen from behind, as the knife scored down her unrecognizable back.
... in the book, the girl in the shower had her head cut off with an axe. One chop. Too swift for Hitch. He preferred the death of a thousand cuts. A thousand stabs. A thousand edits.
She was the only person on the crew who’d read the novel -not especially, but by coincidence, a few months ago. Something to read while a photographer got his lights set just so. The first rule of showbusiness was always take a book to read. There was so much waiting while men fiddled before they could start proper work. On the average Western, you could read From Here to Eternity while the bar-room mirror was being replaced between fights.
Hitch disapproved of Jayne’s book-learning. He intended to make a play of keeping the twist secret ... not letting audiences into theatres after the movie started, appearing in jokey public-service messages saying “Please don’t tell the ending, it’s the only one we have”. But the picture’s last reel wasn’t an atomic plan guarded by the FBI. The paperback was in every book-rack in America. If it were down to Hitch, he’d confiscate the whole run and have the books pulped. It wasn’t even his ending, really. It was Robert Bloch’s. The writer was seldom mentioned. Hitch pretended he’d made it all up. Jayne sympathized ... Bloch was the only participant getting a worse deal out of the movie than she was.
A clot of liquid earth splattered against the windshield, dislodged from the hillside above. The wipers smeared it into a blotch. She saw obscene shapes in the mud pattern, setting off bells at the Catholic Legion of Decency. Soon, the dirt was gone. Eventually, water got rid of all the disgusting messes in the world.
After a few hours in the movie shower, those patches would wash off Jayne’s censorable areas. It didn’t matter what spirit-gum Becca tried. Water would always win.
Then, spittle would rattle in Hitch’s mouth. He would observe, lugubriously, “I spy ... with my little eye ... something beginning wi-i-i-ith ... N! Nipple!”
Always, the director would insist on pretending to help Becca re-apply the recalcitrant triangles ... risking the wrath of the unions. The film’s credited make-up men were already complaining about being gypped out of the chance to work with naked broads and stuck with be-wigging skeletons or filling John Gavin’s chin-dimple. There was an issue about whether the patches were make-up or costume.
Jayne had posed for smut pictures. Walter said no one would ever know, the pay was better than extra-work, and the skin game had been good enough for Marilyn. For Swank and Gent — she’d never made it into Playboy - they shot her as was and smoothed her to plasticity with an airbrush. For the movies, the transformation was managed on set.
“Have you shaved today, Jayne Swallow? Shaved down there?”
Unless she did, the crotch-patch was agony to get off. No matter how many times it washed free during the day, it was always stuck fast at the end of the shoot. She was raw from the ripping.
“I thought of becoming a barber,” Hitch said. “If you need a hand, I have my cut-throat...”
At that, at the thought of a straight-razor on her pubes, he would flush with unconcealable excitement ... and her guts would twist into knots.
“You’ll love Hitch,” Walter said. “And he’ll love you. He loves blondes. And bird names. Birds are in all his films.”
Sure, she was blonde. With a little help from a bottle. Another reason to shave down there.
We can’t all be Marilyn. We can’t all be Janet Leigh.
Being Janet Leigh was Jayne’s job on this film.
Body double. Stand-in. Stunt double. Torso dummy.
Oh, Janet did her time in the shower. From the neck up.
The rest of it, though ... weeks of close-ups of tummy, hands, feet, ass, thighs, throat... that was Jayne.
“It’s a shower scene,” Walter said.
She’d thought she knew what that meant. She’d done shower scenes. Indoors, for sophisticated comedies. Outdoors, for Westerns. Show a shape behind a curtain or a waterfall, and then let Debra Paget or Dorothy Provine step out wrapped in a towel and smile.
They always joked about shooting a version “for France”. Without the curtain.
In France, Brigitte Bardot showed everything. Hitch would have loved to have BB in his sights. But Hollywood wasn’t ready yet...
So, a shower scene ...
A Hitchcock shower scene.
Not a tease, not titillation - except for very specialized tastes (i.e. his). Not a barber’s scene, but a butcher’s. Not for France, but for ... well, for Transylvania or the Cannibal Islands or wherever women were meat to be carved ...
There were caresses ... the water, and the tip of the blade.
Not a single clean shocking chop but a frenzy of pizzicato stabs.
“This boy,” Hitch said, embarrassing Tony Perkins, “he has an eye for the ladies ... no, a knife for the ladies.”
She’d been prodded, over and over. She’d been sliced, if only in illusion - the dull edge of the prop drawn over the soft skin of her stomach, again and again. After the fourth or fifth pass, it felt like a real knife ... after the fourth or fifth day, she thought she was bleeding out, though it was only chocolate syrup, swirling around her dirty feet...
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 56
