A Pair of Aces

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Moonlight jumped into the room and Draighton was not Draighton now, but the strange thing. What had Draighton called him? Lord of the Razor?

  "Cat and mouse," said the Lord of the Razor in his strange voice of broken glass and tumbling razor blades, two pounds of gravel and the screech of a dying cat.

  Leroy was up and running. He went through the living room and into the kitchen and he could hear the plopping of those feet behind him, and he began to scream. Still screaming, he hit the side door and it came open and he leaped out into the night air, onto the yard, and when he did, the moonlight was bagged again by shadows, and Leroy realized now that the moonlight wasn't all there was to it, but it was part of it. He turned and saw Draighton coming. He kicked out hard and hit Draighton in the groin and Draighton doubled a little, but kept coming. Leroy, with nothing more than an instinctive move, stepped aside and slapped out with both hands and caught Draighton across the back, sending him stumbling in his horrid shoes, stumbling across the yard and up against the house next door. He hit his head with a sound like an anvil being dropped on a pumpkin, and Draighton fell and rolled over, his face facing the heavens.

  Leroy looked up at the sky. The clouds were rolling across the heavens and some of them were very dark and he could smell even stronger the aroma of rain in the air. He saw too that soon all the strands of clouds would pass, and the moonlight would be full. He rushed to the storage shed against the house, jerked open the door and got hold of the shovel.

  He rushed over to Draighton, and as he did Draighton's eyes opened and the moonlight shone and Draighton's face began to change. Leroy lifted the shovel with both hands, brought it down with all his might on Draighton's throat.

  There was a sound like someone cutting a garden hose in two, then there was a spray of blood, and Draighton's hand that held the razor fluttered a couple of times, opened. The razor lay in the flat of Draighton's dead hand.

  Just to make sure, Leroy gave Draighton's throat another slam with the shovel, this time freeing the head from the body completely. Leroy stumbled back and sat down in the yard. The yard was full of moonlight now and it lay over it like a thin coating of butter.

  Leroy didn't know exactly what to do. He wondered if anyone would come out of the house next door. They didn't, and lights didn't go on. No one had heard or seen anything. He looked across the street. The houses over there were dark as well.

  How was he going to explain this? What about Mom and Dad?

  He wasn't sure he was doing the right thing, but he began to dig, and finally he had a big trench in the yard. He rolled Draighton and the heads of his parents into the trench and kicked Draighton's head in there with them. He covered it up.

  As he finished, he saw that the razor was lying in the grass.

  He picked it up.

  He carried it in his hand, walked back down the street to his parent's car. Their headless bodies were there. Blood-covered symbols had been drawn on the inside of the windshield.

  Numb, Leroy walked back to his house and went upstairs and sat on the stool that had belonged to Draighton's father. He sat there for an hour, then got up and got the composition notebook. He opened it and looked at the drawings, the symbols. They moved on the page.

  He sucked at his papercut.

  He looked out the window.

  It was rainy.

  Soon the rain would pass. It was that kind of rain. Pushing hard and passing quick. It would still be nightfall. The moon, which was full, would come out. Maybe the sky would clear of clouds.

  He sucked the paper cut on his finger and looked at it.

  His finger was the size of a frankfurter and it pulsed. The cut on his finger spread open as he looked. There seemed to be something there. He got up and found a match he used to air out farts, struck it on the window sill and held the match close to his finger. The heat from the match felt good. The cut on his finger spread open and he looked at it carefully. There in the wound made by the composition book with all its symbols, he could see more than eyes should be able to see. It was as if he had telescopic vision.

  He saw his mother and father's heads hanging on hooks. Draighton's head hanging on a hook. And beneath them, sitting on a stool made of leg bones and rags of flesh, the Lord of the Razor, looking up and out the wound, smiling those stick-pin teeth. Closer he looked. There were all manner of bodies as well as living human beings, flayed alive, screaming, coming to the fore of the wound to look up with pitiful wounds for faces. All manner of strange bat-like things flapped up against the wound but did not come out.

  The Lord of the Razor waved a hand that was like a flash of shadows and the bat things fled and the flayed things fled, and there was just the Lord's face, looking up and partially out of the wound. Smiling those silver stick-pin teeth.

  Leroy dropped his hand. He went back and sat on the stool. He looked down at his feet. He needed to do something about the way they looked. He thumbed through the composition notebook, used the razor to cut the paper cut on his finger open wider. The blood came freely. He wiped it on his pants at first, then he used his finger and the blood to draw in the notebook. He understood the symbols. They did things to the world. A small part of it. They helped crack open dimensions. They made things as the Lord, the King of Shadows, wanted them to be.

  When he finished writing, he sat very still on the stool, the open razor in his hand. Waiting for the rain to come. Waiting for it to pass. Waiting for the moonlight. Waiting for the change.

  Janet Finds the Razor

  Author's Note:

  This is more of a mood piece than anything, and it's probably better if you know about the God of The Razor, but it's not necessary that you do to enjoy the story. Bill Schafer thought it would be nice if we had a new God of The Razor story for this collection of book and associated stories, and I thought on it for a long time, and was about to give up on the idea, when this hit.

  It came out of word association mostly, but there was some kind of germ growing in my skull the moment Bill mentioned doing something new, I just couldn't put my finger on it, and wasn't sure if it was really anything until the words Janet finds the razor appeared in my skull like a neon sign and the story came from that.

  In the unsold screenplay that Neal Barrett, Jr. and I wrote for The Nightrunners, at the end, we had a boy and a girl find the razor, which made for a nice set up for another film. And if not, it gave the whole idea of the razor and the God that came with it a final impact.

  I thought about someone else finding the razor. A girl named Janet, and this came out.

  Janet found the razor lying in the grass. She saw it in the moonlight. It was shiny and the way the moonlight hit it, it threw off a blinding light. It was a big old thing, and the first thing happened was, when she picked it up, it bit her.

  The blade didn't jump open and cut her, but something nipped at her, and when she switched the razor to her other hand, she discovered it was a pretty good nip. She was bleeding.

  She looked the razor over but couldn't find any snags where she might have caught her hand, and the blade was well tucked into the frame, so she was uncertain how she had been hurt.

  Sucking on the wound, she examined the bone handle of the razor. There were all kinds of odd things cut into the handle, shapes that reminded her of hieroglyphics.

  Walking home she began to feel odd. It wasn't a bad odd, exactly, but it wasn't the way she usually felt. At fifteen, she thought she should be out having fun with friends, but she didn't have any friends, and she didn't really have much of a home life. Her parents didn't even know she was out at night. She didn't even have to sneak to go out, all she had to do was walk through the living room where they were watching TV and go out the door. They didn't ask where she was going, or what she was doing. Truth was, she didn't even think they noticed.

  She went out and walked along and thought about things. Once, not long ago, on a walk, she had set fire to an old, out of business washateria. The window was open and she had slippe
d inside and found some old newspapers in there. Besides the newspapers, there were empty wine bottles lying about and rat droppings. Winos had probably been sleeping there at night, and later this night they would come to drink their wine and cover themselves in newspapers. Maybe they would come back soon. The idea that they might catch her thrilled her, and the thought of ridding the winos of their place to sleep, putting them out in the cold, humored Janet, so she took the newspapers and with a lighter she had stolen from her father, she set it afire, and it gradually caught along the window sill, but didn't burn long before it played out.

  It was the best she could do, and she had gone home, and dreamed, and in her dreams the washateria had caught and gone up in a red hat of flames, licked at the sky until the moon caught fire. The moon had fallen blazing from the heavens, crashed into the ground, throwing flames and green moon cheese in all directions.

  The dream had been better than the event, but deep inside of her, there had been planted some kind of seed, and she could feel it grow. And when the razor bit her, the seed seemed to receive some kind of fertilizer, and it grew fast and furious, and she felt so odd, and weak at first, and then anything but weak.

  When she saw her shadow flowing off the sidewalk and into the street, crawling amongst the shadows of the elms and the shadows that the moon made with the houses, it didn't look like her shadow at all, but the shadow felt the way she felt. Big and strong and not even one ounce of feminine. The shadow was that of a large man, wearing a top hat, and there were things in the shadow that didn't look right, that didn't belong, like glints of silver where the teeth should be, and the shadow shape of the razor quit being a shadow and became a long slash of silver.

  When Janet looked down, she saw the razor in her hand was open. She didn't remember opening it. And when she walked, there was a plopping sound, and looking at her feet, she saw that her legs were long and tapered and the feet small, stuck down into the mouths of decapitated heads, and it was the heads that made the plopping noise as she walked.

  Plop. Plop. Plop. Plop.

  She came to her house, and the way the moonlight shown on the window glass by the front door, she could see her reflection, and it wasn't that of a young girl, sixteen, with braces and a crooked nose and greasy, brown hair. It was the reflection of someone who had to stoop real low to look into that window's reflection; look and see an almost skeletal face with teeth like long, shiny, silver stick pins, and eyes that blazed like coals, all of this topped by a large black top hat, and bottomed on the feet by those bloody, splitting, decapitated heads, and when she looked down at the heads, she recognized them. They were the heads of the neighbors across the street. They were good neighbors, and they had always been good to her, and took care of her and listened to her when her parents did not, and she remembered something now. It came to her faintly. She remembered going to their house, and now she remembered opening the blade, and she remembered the way Mr. Jenkins had looked when he opened the door to her knock, and she had had to bend way down to look him in the face.

  He wanted to scream, she could tell that, could remember that now, but the scream was trapped in his throat, like an animal that had died in a burrow. And then she had him. One quick swipe and he was headless, and then she was in the house, stooping as she came through the door. And there was Mrs. Jenkins, and she did scream, but not for long, because her blade moved fast and cut the scream out of her throat.

  Janet, or that thing that had been Janet, gathered the heads then, sat on the couch and stuck them on her cloven feet, and out the door she had gone, on up the street to her house.

  And now she went inside…

  It was three days before anyone knew anything was wrong, across the street at the Jenkins place or in Janet's house. But finally people got worried, and the houses were checked out, and what they found made seasoned cops throw up their doughnuts.

  The Jenkins house, it was bad. Decapitated bodies. The heads missing. Blood on the floor, on the walls. But at Janet's house it was really bad. The walls were painted in bloody symbols and the two headless bodies of her parents had been skinned and the meat that had been in them had big chunks bitten out of it and their skins had been draped on the coat rack. The dog had been decapitated as well. Like the heads of the Jenkins couple, the heads of Janet's parents and the dog were never found.

  Janet was found in the bedroom. She was lying on the bed. She had been stripped of her skin from head to toe, and no one could figure it, because one of her hands, the left arm that had not been peeled of skin, was grasping her skin from her waist, and she had managed to peel it all the way down to her knees before succumbing.

  It looked as if she had almost succeeded in skinning herself.

  Except, there were no sharp instruments available. No one could figure how she could have done it.

  On Janet's bed, and across the floor, and up the wall, and on the window sill, there was lots of blood, and a little crawl pattern that looked like something long and smooth had slid along there, and then it had used something sharp to climb the wall and make the window sill. The window pane was knocked out and there was a blood trail going out the window and into the grass and across the yard, and the trail finally stopped at the street where there was a grating and a city drain.

  The grating was removed and the drain was sucked out, but they couldn't suck it all out, not unless they wanted to stick a hose down a hole many miles long and all the way under the city and into all the tons of sewage festering below.

  So the whole thing was given up. The police didn't find the heads, and they didn't find the instrument that Janet had used on them or on herself, so they decided she didn't do it at all. That someone unknown had come in and done it, had killed the others and skinned her and put her hand like that, like she was peeling her own hide off, and then they had left.

  No one talked about the bloody trail from the bed to the wall to the window, across the yard and down the drain. At least it wasn't talked about in the report. Actually, the cops, and some of the people the cops told about the event, talked about it for a real long time, and sometimes, even now, in quiet whispers, it is spoken of and worried over, and the whole thing remains a mystery.

  THE NIGHTRUNNERS

  Screenplay by Joe R. Lansdale and Neal Barrett, Jr.

  Based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale

  BLACK SCREEN

  a faint whisper of rain, the distant sound of an approaching storm–

  then, without warning, a terrific BLAST of thunder that shakes the foundations of the earth, and a sudden, searing–

  FLASH OF LIGHTNING

  and we see crude, childlike drawings on a grimy concrete wall, and the–

  THEME begins softly, the haunting theme of THE LORD OF THE RAZOR…a throb, a heartbeat, a babble of sound, like voices rising up from the cellar of a madhouse, words we can't identify…

  Darkness.

  Another long flash, and then a series of flashes, strobe-like, and in the strobe light, on the wall, the bizarre symbols. Demonic stick figures. Screaming faces, each entangled with the next, as if this is a map of hell.

  Another big flash and we're seeing the same symbols, and for an instant we don't realize it, but–

  WE ARE ON THE NAKED CHEST OF CLYDE EDSON

  Now we get that strobe-like lightning again, and the shapes on his body appear to shift, and we go–

  CLOSE ON ONE SYMBOL.

  A shadow shape, tall and lean, wearing a top hat and what looks like big balls on his feet, and we HOLD BRIEFLY, before a sudden period of darkness, and then the strobe-lightning picks up again, and we–

  WIDEN TO

  a three-quarter view of the man's face. We can almost see his features, but not quite.

  ANOTHER ANGLE ON CLYDE

  and we can see a barred window and behind the bars, a metal netting mixed with glass. We realize now we're in a jail cell.

  He picks up a shirt and holding it between his two hands flips it like wash he's trying to w
ring out, and then we–

  CUT TO:

  JAIL CORRIDOR

  JAILER walks by Clyde's cell, doesn't look in, hears a slight NOISE, pauses, turns back, looks in at US as we hear the sound of the clatter of a chair against the stone floor.

  JAILOR'S POV: A chair clatters to the floor.

  CLYDE EDSON drops abruptly, as the tangled shirt around his neck jerks to a halt, and we see he has hung himself. He hangs there, naked, and begins to turn.

  The jailer rushes in and we go–

  CLOSE ON CLYDE

  His eyes bulge out like boiled eggs and his mouth is wide open and his tongue pokes out and his neck is turned awkward, and A BOLT OF LIGHTNING makes the weirdly decorated cell as bright as hell on Open House day. And in the brightness, this series of flashes: 1. A large razor snapping open. 2. The stick figures on the wall moving, central among them, the top-hatted figure. 3. The face of a beautiful woman in fear, eyes green as emeralds–BECKY JONES.

  And then, there is only the brightness WHITES OUT with the full sound of thunder as we as we have a SOUND LIKE A STEEL DOOR being slammed closed, and with the sound we–

  SLAM CUT TO:

  BLINDING LIGHTS, a sudden ROAR, the GROWL of a souped up engine, coming right at us. We see the blinding light as headlights now, and just as we perceive this, we have–

  ANOTHER ANGLE ON CAR

  A cool black 66 CHEVY whines out of the night, and then we get a QUICK SHOT OF THE INTERIOR: Swinging from the rearview mirror is a crude pipe cleaner figure with a small torn out photograph of Clyde stuck on it for a face. The photo is cocked to the left, and around it's "neck" is a small noose made of twine. Scratched into the dashboard are the same crude figures we saw in Clyde's jail cell.