by James Ellroy
"You look distressed, Mr. Rudy Pairis. Why's that? Because you're going to die in my place? Because I could have taken you over at any time, and didn't? Because after all this time of your miserable, wasted, lousy life you finally find someone like you, and we don't even have the convenience of a chat? Well, that's sad, that's really sad, kiddo. But you didn't have a chance."
"You're stronger than me, you kept me out," I said.
He chuckled.
"Stronger? Is that all you think it is? Stronger? You still don't get it, do you?" His face, then, grew terrible. "You don't even understand now, right now that I've cleaned it all away and you can see what I did to you, do you?
"Do you think I stayed in a jail cell, and went through that trial, all of that, because I couldn't do anything about it? You poor jig slob. I could have jumped like a shrike any time I wanted to. But the first time I met your Ally I saw you."
I cringed. "And you waited ... ? For me, you spent all that time in prison, just to get to me... ?"
"At the moment when you couldn't do anything about it, at the moment you couldn't shout 'I've been taken over by someone else, I'm Rudy Pairis here inside this Henry Lake Spanning body, help me, help me!' Why stir up noise when all I had to do was bide my time, wait a bit, wait for Ally, and let Ally go for you."
I felt like a drowning turkey, standing idiotically in the rain, head tilted up, mouth open, water pouring in. "You can ... leave the mind ...leave the body... go out ... jaunt, jump permanently..."
Spanning sniggered like a schoolyard bully.
"You stayed in jail three years just to get me?"
He smirked. Smarter than thou.
"Three years? You think that's some big deal to me? You don't think I could have someone like you running around, do you? Someone who can 'jaunt' as I do? The only other shrike I've ever encountered. You think I wouldn't sit in here and wait for you to come to me?"
"But three years ..."
"You're what, Rudy ... thirty-one, is it? Yes, I can see that. Thirty-one. You've never jumped like a shrike. You've just entered, jaunted, gone into the landscapes, and never understood that it's more than reading minds. You can change domiciles, black boy. You can move out of a house in a bad neighborhood —such as strapped into the electric chair—and take up residence in a brand-spanking-new housing complex of million-and-a-half-buck condos, like Ally."
"But you have to have a place for the other one to go, don't you?" I said it just flat, no tone, no color to it at all. I didn't even think of the place of dark, where you can go...
"Who do you think I am, Rudy? Just who the hell do you think I was when I started, when I learned to shrike, how to jaunt, what I'm telling you now about changing residences? You wouldn't know my first address. I go a long way back.
"But I can give you a few of my more famous addresses. Gilles de Rais, France, 1440; Vlad Tepes, Romania, 1462; Elizabeth Bathory, Hungary, 1611; Catherine DeShayes, France, 1680; Jack the Ripper, London, 1888; Henri Désiré Landru, France, 1915; Albert Fish, New York City, 1934; Ed Gein, Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1954; Myra Hindley Manchester, 1963; Albert DeSalvo, Boston, 1964; Charles Manson, Los Angeles, 1969; John Wayne Gacy, Norwood Park Township, Illinois, 1977.
"Oh, but how I do go on. And on. And on and on and on, Rudy, my little porch monkey. That's what I do. I go on. And on and on. Shrike will nest where it chooses. If not in your beloved Allison Roche, then in the cheesy fucked-up black boy, Rudy Pairis. But don't you think that's a waste, kiddo? Spending however much time I might have to spend in your socially unacceptable body, when Henry Lake Spanning is such a handsome devil? Why should I have just switched with you when Ally lured you to me, because all it would've done is get you screeching and howling that you weren't Spanning, you were this nigger son who'd had his head stolen ... and then you might have manipulated some guards or the warden...
"Well, you see what I mean, don't you?
"But now that the mask is securely in place, and now that the electrodes are attached to your head and your left leg, and now that the warden has his hand on the switch, well, you'd better get ready to do a lot of drooling."
And he turned around to jaunt back out of me, and I closed the perimeter. He tried to jaunt, tried to leap back to his own mind, but I had him in a fist. Just that easy. Materialized a fist, and turned him to face me.
"Fuck you, Jack the Ripper. And fuck you twice, Bluebeard. And on and on and on fuck you Manson and Boston Strangler and any other dipshit warped piece of sick crap you been in your years. You sure got some muddy-shoes credentials there, boy.
"What I care about all those names, Spanky my brother? You really think I don't know those names? I'm an educated fellah, Mistuh Rippuh, Mistuh Mad Bomber. You missed a few. Were you also, did you inhabit, hast thou possessed Winnie Ruth Judd and Charlie Starkweather and Mad Dog Coll and Richard Speck and Sirhan Sirhan and Jeffrey Dahmer? You the boogieman responsible for every bad number the human race ever played? You ruin Sodom and Gomorrah, burned the Great Library of Alexandria, orchestrated the Reign of Terror dans Paree, set up the Inquisition, stoned and drowned the Salem witches, slaughtered unarmed women and kids at Wounded Knee, bumped off John Kennedy?
"I don't think so.
"I don't even think you got so close as to share a pint with Jack the Ripper. And even if you did, even if you were all those maniacs, you were small potatoes, Spanky. The least of us human beings outdoes you, three times a day. How many lynch ropes you pulled tight, M'sieur Landru?
"What colossal egotism you got, makes you blind, makes you think you're the only one, even when you find out there's someone else, you can't get past it. What makes you think I didn't know what you can do? What makes you think I didn't let you do it, and sit here waiting for you like you sat there waiting for me, till this moment when you can't do shit about it?
"You so goddamn stuck on yourself, Spankyhead, you never give it the barest that someone else is a faster draw than you.
"Know what your trouble is, Captain? You're old, you're real old, maybe hundreds of years who gives a damn old. That don't count for shit, old man. You're old, but you never got smart. You're just mediocre at what you do.
"You moved from address to address. You didn't have to be Son of Sam or Cain slayin' Abel, or whoever the fuck you been ... you could've been Moses or Galileo or George Washington Carver or Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth or Mark Twain or Joe Louis. You could've been Alexander Hamilton and helped found the Manumission Society in New York. You could've discovered radium, carved Mount Rushmore, carried a baby out of a burning building. But you got old real fast, and you never got any smarter. You didn't need to, did you, Spanky? You had it all to yourself, all this 'shrike' shit, just jaunt here and jaunt there, and bite off someone's hand or face like the old, tired, boring, repetitious, no-imagination stupid shit that you are.
"Yeah, you got me good when I came here to see your landscape. You got Ally wired up good. And she suckered me in, probably not even knowing she was doing it ... you must've looked in her head and found just the right technique to get her to make me come within reach. Good, m'man; you were excellent. But I had a year to torture myself. A year to sit here and think about it. About how many people I'd killed, and how sick it made me, and little by little I found my way through it.
"Because ... and here's the big difference 'tween us, dummy:
"I unraveled what was going on ... it took time, but I learned. Understand, asshole? I learn! You don't.
"There's an old Japanese saying—I got lots of these, Henry, m'man— I read a whole lot—and what it says is, 'Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years' experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience—twenty times.'" Then I grinned back at him.
"Fuck you, sucker," I said, just as the warden threw the switch and I jaunted out of there and into the landscape and mind of Henry Lake Spanning.
I sat there getting oriented for a second; it was the first time I'd done more
than a jaunt ... this was... shrike; but then Ally beside me gave a little sob for her old pal Rudy Pairis, who was baking like a Maine lobster, smoke coming out from under the black cloth that covered my, his, face; and I heard the vestigial scream of what had been Henry Lake Spanning and thousands of other monsters, all of them burning, out there on the far horizon of my new landscape; and I put my arm around her, and drew her close, and put my face into her shoulder and hugged her to me; and I heard the scream go on and on for the longest time, I think it was a long time, and finally it was just wind ...and then gone ... and I came up from Ally's shoulder, and I could barely speak.
"Shhh, honey, it's OK," I murmured. "He's gone where he can make right for his mistakes. No pain. Quiet, a real quiet place; and all alone forever. And cool there. And dark."
I was ready to stop failing at everything, and blaming everything. Having fessed up to love, having decided it was time to grow up and be an adult—not just a very quick study who learned fast, extremely fast, a lot faster than anybody could imagine an orphan like me could learn, than any body could imagine —I hugged her with the intention that Henry Lake Spanning would love Allison Roche more powerfully, more responsibly, than anyone had ever loved anyone in the history of the world. I was ready to stop failing at everything.
And it would be just a whole lot easier as a white boy with great big blue eyes.
Because— get on this now—all my wasted years didn't have as much to do with blackness or racism or being overqualified or being unlucky or being high-verbal or even the curse of my "gift" of jaunting, as they did with one single truth I learned waiting in there, inside my own landscape, waiting for Spanning to come and gloat:
I have always been one of those miserable guys who couldn't get out of his own way.
Which meant I could, at last, stop feeling sorry for that poor nigger, Rudy Pairis. Except, maybe, in a moment of human weakness.
OUT THERE IN THE DARKNESS
1995: Ed Gorman
ED GORMAN (1941–) was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and graduated from Coe College in Iowa (1963). He worked in advertising as a copywriter and freelance writer for twenty years, then became a full-time writer, mainly of fiction. While most of his work has been in the mystery genre, he has also written many other types of fiction, including horror (he was nominated for Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association for his short story collections Cages [1995] and The Dark Fantastic [2001]) and westerns (he won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for Best Short Fiction, for "The Face" in 1992), under both his own name and the pen names E. J. Gorman and Daniel Ransom. He has been nominated for two Edgar Allan Poe Awards by the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Short Story, for "Prisoners" (1991), and (with others) Best Biographical/Critical Work, for The Fine Art of Murder (1994). He was also honored with MWA's Ellery Queen Award in 2003, given primarily for his numerous works of mystery fiction, his long editorship of Mystery Scene Magazine, a fanzine, and his many anthologies.
Among his many novels are the first in the six-volume Jack Dwyer series, Rough Cut (1985); The Day the Music Died (1999), the first of more than a half-dozen Sam McCain novels; and The Poker Club (1999), which was made into a feature film directed by Tim McCann in 2008. The Poker Club is an expansion of the short story "Out There in the Darkness," which was first published in a limited-edition (five hundred copies) chapbook by Subterranean Press, in 1995.
***
1
THE NIGHT IT all started, the whole strange spiral, we were having our usual midweek poker game — four fortyish men who work in the financial business getting together for beer and bawdy jokes and straight poker. No wildcard games. We hate them.
This was summer, and vacation time, and so it happened that the game was held two weeks in a row at my house. Jan had taken the kids to see her Aunt Wen dy and Uncle Verne at their fishing cabin, and so I offered to have the game at my house this week, too. With nobody there to supervise, the beer could be laced with a little bourbon, and the jokes could get even bawdier. With the wife and kids in the house, you're always at least a little bit intimidated.
Mike and Bob came together, bearing gifts, which in this case meant the kind of sexy magazines our wives did not want in the house in case the kids might stumble across them. At least that's what they say. I think they sense, and rightly, that the magazines might give their spouses bad ideas about taking the secretary out for a few after-work drinks, or stopping by a singles bar some night.
We got the chips and cards set up at the table, we got the first beers open (Mike chasing a shot of bourbon with his beer), and we started passing the dirty magazines around with tenth-grade glee. The magazines compensated, I suppose, for the balding head, the bloating belly, the stooping shoulders. Deep in the heart of every hundred-year-old man is a horny fourteen-year-old boy.
All this, by the way, took place up in the attic. The four of us got to know one another when we all moved into what city planners called a "transitional neighborhood." There were some grand old houses that could be renovated with enough money and real care. The city designated a ten-square-block area as one it wanted to restore to shiny new luster. Jan and I chose a crumbling Victorian. You wouldn't recognize it today. And that includes the attic, which I've turned into a very nice den.
"Pisses me off," Mike O'Brien said. "He's always late."
And that was true. Neil Solomon was always late. Never by that much but always late nonetheless.
"At least tonight he has a good excuse," Bob Genter said.
"He does?" Mike said. "He's probably swimming in his pool." Neil recently got a bonus that made him the first owner of a full-size outdoor pool in our neighborhood.
"No, he's got patrol. But he's stopping at nine. He's got somebody trading with him for next week."
"Oh, hell," Mike said, obviously sorry that he'd complained. "I didn't know that."
Bob Genter's handsome black head nodded solemnly.
Patrol is something we all take very seriously in this newly restored "transitional neighborhood." Eight months ago, the burglaries started, and they've gotten pretty bad. My house has been burglarized once and vandalized once. Bob and Mike have had curb-sitting cars stolen. Neil's wife, Sarah, was surprised in her own kitchen by a burglar. And then there was the killing four months ago, man and wife who'd just moved into the neighborhood, savagely stabbed to death in their own bed. The police caught the guy a few days later trying to cash some of the traveler's checks he'd stolen after killing his prey. He was typical of the kind of man who infested this neighborhood after sundown: a twentyish junkie stoned to the point of psychosis on various street drugs, and not at all averse to murdering people he envied and despised. He also knew a whole hell of a lot about fooling burglar alarms.
After the murders there was a neighborhood meeting, and that's when we came up with the patrol, something somebody'd read about being popular back east. People think that a nice middle-sized Midwestern city like ours doesn't have major crime problems. I invite them to walk many of these streets after dark. They'll quickly be disabused of that notion. Anyway, the patrol worked this way: each night, two neighborhood people got in the family van and patrolled the ten-block area that had been restored. If they saw anything suspicious, they used their cellular phones and called police. We jokingly called it the Baby-Boomer Brigade. The patrol had one strict rule: you were never to take direct action unless somebody's life was at stake. Always, always use the cellular phone and call the police.
Neil had patrol tonight. He'd be rolling in here in another half hour. The patrol had two shifts: early, eight to ten; late, ten to twelve.
Bob said, "You hear what Evans suggested?"
"About guns?" I said.
"Yeah."
"Makes me a little nervous," I said.
"Me, too," Bob said. For somebody who'd grown up in the worst area of the city, Bob Genter was a very polished guy. Whenever he joked that he was the token black, Neil always countered with the f
act that he was the token Jew, just as Mike was the token Catholic and I was the token Methodist. We were friends of convenience, I suppose, but we all really did like one another, something that was demonstrated when Neil had a cancer scare a few years back. Bob, Mike, and I were in his hospital room twice a day, all eight days running.
"I think it's time," Mike said. "The bad guys have guns, so the good guys should have guns."
"The good guys are the cops," I said. "Not us."
"People start bringing guns on patrol," Bob said, "somebody innocent is going to get shot."
"So some night one of us here is on patrol and we see a bad guy and he sees us and before the cops get there, the bad guy shoots us? You don't think that's going to happen?"
"It could happen, Mike," I said, "but I just don't think that justifies carrying guns."
The argument gave us something to do while we waited for Neil.
"Sorry I'm late," Neil Solomon said after he followed me up to the attic and came inside.
"We already drank all the beer," Mike O'Brien said loudly.
Neil smiled. "That gut you're carrying lately, I can believe that you drank all the beer."
Mike always enjoyed being put down by Neil, possibly because most people were a bit intimidated by him— he had that angry Irish edge—and he seemed to enjoy Neil's skilled and fearless handling of him. He laughed with real pleasure.
Neil sat down, I got him a beer from the tiny fridge I keep up here, cards were dealt, seven-card stud was played.
Bob said, "How'd patrol go tonight?"
Neil shrugged. "No problems."
"I still say we should carry guns," Mike said.
"You're not going to believe this, but I agree with you," Neil said.
"Seriously?" Mike said.
"Oh, great," I said to Bob Genter. "Another beer-commercial cowboy."
Bob smiled. "Where I come from, we didn't have cowboys, we had 'mothas.'" He laughed. "Mean mothas, let me tell you. And practically all of them carried guns."
