by Mike Ashley
There was also a carbon copy of the story he’d just finished. The return address on the first page was a box number at the Hollywood post office. The title of the story was “Deathsong.” I wish I’d had time to read it.
All in all, I didn’t find anything. Except for the books and the deck of cards there was nothing of Andrew Detweiler personally in the whole apartment. I hadn’t thought it possible for anyone to lead such a turnip existence.
I looked around to make sure I hadn’t disturbed anything, turned off the bathroom light, and got in the closet, leaving the door open a crack. It was the only possible place to hide. I sincerely hoped Detweiler wouldn’t need anything out of it before I found out what was going on. If he did, the only thing I could do was confront him with what I’d found out. And then what, Mallory, a big guilty confession? With what you’ve found out he could laugh in your face and have you arrested for illegal entry.
And what about this, Mallory. What if someone died nearby tonight while you were with Detweiler; what if he comes straight to his apartment and goes to bed; what if he wakes up in the morning feeling fine; what if nothing is going on, you son of a bitch?
It was so dark in there with the curtains drawn that I couldn’t see a thing. I left the closet and opened them a little on the front window. It didn’t let in a lot of light, but it was enough. Maybe Detweiler wouldn’t notice. I went back to the closet and waited.
Half an hour later the curtains over the barred open window moved. I had squatted down in the closet and wasn’t looking in that direction, but the movement caught my eye. Something hopped in the window and scooted across the floor and went behind the couch. I only got a glimpse of it, but it might have been a cat. It was probably a stray looking for food of hiding from a dog. Okay, cat, you don’t bother me and I won’t bother you. I kept my eye on the couch, but it didn’t show itself again.
Detweiler didn’t show for another hour. By that time I was sitting flat on the floor trying to keep my legs from cramping. My position wasn’t too graceful if he happened to look in the closet, but it was too late to get up.
He came in quickly and bolted the door behind him. He didn’t notice the open curtain. He glanced around, clicking his tongue softly. His eyes caught on something at the end of the couch. He smiled. At the cat? He began unfastening his shirt, fumbling at the buttons in his haste. He slipped off the shirt and tossed it on the back of the chair.
There were straps across his chest.
He turned towards the suitcase, his back to me. The hump was artificial, made of something like foam rubber. He unhooked the straps, opened the suitcase, and tossed the hump in. He said something, too soft for me to catch, and lay face down on the couch with his feet towards me. The light from the opened curtain fell on him. His back was scarred, little white lines like scratches grouped around a hole.
He had a hole in his back, between his shoulder blades, an unhealed wound big enough to stick your finger in.
Something came around the end of the couch. It wasn’t a cat. I thought it was a monkey, and then a frog, but it was neither. It was human. It waddled on all fours like an enormous toad.
Then it stood erect. It was about the size of a cat. It was pink and moist and hairless and naked. Its very human hands and feet and male genitals were too large for its tiny body. Its belly was swollen, turgid and distended like an obscene tick. Its head was flat. Its jaw protruded like an ape’s. It too had a scar, a big, white, puckered scar between its shoulder blades, at the top of its jutting backbone.
It reached its too-large hand up and caught hold of Detweiler’s belt. It pulled its bloated body up with the nimbleness of a monkey and crawled onto the boy’s back. Detweiler was breathing heavily, clasping and unclasping his fingers on the arm of the couch.
The thing crouched on Detweiler’s back and placed its lips against the wound.
I felt my throat burning and my stomach turning over, but I watched in petrified fascination.
Detweiler’s breathing grew slower and quieter, more relaxed. He lay with his eyes closed and an expression of almost sexual pleasure on his face. The thing’s body got smaller and smaller, the skin on its belly growing wrinkled and flaccid. A trickle of blood crawled from the wound, making an erratic line across the Detweiler boy’s back. The thing reached out a hand and wiped the drop back with a finger.
It took ten minutes. The thing raised its mouth and crawled over beside the boy’s face. It sat on the arm of the couch like a little gnome and smiled. It ran its finger down the side of Detweiler’s cheek and pushed his damp hair back out of his eyes. Detweiler’s expression was euphoric. He sighed softly and opened his eyes sleepily. After a while he sat up.
He was flushed with health, rosy and clear and shining.
He stood up and went to the bathroom. The light came on and I heard water running. The thing was in the same place, watching him. Detweiler came out of the bathroom and sat back on the couch. The thing climbed onto his back, huddling between his shoulder blades, its hand on his shoulder. Detweiler stood up, the thing hanging onto him, retrieved the shirt, and put it on. He wrapped the straps neatly around the artificial hump and stowed it in the suitcase. He closed the lid and locked it.
I had seen enough, more than enough. I opened the door and stepped out of the closet.
Detweiler whirled, his eyes bulging. A groan rattled in his throat. He raised his hands as if fending me off. The groan rose in pitch, becoming an hysterical keening. The expression on his face was too horrible to watch. He stepped backward and tripped over the suitcase.
He lost his balance and toppled over. His arms flailed for equilibrium, but never found it. He struck the edge of the table. It caught him square across the hump on his back. He bounced and fell forward on his hands. He stood up agonizingly, like a slow motion movie, arching his spine backward, his face contorted in pain.
There were shrill, staccato shrieks of mindless torment, but they didn’t come from Detweiler.
He fell again, forward onto the couch, blacking out from pain. The back of his shirt was churning. The scream continued, hurting my ears. Rips appeared in the shirt and a small misshapen arm poked out briefly. I could only stare, frozen. The shirt was ripped to shreds. Two arms, a head, a torso came through. The whole thing ripped its way out and fell onto the couch beside the boy. Its face was twisted, tortured, and its mouth kept opening and closing with screams. Its eyes looked uncomprehendingly about. It pulled itself along with its arms, dragging its useless legs, its spine obviously broken. It fell off the couch and flailed about on the floor.
Detweiler moaned and came to. He rose from the couch, still groggy. He saw the thing, and a look of absolute grief appeared on his face.
The thing’s eyes focused for a moment on Detweiler. It looked at him, beseeching, held out one hand, pleading. Its screams became a breathless rasping. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I picked up a chair and smashed it down on the thing. I dropped the chair and leaned against the wall and heaved.
I heard the door open. I turned and saw Detweiler run out.
I charged after him. My legs felt rubbery but I caught him at the street. He didn’t struggle. He just stood there, his eyes vacant, trembling. I saw people sticking their heads out of doors and Johnny Peacock coming toward me. My car was right there. I pushed Detweiler into it and drove away. He sat hunched in the seat, his hands hanging limply, staring into space. He was trembling uncontrollably and his teeth chattered.
I drove, not paying attention to where I was going, almost as deeply in shock as he was. I finally started looking at the street signs. I was on Mulholland. I kept going west for a long time, crossed the San Diego Freeway, into the Santa Monica Mountains. The pavement ends a couple of miles past the freeway, and there’s ten or fifteen miles of dirt road before the pavement picks up again nearly to Topanga.
The road isn’t travelled much, there are no houses on it, and people don’t like to get their cars dusty. I was about in the middle of the unpav
ed section when Detweiler seemed to calm down. I pulled over to the side of the road and cut the engine. The San Fernando Valley was spread like a carpet of lights below us. The ocean was on the other side of the mountains.
I sat and watched Detweiler. The trembling had stopped. He was asleep or unconscious. I reached over and touched his arm. He stirred and clutched at my hand. I looked at his sleeping face and didn’t have the heart to pull my hand away.
The sun was poking over the mountains when he woke up. He roused and was momentarily unaware of where he was; then memory flooded back. He turned to me. The pain and hysteria were gone from his eyes. They were oddly peaceful.
“Did you hear him?” he said softly. “Did you hear him die?”
“Are you feeling better?”
“Yes. It’s all over.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
His eyes dropped and he was silent for a moment. “I want to tell you. But I don’t know how without you thinking I’m a monster.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He…was my brother. We were twins. Siamese twins. All those people who died so I could stay alive.” There was no emotion in his voice. He was detached, talking about someone else. “He kept me alive. I’ll die without him.” His eyes met mine again. “He was insane, I think. I thought at first I’d go mad too, but I didn’t. I think I didn’t. I never knew what he was going to do, who he would kill. I didn’t want to know. He was very clever. He always made it look like an accident or suicide when he could. I didn’t interfere. I didn’t want to die. We had to have blood. He always did it so there was lots of blood, so no one would miss what he took.” His eyes were going empty again.
“Why did you need the blood?”
“We were never suspected before.”
“Why did you need the blood?” I repeated.
“When we were born,” he said, and his eyes focused again, “we were joined at the back. But I grew and he didn’t. He stayed little bitty, like a baby riding around on my back. People didn’t like me…us, they were afraid. My father and mother too. The old witch-woman I told you about, she birthed us. She seemed always to be hanging around. When I was eight, my parents died in a fire. I think the witch-woman did it. After that I lived with her. She was demented, but she knew medicine and healing. When we were fifteen she decided to separate us. I don’t know why. I think she wanted him without me. I’m sure she thought he was an imp from hell. I almost died. I’m not sure what was wrong. Apart, we weren’t whole. I wasn’t whole. He had something I didn’t have, something we’d been sharing. She would’ve let me die, but he knew and got blood for me. Hers.” He sat staring at me blankly, his mind living the past.
“Why didn’t you go to a hospital or something?” I asked, feeling enormous pity for the wretched boy.
He smiled faintly. “I didn’t know much about anything then. Too many people were already dead. If I’d gone to a hospital they’d have wanted to know how I’d stayed alive so far. Sometimes I’m glad it’s over, and, then, the next minute I’m terrified of dying.”
“How long?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve never been more than three days. I can’t stand it any longer than that. He knew. He always knew when I had to have it. And he got it for me. I never helped him.”
“Can you stay alive if you get regular transfusions?”
He looked at me sharply, fear creeping back. “Please. No!”
“But you’ll stay alive.”
“In a cage! Like a freak! I don’t want to be a freak anymore. It’s over. I want it to be over. Please.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
I looked at him, at his face, at his eyes, at his soul. “There’s a gun in the glove compartment,” I said.
He sat for a moment, then solemnly held out his hand. I took it. He shook my hand, then opened the glove compartment. He removed the gun and slipped out of the car. He went down the hill into the brush. I waited and waited and never did hear a shot.
THE FENCE AT THE END
OF THE WORLD
Melissa Mia Hall
Melissa Mia Hall was not a prolific writer of fiction. Most of her work had been reviews and interviews in her career as a journalist, and she had sold a little less than thirty stories before her untimely death in January 2011. But each story packs as much energy as a dozen ordinary tales. Melissa wrote much of herself into her work and her stories are always memorable, even one as short as the following. It was the story’s title that first caught my eye, but let it not delude you. It has afar harsher and more frightening meaning than you might expect, and is written straight from the heart.
Every evening they go out to the fence, down where the world ends. Marla and Kay hold hands for luck. It takes courage to go down there. They take turns looking though a crack in one wooden plank, its tip sharp with splinters just begging to pierce their hands. They search the sometimes featureless darkness for clues.
“I see a spot of light.”
“A lightning bug…”
“A lightning ball.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I seen it. I seen it plain as day, that a UFO gonna come down and scoop us up, take us away to Alpha Centauri, or who knows, maybe Camelot. I got to get me a King Arthur.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
“You wish.”
They can’t open the gate that goes outside. Mama told them never to open the gate. They can never, ever go outside. They will live here forever until their bodies rot and their eyeballs fall out.
Marla turns away from the fence. She sits back on her haunches like their old Irish Setter Claude used to. The ritual is getting tiresome.
“Ain’t you ever sick to death about all this?”
“If you want to fall off the edge of the world, you go right on ahead and do it. You want to go together?” Kay puts an arm around her older sister and Marla shivers. “We could fall through space together.”
“We could go during the day. I can see more’n space out there then. The postman comes. So does all manner of folk. Everybody comes and goes. Why not us? I heard tell maybe somebody’s gonna come and make Mama let us go to school this fall.”
The postman says everyone’s got to go to school. He’s tall, brown and muscular. He looks good in his shorts. Name’s Emmitt and he always talks to Marla like she’s smart.
“We gonna look like fools. They’ll think we retards,” Kay says.
“I don’t care. Mama can’t make us stay here forever.”
“But we will. We got to take care of Mama.”
“Money ain’t gonna last forever. We gots to pay bills,” Marla sighs.
“No, we don’t. Besides, nobody cares about white trash. We can just slide on by for awhile – just borrow from Peter to pay Paul – way we’ve always done.”
“Don’t be calling us white trash. Daddy was the trash. He shouldn’t have gone off and left us.” Marla says sharply.
The darkness seems to lift a little. Marla pushes Kay’s arm away and stands up. She stretches her thin arms and Kay watches admiringly. Kay is smaller, chubbier.
“Did you hear her? Was that Mama?”
Behind them, the house appears to tilt as a sound whispers in the pecan trees drooping above it. “What if people never die, just seem like.”
“You mean, play like they dead?” Marla doesn’t like to talk about the dead. She heads for the porch bravely where Mama’s old porch-swing moves in the breeze in lop-sided fashion. Kay follows her. They sit on the steps, waiting for the air to turn cooler, but it’s August in East Texas and is not at all likely. “I don’t know, but say we climbed the fence and went over tonight, Katykins, what do you think would really happen?”
“We’d fall into pitch darkness, into nothing. We’d fall and fall and never land.”
Kay wraps her short arms around her knees and squeezes.
“Sure you would! I don’t
think Mama’s right about this. It’s crazy.”
“She be bed bound. She can’t make us do anything, that’s for sure.” Kay rubs her latest bruise and studies a scab on her knee. “Oh, who we kidding, yes, she can.”
It’s an eternal argument, what Mama can and can’t do.
The old neon hand is no longer lit. Folks don’t come anymore to visit Madame Clarice, Spiritual Advisor and Gifted Psychic. It’s like a magical circle has been drawn around their house. It happened around the time Mama came back from the hospital after the fit. Doctors called it a stroke. The girls knew better. Mama got so mad at them one day she just sit down and screamed until she couldn’t scream anymore.
Marla has considered turning the electricity on and becoming the next Spiritual Advisor. Every town needs one and they really like them to be exotic. Marla has taken to wearing some of Mama’s old get-ups. She is aware of how pretty she is. Sometimes she just stares at herself naked in the hall mirror. She tries different earrings. Mama can’t say anything. Mama was so greedy.
“Marla, we gots to do something. I want to go to school. If we can see the sun and it is out there, every morning…” Kay points towards the gate that for some peculiar reason, only the postman can open, “then hey, we can go out there. We’ve got to.”
They used to go out. It’s not like they’ve never been. But Marla believes Mama is right. After the fit, everything changed. The air shifted.
Spring became fall. Marla tried, one secret night to go outside and her foot fell on air. She slipped and fell, held on to the edge of the world by sheer determination and pulled herself back into yard. She looked down into nothing. The ground had given away. At first, she thought there’d been an earthquake or something. Magic. Mama never wanted them to leave her. They had to stay. Because the world had become an illusion. “No.”
