“Hey, don’t we have enough crap flying loose in this house without me having to haul your tired old ass up on sexual hareassment?”
“You wish.” He spat soggy paper into the waste basket. “So? Gimme a date, I’ll settle for a ballpark figure. Round it off to the nearest decade.”
I didn’t think this was amusing. “I live the way I like.”
“You live like shit.”
I could feel the heat in my cheeks. “I don’t have to -”
“No; you don’t. But I’ve watched you for a long time, Francine. I knew your step-father, and I knew Andy . . .”
“Leave Andy out of it. What’s done is done.”
“Whatever. Andy’s gone, a long time now he’s been gone, and I don’t see you moving along. You live like an old lady, not even with the cat thing; and one of these days they’ll find your desiccated corpse stinking up the building you live in, and they’ll bust open the door, and there you’ll be, all leathery and oozing parts, in rooms filled with old Sunday newspaper sections, like those two creepy brothers . . .”
“The Collyer Brothers.”
“Yeah. The Collyer Brothers.”
“I don’t think that’ll happen.”
“Right. And I never thought we’d elect some half-assed actor for President.”
“Clinton wasn’t an actor.”
“Tell that to Bob Dole.”
It was wearing thin. I wanted out of there. For some reason all this sidebar crap had wearied me more than I could say. I felt like shit again, the way I’d felt before dinner. “Are you done beating up on me?” He shook his head slowly, wearily.
“Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll start all over.” I thanked him, and I went home. Tomorrow, we’ll start all over. Right at the level of glistening black alleys. I felt like shit.
* * * *
I was dead asleep, dreaming about black birds circling a garbage-filled alley. The phone made that phlegm-ugly electronic sound its designers thought was reassuring to the human spirit, and I grabbed it on the third. “Yeah?” I wasn’t as charming as I might otherwise have been. The voice on the other end was Razzia down at the house. “The three women . . . them models . . .?”
“Yeah, what about them?”
“They’re gone.”
“So big deal. They were material witnesses, that’s all. We know where to find ‘em.”
“No, you don’t understand. They’rereally gone. As in ‘vanished.’ Poof! Green light. . . and gone.”
I sat up, turned on the bed lamp. “Green light?”
“Urey had ‘em in tow, he was takin’ ‘em down the front steps, and there was this green light, and Urey’s standin’ there with his dick in his mitt.” He coughed nervously. “In a manner ‘a speak-in’.”
I was silent.
“So, uh, Lootenant, they’re, uh, like no longer wit’ us.”
“I got it. They’re gone. Poof.”
I hung up on him, and I went back to sleep. Not immediately, but I managed. Why not. There was a big knife with a tag on it, in a brown bag, waiting for me; and some blood simples I already knew; there were three supermodels drunk with love who now had vanished in front of everyone’s eyes; and we still had an old dead man with his head hanging by a thread.
The Boss had no right to talk to me like that.
I didn’t collect old newspapers. I had a subscription to Time. And the J. Crew catalogue.
* * * *
And it was that night, in dreams, that the one real love of my life came to me.
As I lay there, turning and whispering to myself, a woman in her very early forties, tired as hell but quite proud of herself, only eleven years on the force and already a Lieutenant of Homicide, virtually unheard-of, I dreamed the dream of true love.
She appeared in a green light. I understood that... it was part of the dream, from the things the bum Richard had said, that the women had said. In a green light, she appeared, and she spoke to me, and she made me understand how beautiful I really was. She assured me that Angie Rose and Hypatia and Camilla had told her how lovely I was, and how lonely I was, and how scared I was . . . and we made love.
If there is an end to it all, I have seen it; I have been there, and I can go softly, sweetly. The one true love of my life appeared to me, like a goddess, and I was fulfilled. The water was cool and clear and I drank deeply.
I realized, as I had not even suspected, that I was tired. I was exhausted from serving time in my own life. And she asked me if I wanted to go away with her, to a place where the winds were cinnamon-scented, where we would revel in each other’s adoration till the last ticking moment of eternity.
I said: take me away.
And she did. We went away from there, from that sweaty bedroom in the three-room apartment, before dawn of the next day when I had to go back to death and gristle and puzzles that could only be solved by apprehending monsters. And we went away, yes, we did.
* * * *
I am very old now. Soon I will no doubt close my eyes in a sleep even more profound than the one in which I lay when she came to release me from a life that was barely worth living. I have been in this cinnamon-scented place for a very long time. I suppose time is herniated in this venue, otherwise she would not have been able to live as long as she did, nor would she have been able to move forward and backward with such alacrity and ease. Nor would the twisted eugenics that formed her have borne such elegant fruit.
I could have sustained any indignity. The other women, the deterioration of our love, the going-away and the coming back, knowing that she ... or he, sometimes . . . had lived whole lives in other times and other lands. With other women. With other men.
But what I could not bear was knowing the child was not mine. I gave her the best eternity of my life, yet she carried that damned thing inside her with more love than ever she had shown me. As it grew, as it became the inevitable love-object, I withered.
Let her travel with them, whatever love-objects she could satisfy, with whatever was in that dirty paper bag, and let them wail if they choose . . . but from this dream neither he nor she will ever rise. I am in the green light now, with the machete. It may rain, but I won’t be there to see it.
Not this time.
<
* * * *
PETER STRAUB
Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff
Peter Straub is the author ofa number of best-selling novels, including Ghost Story, Shadowland, Koko, The Throat and The Hellfire Club. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, two World Fantasy Awards and the International Horror Guild Award (for “Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff”). He also received the Life Achievement Award at the 1997 World Horror Convention.
More recently he published a new novel, Mr X, and the novella Pork Pie Hat appeared as part of Orion’s Criminal Records series. A new collection of shorter fiction, Magic Terror, is forthcoming.
About the following powerful novella, the author explains, “I had been thinking about what I might do with Herman Melville’s great story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ when Otto Penzler asked me to contribute to an anthology based on the theme of revenge. ‘All right,’ I thought, ‘let’s do a “Bartleby” about revenge.’
“I had to do something with ‘Bartleby’, anyhow, as I hadn’t been able to think about anything else since I reread it. Plus the idea of revenge exacted by revenge itself, which is the only kind of revenge interesting enough to write about, seemed to fit pretty well into a story about a man who cannot rid himself of a mysterious employee. Once I started, the entire story seemed to fall happily into place. I should add that the lyrical descriptions of cigar-smoke are jokes about connoisseurship.”
* * * *
I.
I never intended to go astray, nor did I know what that meant. My journey began in an isolated hamlet notable for the piety of its inhabitants, and when I vowed to escape New Covenant I assumed that the values instilled within me there would forever be my guide. And so, with a dept
h of paradox I still only begin to comprehend, they have been. My journey, so triumphant, also so excruciating, is both from my native village and of it. For all its splendor, my life has been that of a child of New Covenant.
When in my limousine I scanned the Wall Street Journal, when in the private elevator I ascended to the rosewood-paneled office with harbor views, when in the partners’ dining room I ordered squab on a mesclun bed from a prison-rescued waiter known to me alone as Charlie-Charlie, also when I navigated for my clients the complex waters of financial planning, above all when before her seduction by my enemy Graham Leeson I returned homeward to luxuriate in the attentions of my stunning Marguerite, when transported within the embraces of my wife, even then I carried within the frame houses dropped like afterthoughts down the streets of New Covenant, the stiff faces and suspicious eyes, the stony cordialities before and after services in the grim great Temple - the blank storefronts along Harmony Street - tattooed within me was the ugly, enigmatic beauty of my birthplace. Therefore I believe that when I strayed, and stray I did, make no mistake, it was but to come home, for I claim that the two strange gentlemen who beckoned me into error were the night of its night, the dust of its dust. In the period of my life’s greatest turmoil - the month of my exposure to Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff, “Private Detectives Extraordinaire,” as their business card described them - in the midst of the uproar I felt that I saw the contradictory dimensions of.. .
of...
I felt I saw. . . had seen, had at least glimpsed . . . what a wiser man might call... try to imagine the sheer difficulty of actually writing these words ... the Meaning of Tragedy. You smirk, I don’t blame you, in your place I’d do the same, but I assure you I sawsomething.
I must sketch in the few details necessary to understand my story. A day’s walk from New York state’s Canadian border, New Covenant was (and still is, still is) a town of just under a thousand inhabitants united by the puritanical Protestantism of the Church of the New Covenant, whose founders had broken away from the even more puritanical Saints of the Covenant. (The Saints had proscribed sexual congress in the hope of hastening The Second Coming.) The village flourished during the end of the nineteenth century, and settled into its permanent form around 1920.
To wit: Temple Square, where the Temple of the New Covenant and its bell tower, flanked left and right by the Youth Bible Study Center and the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School, dominate a modest greensward. Southerly stand the shop fronts of Harmony Street, the bank, also the modest placards indicating the locations of New Covenant’s doctor, lawyer, and dentist; south of Harmony Street lie the two streets of frame houses sheltering the town’s clerks and artisans, beyond these the farms of the rural faithful, beyond the farmland deep forest. North of Temple Square is Scripture Street, two blocks lined with the residences of the Reverend and his Board of Brethren, the aforementioned doctor, dentist, and lawyer, the President and Vice-President of the bank, also the families of some few wealthy converts devoted to Temple affairs. North of Scripture Street are more farms, then the resumption of the great forest in which our village described a sort of clearing.
My father was New Covenant’s lawyer, and to Scripture Street was I born. Sundays I spent in the Youth Bible Study Center, weekdays in the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School. New Covenant was my world, its people all I knew of the world. Three-fourths of all mankind consisted of gaunt, bony, blond-haired individuals with chiseled features and blazing blue eyes, the men six feet or taller in height, the women some inches shorter - the remaining fourth being the Racketts, Mudges, and Blunts, our farm families, who after generations of intermarriage had coalesced into a tribe of squat, black-haired, gap-toothed, moon-faced males and females seldom taller than five feet, four or five inches. Until I went to college I thought that all people were divided into the races of town and barn, fair and dark, the spotless and the mud-spattered, the reverential and the sly.
Though Racketts, Mudges and Blunts attended our school and worshipped in our Temple, though they were at least as prosperous as we in town save the converts in their mansions, we knew them tainted with an essential inferiority. Rather than intelligent they seemedcrafty, rather than spiritual, animal. Both in classrooms and Temple, they sat together, watchful as dogs compelled for the nonce to be “good,” now and again tilting their heads to pass a whispered comment. Despite Sunday baths and Sunday clothes, they bore an uneraseable odor redolent of the barnyard. Their public self-effacement seemed to mask a peasant amusement, and when they separated into their wagons and other vehicles, they could be heard to share a peasant laughter.
I found this mysterious race unsettling, in fact profoundly annoying. At some level they frightened me - I found them compelling. Oppressed from my earliest days by life in New Covenant, I felt an inadmissible fascination for this secretive brood. Despite their inferiority, I wished to know what they knew. Locked deep within their shabbiness and shame I sensed the presence of a freedom I did not understand but found thrilling.
Because town never socialized with barn, our contacts were restricted to places of education, worship, and commerce. It would have been as unthinkable for me to take a seat beside Delbert Mudge or Charlie-Charlie Rackett in our fourth-grade classroom as for Delbert or Charlie-Charlie to invite me for an overnight in their farmhouse bedrooms. Did Delbert and Charlie-Charlie actually have bedrooms, where they slept alone in their own beds? I recall mornings when the atmosphere about Delbert and Charlie-Charlie suggested nights spent in close proximity to the pig pen, others when their worn dungarees exuded a freshness redolent of sunshine, wildflowers and raspberries.
During recess an inviolable border separated the townies at the northern end of our play area from the barnies at the southern. Our play, superficially similar, demonstrated our essential differences, for we could not cast off the unconscious stiffness resulting from constant adult measurement of our spiritual worthiness. In contrast, the barnies did not play at playing but actually played, plunging back and forth across the grass, chortling over victories, grinning as they muttered what must have been jokes. (We were not adept at jokes.) When school closed at end of day, I tracked the homebound progress of Delbert, Charlie-Charlie and clan with envious eyes and a divided heart.
Why should they have seemed in possession of a liberty I desired? After graduation from Middle School, we townies progressed to Shady Glen’s Consolidated High, there to monitor ourselves and our fellows while encountering the temptations of the wider world, in some cases then advancing into colleges and universities. Having concluded their educations with the seventh grade’s long division and “Hiawatha” recitations, the barnies one and all returned to their barns. Some few, some very few, of us, among whom I had determined early on to be numbered, left for good, thereafter to be celebrated, denounced, or mourned. One of us, Caleb Thurlow, violated every standard of caste and morality by marrying Munna Blunt and vanishing into barnie-world. A disgraced, disinherited pariah during my childhood, Thurlow’s increasingly pronounced stoop and decreasing teeth terrifyingly mutated him into a blond, wasted barnie-parody on his furtive annual Christmas appearances at Temple. One of them, one only, my old classmate Charlie-Charlie Rackett, escaped his ordained destiny in our twentieth year by liberating a plow horse and Webley-Vickers pistol from the family farm to commit serial armed robbery upon Shady Glen’s George Washington Inn, Town Square Feed & Grain, and Allsorts Emporium. Every witness to his crimes recognized what, if not who, he was, and Charlie-Charlie was apprehended while boarding the Albany train in the next village west. During the course of my own journey from and of New Covenant, I tracked Charlie-Charlie’s gloomy progress through the way stations of the penal system until at last I could secure his release at a parole hearing with the offer of a respectable job in the financial planning industry.
I had by then established myself as absolute monarch of three floors in a Wall Street monolith. With my two junior partners, I enjoyed the services
of a fleet of paralegals, interns, analysts, investigators, and secretaries. I had chosen these partners carefully, for as well as the usual expertise, skill and dedication, I required other, less conventional qualities.
I had sniffed out intelligent but unimaginative men of some slight moral laziness; capable of cutting corners when they thought no one would notice; controlled drinkers and secret drug-takers: juniors with reason to be grateful for their positions. I wanted no zealousness. My employees were to be steadfastly incurious and able enough to handle their clients satisfactorily, at least with my paternal assistance.
My growing prominence had attracted the famous, the established, the notorious. Film stars and athletes, civic leaders, corporate pashas, and heirs to longstanding family fortunes regularly visited our offices, as did a number of conspicuously well-tailored gentlemen who had accumulated their wealth in a more colorful fashion. To these clients I suggested financial stratagems responsive to their labyrinthine needs. I had not schemed for their business. It simply came to me, willy-nilly, as our Temple held that salvation came to the elect. One May morning, a cryptic fellow in a pin-striped suit appeared in my office to pose a series of delicate questions. As soon as he opened his mouth, the cryptic fellow summoned irresistibly from memory a dour, squinting member of the Board of Brethren of New Covenant’s Temple. I knew this man, and instantly I found the tone most acceptable to him. Tone is all to such people. After our interview he directed others of his kind to my office, and by December my business had tripled. Individually and universally these gentlemen pungently reminded me of the village I had long ago escaped, and I cherished my suspicious buccaneers even as I celebrated the distance between my moral life and theirs. While sheltering these self-justifying figures within elaborate trusts, while legitimizing subterranean floods of cash, I immersed myself within a familiar atmosphere of pious denial. Rebuking home, I was home.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology] Page 46
