by Kim Newman
He was safe in his Household. The defences were on, the grounds were secure. There were no human agents in the system to turn traitor, and the governing AI had had its loyalties freshly upgraded. Killflies were loose in the corridors of his retreat – he knew his employees referred to it behind his back as The House on Haunted Hill – and were coded to administer lethal injections to any moving thing that didn’t match Monte’s displacement configurations. He was as protected as a man could be.
He sat on the psychedelic bubble couch, and looked at his tiger-striped echt-Mondrian. The painting stirred in its sleep. He let the pleasant warmth of a soother seep through his body, calming him. As he watched, the painting’s breathing grew ragged. It died, colours fading to grey, jelly congealing behind glass. It had happened before. A fault in the heating. There was nothing to worry about, the soother in his bloodstream told him. Deep in his brain, an unsoothed fragment of his consciousness screamed.
He floated back to his easel room. As he passed the sensors, his body heat registered. Overhead banks of lights lit up, then shut off when he had moved on. There was darkness in front and darkness behind, but he was always in the light. Safe, in white light.
Behind him, black eyes shone in the darkness.
Monte heard the swish, and turned. He couldn’t see, but he had a strong afterimage. A tall man, with a heavy cloak.
He had to be alone. A 3-D wallplan proved it. He showed up as an orange pinpoint, winking in a corridor. There were no other warm bodies in the house.
He arrived in the easel room just too late. The twitch was disappearing off the lower right corner of the screen. A black and white picture remained. Monte stood over the easel, and watched as the camera tracked around an empty crypt. Lids fell off coffins, and creepy-crawlies –giant spiders, rats, an armadillo – scuttled in corners. Dracula’s sad-eyed wives waited, infinitely patient, in long white shifts for their Master’s return.
In his system, the soother reached the zenith of its effect. The tranquilising bulk of the pill had dissolved, putting a potentially dangerous dosage into him, and the emetic core spread in his gut. If he wanted to drug any more, he would have to empty his stomach. He wasn’t soothed right now. Fear played his buttons, icy fingertips keyed his vertebrae. He would have to empty his stomach.
His bathroom was mirrored and luxurious, richly carpeted and hung with turquoise and scarlet silks. The design was copied from a Cecil B. DeMille spectacular of the 1920s he had rejected as too outmoded to be worth even a thorough remix. Jewel-encrusted gold taps shone against lime green, veined marble sunken tubs. This was the focus, far more than his austere bedroom, of his fantasies and fulfilments.
Monte bent double over a puce and ginger toilet bowl, fashioned like a triton’s horn, and vomited tidily. He slammed down the oyster-shaped lid and sat on it. The emetic had a calming side-effect. He felt bad, but was instantly better. He got up and walked to the sink – a mustard replica of the font in Salisbury Cathedral – and washed his face.
Behind him, a door silently opened.
Monte peered minutely at his face in the mirror. It was possible to be flabby and haggard at the same time. He bared his teeth. They were filmed yellow. Then, the thing took him. He saw the hand that gripped his jaw and felt the one in his hair, but neither showed in the mirror. He was held fast by emptiness. Arms like metal bands gripped him. Angling his eyes down, he could see the dark sleeve of a dinner jacket and the black folds of a cloak; but in the mirror (on-screen?) he was struggling only with himself. His paisley collar was yanked away from his neck. Cold lips clamped to his throat, ice-chip teeth sank in…
The turquoise and scarlet faded first, turned dead and grey. Then, his shirt calmed down and resolved itself into a dingy, indeterminate smear. His vision slowly bled, the Technicolor twitch passing from left to right before his eyes…
He felt himself emptying out. Feebly, he raised a hand to push away the unseen face pressed to his throat. He had no more feeling. His hand flapped, chilly and wet, in his field of vision.
The last things he saw were his fingers, stained for ever with the black of his own blood.
PAMELA’S PURSUIT
Part of her strategy had been to feign, first indifference, then reluctance. It bought Pamela time to sharpen up. While Robin amassed filmy brochures and solicited testimonials from satisfied friends, she put up a deceptive resistance. She spent her lunch hours at the weapons library. Her reactions were fine, but her accuracy needed work. Once, she let a stranger pick her up on the range and sessioned with him. He had willingly paid the registration fee and looked devastated when she remaindered him with her first slug. She didn’t need to finish him, she had brought him definitively down, but she had filled his heart all the same. She had always had a healthy interest in killing. Besides, he had been a feeler and she didn’t like feelers.
After three years, Pamela and Robin could still hurt each other as deeply as they had when they first started going together. She had completely changed his face, eroding the fleshy pockets under his chin and cheekbones with her talons. With the aid of popular manuals, he had diligently mapped all the response centres of her body. He was persistent but not terribly inventive. Robin was always imagining he had new ideas but it was Pamela who was forever trying to expand the envelope of their marriage. She had been subtly manoeuvring him towards The Game for several months. As always, she needed to let him think it was his idea. But she had been the one to think of inviting the Raiths over and nudged them into enthusing. Ted Raith was a squidge and his wife could be above at her worst; they were Robin’s associates. But they had experimented, she knew, with The Game. Robin had kept up a stream of excited questions. She knew that, again, she had him.
Her feeler victim had paid for his own remaindering, but marital etiquette meant that Pamela and Robin would have to go halves. She didn’t mind. She had placed a portion of her private funding in an insurance policy and duped Robin into signing it under the impression he was entering a breakfast cereal contest. His caption had been terribly good and when she later told him he had lost, he had humourlessly initiated a boycott of the Kellogg’s company. She suspected him of arranging for the fire-bombing of several of their European warehouses. They took the fee down to the Palace with them, in platinum wafers, and passed it over to the Game officials in the foyer. They handprinted holograph waivers, absolving the company from any possible liability for permanent disabilities, and were separated.
‘Your first time?’ asked the bovey matron in the ladies’ changing room as Pamela shucked her street armour.
‘Yes,’ she sort-of lied.
‘You’ll win. The wife usually does.’
‘Uh-huh?’ She needed help with press-seams. The matron obliged. In the full-length mirror, Pamela looked svelte in black fatigues.
‘Sure. The men never bother to do their prep. They don’t take this seriously. You’ve practised?’
‘A little.’ She climbed into an elaborate shoulder holster and adjusted the straps. It had to be tight enough not to make giveaway noises but not so tight as to impede her respiratory functions.
‘A little. I’ll bet your husband hasn’t so much as squeezed off a slug in anger since he left school.’
‘That’s very probable,’ she said, but added loyally, ‘but he’s always competent. He won’t go into the Palace without being sure he can walk out.’
‘Will you surprise him?’
Pamela smiled as the matron gave her the roscoe. She held the thing, not gripping too hard, gauging weight and balance.
‘I think so.’
The roscoe was light and ladylike. The Game didn’t let you tote your own hardware. Pamela preferred something a bit more blatant. Heat-seeking slugs and dum-dum scattershots. She believed in doing as much damage as possible.
The matron helped her flip the clip and slitch the safeties. The clip rattled going in but was silent when she shook the roscoe.
‘Soundproof,’ said the matron.
Pamela pointed, not really aiming, and shot a portrait. It was a large blue picture of some forgotten stateswoman with an unsympathetic simper. She holed the face, just under the right eye, making a crocodile tear. She had hoped for the bridge of the nose.
‘It’s off slightly.’
‘That’s easy to fix. Here.’
The matron took the roscoe and gave the barrel a precise twist. This time, Pamela got her mark between the eyes. She put the weapon up to her lips and blew away a curl of smoke. Her nostrils caught the tang of ozone.
‘Of course you know you shouldn’t do that to a real person…’
‘Not unless you’re serious.’
‘No. Your brain is where you live. You only get one.’
‘I know.’
‘Accidents happen. Even here.’
‘Not to me.’
‘We have rigid safety controls. When you applied, your husband and you were thoroughly out-checked. You have no especial history of psychopathic or sociopathic disorder.’
‘That’s nice to know.’
The matron kissed her on the lips for good luck and felt under her tunic for her own benefit. She pulled an acorn-sized knobble out from Pamela’s armpit.
‘A frag? That’s not allowed, you know.’
Pamela shrugged. It was the concealment she had expected to lose. Like the tracer Robin had put in her earring. They wouldn’t search for any lesser items now, although she had persevered and found the bug in her hair. Robin would try to go into the Palace with an edge. She thought she could match that.
The portrait hinged aside, and Pamela stepped alone into the Palace. The first room bore the scars of The Game. There were join-the-dots bullet pocks on the wall. Cords of blood wove into the clearwater streaming between mossy clumps of furniture. There was little cover nearby and she couldn’t precog any immediate danger. She explored further.
She didn’t know this lay-out at all. Her first session had been in another part of the Palace. But she shouldn’t be at any particular disadvantage. She guessed that Robin had tried to access the floor plan too; he would have run aground even before coming up against the Master Block that had brought her down. As far as knowledge of the terrain went, they were even. Theoretically, Robin was a better tactician than she – the hairbug had been a nice try. But he didn’t know what it was really like to stalk and be stalked. She did; she liked it.
The next room was darker. She took time to squeeze the cheater’s kit out of her shoulder pad. With the mudsticks, she tiger-striped her face black and green. Then, she fit the blackcaps over her more visible teeth and licked until they stuck. The one-way contacts were more difficult to get comfy with, but they were worth the itch. Her eyes should look like black marbles now and her night vision was improved by a factor of five. Details of the room emerged from the shadows. She could read the spines of swollen books on the shelves; previously she had only been able to make out rough shapes. The uniform volumes were all by someone called Hansard.
She ungloved her left hand and darked the bare skin. Her fingers might be another edge. They had been her first, and so far only, major alteration. Apart from the nerve turnarounds. When she’d had her nails pulled and replaced with switchblades, her first husband – the squidge – had tried to call up his legal expeditor on the ouija slab. He didn’t believe her when she said the attachments were mainly for dealing with shrink-wrapped packages and had gone on punching keys. While he was on hold, she had opted for the Moscow Divorce and snipped his spinal column with her bunched finger-toys. When he was dead, she had been able to roll his head into funny positions. He hadn’t spoken to her since.
She extruded claws experimentally and scratched a book. It had been left flat on a tilting desk. The thick leather parted and her nail sank into yellow fleshy pages. She flicked the pulp away and sheathed her sharpies. The book felt very boring. She picked up echoes of a few dreary tirades and quickly brushed them out of mind. They reminded her of her first husband.
It had been her own fault, really, for marrying at thirteen. She had been much too old for a soldier. All he had learned in his military kindergarten was the three fs: feedin’, fightin’ and fillin’in forms. He didn’t think women should be allowed to kill people. He had taken no interest in her terrapins. Her only regret over the split-up was that it had come four months too early for Shelley. Neither of them could legally apply for custody unless the child was over five years old and so Shelley had been taken to The Farm. Pamela sometimes got the horrid feeling that some stranger was looking back at her through her daughter’s eyes. It was unlikely, but possible.
Yes, Husband Number One had been a squidge. Robin wasn’t a squidge, but he could be a bit of a skulk at times. Rather, he was a lot of a skulk a lot of the time. Take The Game: he had emphasised all through the prelims how important it was for the session to be mutually satisfactory. But she knew he had laid in a stock of quickill slugs and would, when it came to the face-off, opt to remainder her quickly rather than take the risk of prolonging the agony. He was like that. Sometimes Pamela thought Robin didn’t count her as a real person.
She padded on catslippers through the dark rooms, professionally out-checking each one, roscoe held up near her face, medium pressure on the squeezegrip. There was a surprisingly thriving ecosystem inside the Palace. The vegetation was mostly fungal but there were some vines, grasses and overgrown descendants of pot plants. The water ran down the walls in curtains. Some of the herringbone tiles had been rotted through or mulched by aggressive roots. There was rumoured to be a pack of feral corgis in the jungle somewhere but they oughtn’t to be dangerous.
She kept to the doors and corridors, avoiding the secret passageways. There were indigenous inhabitants in there somewhere. Nobody was supposed to live in the Palace any longer but elements of the ancien regime had stayed behind and interbred in the depths. The Game people didn’t really try to clear them out because they weren’t that dangerous. Feeble-minded, lazy-limbed ichabods with huge ears and rabbit teeth, by all accounts. Richer sportspeople than Pamela and Robin were taken on occasional safaris, hoping to bag an innocent bystander for the doping room wall. She wanted nothing to do with that. She didn’t approve of killing anything that couldn’t kill you back.
She found an ear nailed to one door and was duly warned away from what lay beyond. The thing was normal-sized and still warm. The place was quiet, except for the running water and occasional gunshots in different wings. She oughtn’t to run into any other parties. This was a private session and she and Robin were supposed to be on one of the many sealed-off zones.
In one room, she found a remain. It was one of the indigenes, gone for good. The head had been taken but the zaroff had left a trampled tiara. The remain wore a billowing, mildewed dress with an array of medal-like brooches on the shoulders and across the breast. Pamela didn’t think it had been a woman, judging from the feet. There were plants growing out of the thing, so it had obviously been remaindered some time ago.
She stepped into a corridor and found a spoor. Wet footprints on a ragged pile carpet. Robin was either being careless or setting a trap. He couldn’t see the prints without lenses, so perhaps he hadn’t been aware he was making them. But he ought to know if he’d got his feet wet. She didn’t want to underestimate him. It was the kind of thing he was always doing to her. She left the corridor and took a parallel course to the tracks, expecting him in each successive room.
She was excited, but in control. She knew she had an edge there. He would be nervy by now, probably irritated. In situations like this, he usually struck up a dopesmoke. Here he’d be afraid to show a glow. That would scrunch him inside, ruffle his tentacles. That gave her a definite, and growing, edge.
In the next room, a swatch of plaster fell from the ceiling into an ope
n piano, twanging impossible chords. Pamela swivelled from the waist, went down on one knee, extended her roscoe arm and squeezed at the door. Chest height. She squeezed again, lower this time. The door swung both ways on its remaining hinge and fell away. There was a cloud of dust in the room, but no Robin.
Mistake.
She should have taken natural decay into account. The Palace was obviously falling apart. She had given Robin an unmistakable aural bearing. She tried to get up, but her knee was wobbly. Finally, she made it. Her mouth was dry and her eyes stung with water that had built up behind the contacts. Her tunic felt too tight, chafing her. She split the pectoral seam, enjoying the chilly rush, then sealed herself to the choker. Swanny cleavage would be too tempting a target.
She looked around for cover and decided on the next-but-one room. Robin would know her general location but have to out-check each room in turn. She hoped he’d come to her soon. He’d expect a trap, of course, but she would know what he was up to. It would get all this foreplay over with. She ejected the slug clip and checked it. It was fine. The roscoe had worked perfectly. There had been no kick to jolt her elbow out of joint. It still felt like something for potting hummingbirds, but a few holes in the right places would do as much serious hurt as a total fleshblast.
From her room, she could hear him coming. He had two choices. There were only two doors. She had a clear shot at each, and, in her position, was shielded by a pair of high-backed chairs. They might not stop a slug, but they’d squidge his aim. He was making a noise. Too much noise. It had to be a blind.
‘Pamela,’ he shouted.
He was doing something skulky, she knew that much.
‘Darling, come out. Let’s climax this.’
She stopped breathing and extruded claws. They shone in the minimal light.
She sighted on the left door, but was ready to switch to the right. Her arm ached after thirty seconds. The roscoe didn’t feel light now. There were drops of condensation on the barrel. Pamela’s mud was running in rivulets down her neckline. She could have done with that frag now.
