Fantastic Tales of Terror

by Eugene Johnson

  “So . . . what’s your name, anyway? I mean, if a gentleman is going to come calling after midnight, I think it’s only fair that he have a name, no?”

  The man stopped and turned back. “Please, call me Jack, Miss Garland. I’d be honored if you would do so.” He extended his hand toward her. She looked down first at the hand holding the empty vodka glass, then at the one holding the cigarette. She flicked the latter to the ground just past the man’s right leg, and extended her free hand. He took it gently in his hand—his very cold hand—and brought it up to meet his bending form. The brush of his equally cold lips against the top of her hand made her shiver, and she pulled away quickly.

  “Now don’t think I’m condoning this kind of thing,” she said, regaining her baseline booze-and-barbiturates composure, “but since you are a fan and since you did travel all this way to meet me, who am I to disappoint? I could at least offer you a drink before I send you on your way.”

  “That would be delightful beyond words, Miss Garland,” the man named Jack said.

  She turned toward the parlor, too quickly, and teetered slightly before recovering her balance. Jack made no move to assist her, entering the flat at a dutiful distance behind.

  “Please, Mr . . . Jack,” she said motioning with exaggerated stateliness toward a garishly-upholstered armchair near the empty fireplace, “Won’t you please sit down?” She was clearly in command of the room, the star of tonight’s production, aided by the heightened effect of secobarbital and cheap vodka. She uncapped a half-empty bottle of Gilbey’s and refilled her glass.

  “So what’s your poison, Jack?” she asked of her guest.

  Jack motioned polite declination with his hand.

  “You sure? A lady hates to drink alone.” The question was met with continued silence. “Suit yourself.”

  “I don’t suppose your housemaid could prepare a cup of hot tea?”

  “My housemaid?”

  “Surely, a star of your caliber and pedigree has at least one domestic . . . ”

  She threw her head back and laughed. She took a healthy swig from her refilled glass and then, as of considering the implications of not keeping up appearances, she said, “I’ve given the staff the evening off. They all wanted to see that dreadful documentary on the royal family on their televisions. Tellies, as you people say, isn’t it?”

  “Quite right, Miss Garland,” Jack said with a slight nod.

  She couldn’t help sneaking looks at his face—trying both not to stare but to zero in on his features which seemed just out of focus, shifting. There was something simultaneously fascinating and unsettling about this lack of facial detail, and she wasn’t entirely ruling out the effects of the pills as the cause. She remembered once—after a slight overindulgence on her part at dinner before a show—watching an entire audience whose heads seemed to ripple and swell, elongating right before her eyes in the middle of “The Man That Got Away.”

  “How terribly rude of me,” she said snapping from her daydream, as if decorum suddenly pushed its way through the shroud of fog in her mind. “Can I at least take your coat, Jack?”

  Again, he simply raised a gloved hand in courteous refusal. “No, please don’t trouble yourself, Miss Garland. The truth is that I’m rather chilled from my travels through the London drizzle. I would just as well prefer to keep my topcoat on. Please don’t think me rude for doing so.”

  She waved him off dismissively, the foggy tendrils once again dragging her remembered manners back into the recesses of her psyche. “So, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we, Jack? Why exactly are you here? You’ve got to be my biggest fan to trudge all the way out here in the middle of a rainy night for a bloody autograph!” She had taken to—and secretly enjoyed—incorporating some of the more colorful British colloquialisms into her own discernibly distinct speech pattern. Bollocks and rubbish being close runners-up to bloody.

  Jack laughed, his expression of lively amusement sounding impossibly echoey in the tiny drawing room. The sound seemed to oscillate all around her—eerie, disembodied. Disconnected.

  Then, the merriment severed, abruptly and without transition: “I’m not here for an autograph.” The declaration carried the gravity of a tolling bell, its severity of intonation driving a shiver through her body. Even through the miasma of narcotics and alcohol, she recognized her mistake—letting a stranger in the house in the middle of the night. How she wished Mickey was here at that moment; he’d know what to do.

  “No?” she said with forced confidence, moving—staggering, really—away from the liquor cabinet, casually sidling between the back of the sofa where her guest sat—his back now to her—and the front door, eager to keep a clear channel of egress.

  Jack sat motionless, (quivering) face forward. “No, Miss Garland. I assure you, although I am a great fan of your work, I have not traveled all this way for something so . . . boorish as an autograph.”

  Prone to shifting moods when under the influence, and accompanied by another swig from her glass, her demeanor swung from nervous to annoyed. “Well, then, just why in the goddamn hell are you here, Mr. . . . Jack?” To her ears, there was challenge and defiance in her voice; to anyone else’s, just slurred inarticulacy.

  There was the slightest of sighs—imperceptible to most, but certainly to the inebriated—before Jack replied. “I’m here to take your soul, Miss Garland.”

  Under normal circumstances, such an utterance might have been met with a sense of surprise or even fear, but her artificially enhanced version of reality that evening processed her visitor’s words through a distorted filter. Traveling through the warped kaleidoscope between her ears and brain, the words took on farcical meaning. The implied, if improbable, threat blossomed into garish absurdity—like juggling clowns riding unicycles at the circus. She erupted into laughter.

  “Well, isn’t that a relief?” she said. “And here I was beginning to worry about you, Jack. I had you pegged as an autograph hound, or one of those weirdos who think I travel with the ruby slippers. But, no, you’re just a run-of-the-mill soul collector.” More laughter, dissolving into coughing that rumbled up from somewhere deeper in her chest than the laughs.

  Jack continued to sit staring forward, unmoving, as she stumbled around to the front of the sofa, slamming the empty vodka glass down and snatching a pack of cigarettes off the end table as she did so. With shaky hands, she fished a Player’s No. 6 from the pack, plucked a match from a matchbook sporting an image of the Tower of London and the name of some charmless pub on its cover, and swiped its red charcoaled tip across the coarse strip on the matchbook’s exterior.

  She lit the cigarette and puffed a cloud of smoke into the room. “I’ve got some bad news for you, Jackie—mind if I call you that? See, you can’t take something I don’t have. I lost my goddamned soul a long time ago in this business.”

  “Yes, that is rather unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate? My dear fellow,” she began in full affectation, “that’s not unfortunate . . . it’s a goddamn crime! I gave those studios the best years of my life . . . my career. I made those overfed pork bellies buckets of cold, hard cash with this talent. And what’d I get in return?”

  “An unceremonious dismissal,” Jack said, his hollow voice conciliatory, almost apologetic.

  “Thrown out with the trash,” she said, then added for emphasis, “Yesterday’s rubbish.”

  “You’re hardly yesterday’s rubbish, Miss Garland. I daresay, you’re being much too hard on yourself. Why, your motion pictures and recordings have brought immeasurable joy to countless men, women, and children over the years.”

  She considered his words for a moment, taking them in with another deep drag of the cigarette. “Well, that’s very kind of you to say, Jack.” His words, coursing through her on waves of Seconal and vodka, assuaged her, softening her alternating anger and apprehension.

  “And it’s been very kind of you to receive me, Miss Garland,” Jack said, starting to rise from the cou
ch, “but I’m afraid it’s very late and I don’t want to overstay my welcome. I’ll just collect what I’ve come for and be . . . ”

  “Tea!” she exclaimed, snapping to attention and clapping her hands together, sending ash from the end of her cigarette airborne. “You asked for a cup of tea—spot of tea, isn’t that what you people call it?—and that’s the very least I can do before you head back out into this ghastly night.”

  Jack, mid-rise from the sofa, sat back quietly. “If you’re certain it’s no trouble . . . ”

  “None at all,” she said, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray beside him. “I’ll just boil some water.” She tottered toward the kitchen, zigzagging as she exited the room. From the kitchen, the sound of a kettle banging against the stove and water pouring from the tap.

  “I’m afraid I’m at a disadvantage, Jack,” she called out to him as she set about the business of preparing her version of an English teatime. “You know everything about me, but I know nothing about you. Tell me, where in England are you from, anyway?”

  His voice wafted in from the drawing room, the distance doing little to dispel its resonance. “I’m originally from London, but because I travel so much, my life has taken on a rather transitory quality, I’m afraid.”

  “And is there a special someone out there? A Mrs. Jack perhaps?”

  “No, I’m afraid the nature of my . . . work makes any kind of romantic attachments quite impossible these days.”

  She appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame, and regarded him sitting on the sofa, stock-still. “Come now, there’s never been a special lady in your life? Ever?”

  “I suppose there was the occasional young lady who caught my passing interest back in the Whitechapel days,” Jack acquiesced. “But none of them quite worked out,” he added, head bowed.

  She smiled sadly, somehow understanding her visitor’s loneliness which now stretched across the room and closed the distance between them. Even at the center of adoring crowds, she knew that kind of soul-crushing loneliness. She turned back toward the kitchen where the water began to boil on the stove.

  Even under the influence, she knew how to function—and wooziness was no match for her ability to do so. She made quick work of transferring hot water to the delicate teapot, which sat in the middle of a sterling silver serving tray flanked by two equally delicate teacups and saucers. With an efficiency that belied her present state, she searched out the sugar bowl and retrieved milk from the icebox. With shaky hands that rattled the teacups against their saucers on the tray, she lifted the hastily thrown-together service and turned.

  Jack was standing there. She let out a startled yelp as the tray slipped from her hands and crashed to the floor, sugar cubes quickly dissolving in the hot tea and milk all around their feet.

  “Jesus Christ!” she shouted.

  “I’ve startled you.” Jack was mere inches from her now, somehow appearing even taller and more imposing than he had in the doorway earlier.

  She struggled to regain her composure, her heart beating wildly in her chest, the adrenaline coursing through her veins momentarily eclipsing the sedative effects of the Seconal. “You’re good goddamned right you startled me,” she cried, her voice rising in volume and hysteria. She looked down at the remnants of her English teatime, now spreading across the floor in tandem with the terror spreading through her body.

  “I think it’s time for you to be on your way now,” she said with forced sternness. She moved to sidestep around the widening coagulation of sweet tea and cream—and by extension, her visitor—but Jack moved with her, his cloak-like outer garment swinging with the movement like a displaced curtain over feet she couldn’t see. It was as if he were floating across the tiled floor.

  “You invited me in, Miss Garland,” he said, “of your own free will and volition. You wanted something from me, and now I wish to take something from you.” His voice was even, calm—almost preternaturally so.

  “Please,” she said, choking back the sob that was threatening to spill out from the back of her throat, “just leave. I don’t want any trouble, hear?”

  “Ah, but you’ve made a habit of inviting trouble into your life, haven’t you, Miss Garland?”

  She blinked through watering eyes, looking up into his featureless, molten face. “I don’t . . . ”

  “The barbiturates, your fondness for the spirits and men. Your life has become one indulgence after another, and you’ve squandered your many talents on those immoderations.”

  “I . . . I don’t understand. Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I wish to relieve you of your burdens, Miss Garland. You’re a weak woman . . . a fallen woman.”

  “I demand that you leave. Now!” she said trying to summon some modicum of courage so she could shake off the fear that had now all but consumed her. The idea that this faceless man was deriding her, implying threat in her own home . . . it was outrageous. And terrifying. She again sidestepped, this time to the right, but Jack was right there, gliding in front of her to block any escape.

  “Five husbands. Courting the affections of homosexuals. Leaving your devoted audiences waiting and often disappointed because you’re off numbing yourself with medications and drink. You’ve failed, Miss Garland. You’ve become a miserable wretch . . . a common whore. Just like the others . . . ”

  She caught the glint of steel as Jack unsheathed the large butcher knife that seemed to materialize—as if by some kind of sorcery or cheap parlor trick, she wasn’t sure which in the unreality of the moment—from the heavy fabric folds of his topcoat. She screamed, her legs—suddenly heavy under the weight of her terror and the cumulative effects of an evening of pills and booze—sliding out from under her. She hit the kitchen floor in a splash of warm tea and milk.

  Her fight or flight instinct struggled to overpower the strong sense of surrender that told her to stay there on the floor, the latter an almost pacifying, maternal inner voice that coaxed her to let go. Suddenly, she was moving—scrambling, really—first backwards on all fours in crab-like movements away from where Jack towered above her, then forward on knees and palms that slipped and slid in the liquid mess on the floor. She could hear the whoosh as the knife sliced the air above her with tremendous force. Jack was apparently as strong as he was tall, she thought with almost logical detachment.

  Finding traction just beyond the spill, she was up and on her feet. When Jack appeared in her left peripheral vision, she knew exit from the house was blocked so instead she sprinted forward, across the hall and into the bathroom. She slammed the door shut and slid the latch into place. She pressed her back to the door anticipating her visitor’s imminent contact with the flimsy wood, knowing that it wouldn’t likely withstand the force of impact.

  She closed her eyes, images of Judy and Lorna and Joey playing out in motion picture images in her mind’s eye. She thought of Mickey coming home to find her bloodied body there, on the bathroom floor, unceremoniously splayed. She could see the tawdry tabloid headlines now: Dorothy Dead in Loo Bloodbath. At least the Sunday Times header would be more dignified: American Star Brutally Murdered in London.

  Star.

  She was a star, critics be damned, and the irony that she’d likely enjoy a comeback in death that could never be rivaled in life wasn’t entirely lost on her in what she knew to be her last terrifying moments. She wondered if her death would hurt, wondered how the knife would feel piercing her skin. The inevitability of it now weighed her down, made her legs feel like lead. She was so tired. Tired of the demands this life—a charmed life by all outside accounts anyway—had placed on her. She’d given it her all, but she was just so tired. Tired of the betrayals, of the judgements, of the impossible standards she was expected to live up to. She had always been the ugly duckling—apropos she should die in such an ugly manner.

  She jumped at the sound of Jack’s voice from the other side of the door.

  “Let the world remember you as you once were,
Miss Garland. Not as you’ve become,” Jack said through the wooden panels. His voice had taken on a softer tone, a soothing elixir of logic and absolution that was lulling her into surrender. She backed away from the door, the backs of her knees eventually making contact with the cold porcelain of the toilet. She sat as Jack’s voice—that horrible, ghostly voice—continued to float through the door.

  “You’ve been wicked, Miss Garland. And it’s time to atone for your sins. Through death, your acquittal is all but guaranteed.” His words eerily reflected her own thoughts, as if this horrible, murderous stranger could somehow read her mind at that moment. But he was right: In death, she’d find relief—and unending celebrity to the ends of time. Just as he had, this traveler of great distance and time, whose own incomprehensible identity she now understood.

  “Your fans will mourn you, coming from great distances to pay tribute to your life and career. Your death will bring about a great riot in an even greater city, Miss Garland, so deep will the despair over your untimely passing run.”

  “But . . . I’m afraid,” she said, her voice childlike and fragile in the stillness. It was a simple declaration told with her entire truth.

  When the latch on the bathroom door gently slid back and the door opened, she didn’t jump or try to run. She was raised to believe in a heaven and hell, with an interim purgatory for those whose fates were undecided—a last stop before either redemption or condemnation. She understood in that moment, perched atop the toilet bowl in the modest mews flat she shared with the last in a long string of men who loved the little girl in the blue gingham dress and red ruby slippers, that this was her purgatory, her chance to choose between deliverance and damnation.

  Jack was now standing directly in front of her; the eddying blur of his face reflected in the gleam the knife’s blade poised at her throat.

  She nodded. “I’m ready, Jack.” She suddenly felt the effects of a lifetime of red devils and hooch. Her eyelids became heavy, her limbs weak; it was a struggle to remain upright. She wavered but sensed Jack steadying her with a hand that never touched her.