Dead Lines

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  Most of all, he knew, he had to calm down. Only the cool head would prevail. He had come too far to flame out now, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to spend his second chance at life in the Women’s Correctional Institute at Ithaca.

  “C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon,” he said, as if he were coaching a flagging athlete at the big meet. “Think! Think methodical! Think evidence! Think medical examiner! Think…” and he smiled then, “. . .forensic pathology!”

  Of course. God knows he’d spent enough time poring over the textbooks back at Glen’s. He knew what they looked for, what kinds of clues were applicable to a blunt force injury. It was simply a matter of eradicating the evidence. Between that and the coke whores and customers and his stash, a botched-drug deal would be the natural assumption. “Too bad he didn’t have a dog, though,” he murmured, fumbling with Meryl’s glasses. “Under the circumstances, canine anthropophagy would be a godsend.”

  He bent over and breathed deeply, calming her shaking limbs. “There, there, calm down,” he murmured. “Shhhh-shhhhh.”

  While her head was down, he checked the floor. Colin was a mess. The lacerations around his eye were still bleeding like crazy; all those arteries along the bone ridge, probably hemorrhaging away, pumping his life out onto the Congoleum. Not to mention his wise fucking mouth If he wasn’t already dead from the trauma, the blood loss got him for sure. No way in hell of cleaning it up; the Ix-st they could hope for was to blur the clues.

  Fortunately the floor was a little crooked; most of it was pooling toward the living room. He checked very very carefully for stains or smears in any way tied to Meryl’s body or clothing, and, satisfied, backed up and padded over to the kitchen, giving silent thanks for that good ol’ feline grace.

  “Colin was a prick,” he noted with amazement, “but he certainly was a fastidious prick. Just look at this!” The underside of the sink was filled with cleaning agents and solvents of all kinds. He found a pair of Playtex living gloves and slipped them on, and started rooting around.

  It was during this rooting process that Jack found the Clobber.

  It was a very strong brand of drain cleaner, so much so that it made Drano seem like Kool-Aid by comparison. There was a full liter bottle of it, way in the back, behind the Lemon Pledge and the Formby’s Tung Oil. Jack pulled the bottle out and held it up, reading the ingredients off the label. Undiluted hydrochloric acid, for those really tough jobs.

  If there was a tougher job than this, Jack couldn’t think of it. He changed his mind about cleaning up.

  He had a better idea.

  “Yes, yes.” He smiled. “Thisll do it. We’re gonna be okay, you’ll see.”

  He stoppered the sink and placed the bust of Einstein on its side in the basin. Then he uncapped the bottle. *

  “Careful, now,” he admonished. “This stuff will burn a hole right through us.” Jack held the bottle at Meryl’s arm’s-length and tipped a third of the contents over the bust, then backed quickly away. Plumes of acrid smoke instantly sputtered up from the rim.

  “So much for Albert,” he said, hefting the remaining contents. He turned back toward the mess on the floor.

  And had yet another idea.

  “Don’t look,” he warned her, as he held the bottle over what was left of Colin’s head.

  She didn’t.

  Five minutes later they were out the door and down the street, leaving Colin to stew in his juices. They discarded the gloves three blocks away, in a dumpster that looked to be ready for pickup.

  “Are you okay?” He asked, feeling for her presence. Meryl hadn’t made a sound since… since quite a while ago. He hoped she was okay. He told her so.

  She didn’t answer, but he could feel her terror dimly in the back of her… no, his … correction, their… mind. “I guess we should head for home,” he said by way of comfort. “I’m exhausted. How about you?”

  No answer.

  “You’ll feel better, soon’s we get some rest.” They turned down Greenwich Avenue. Cafe Degli Artisti beckoned from across the way, right next to the Jerusalem falafel place and the Tex-Mex chili bar. Either one of the latter seemed infinitely preferable. He hated fucking snotty literati. Besides, he decided, too much caffeine might be overly stimulating just now. “We should get home,” he offered. “Katie’ll be back real soon. I feel sure of it.

  “And everything will be just like it was before,” he added. “Only better. I promise.

  “Trust me.”

  21

  THE HEART OF THE MATTER

  It was just about a quarter past one when Katie found the stories.

  She had come back ostensibly to get her things… at least enough of them to subsist on until she could clear her head. Finding the apartment empty was a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it had spared her the embarrassment of facing Meryl, stammering a mouthful of excuses that sounded a whole lot lamer than they felt. On the other hand, it meant facing the apartment, alone.

  She was just starting to consider the unpleasantness of that option when she found the stories.

  “What the hell,” she started to ask, but the words just dried up in her throat. One look at the box and she knew exactly what it was.

  “Oh, say it ain’t so,” she croaked. Now, more than ever, she wished that Meryl were here. She’d evidently known about this for some time, which pissed Katie off. She’d also left in some kind of big-time hurry, judging from the fact that the book and a lot of other stuff was just laying around. Not like Meryl at all. She wondered what that meant.

  The folders sat there, all neat and tidy. Something else was there beside them.

  Meryl’s notebook.

  Now that’s really strange, Katie thought, feeling a worm of anxiety uncoiling in her guts. Meryl would never leave the house without her book. She was always scribbling in it, and she carried the damned thing around like it was welded to the end of her wrist or something. Katie avoided looking at it, as if even seeing it away from its keeper was like some sort of intrusion. “Huh-uh, no way,” she muttered. “I ain’t peeking.”

  She looked back at the folders instead, their titles rendered in the tight cursive script that was so anomalously familiar, so exemplary of control in a life so otherwise out of it. They brought back lots and lots of memories. Most of them painful.

  Only the last two stories in the batch were new to her.

  They didn’t take long to read.

  By the time she turned the last page of “The Difference,” her hands were shaking. She felt cold, but not in the poetic sense; it had nothing to do with his icy metaphors, climbing up from their fogbound allegorical sea. She felt like he had jammed his hand up the hind end of reality and worked its jaws, twisting everything and making it say all the wrong things.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d felt utterly violated by one of his stories.

  But this one sure as shit took the cake.

  “Jack, goddam you,” she said to herself, the room at large. “How could you do this to me?”

  She already knew the answer to that one: easy. That’s what loving Jack Rowan was all about. Heartbreak and torture, with just enough good in there to keep her hanging on, hoping that one day they’d work it out.

  Except they never ever did. And now…

  She looked at Meryl’s journal, and the stories she’d sworn she never wanted to see again. Side by side. Daring her to put one and one together.

  She didn’t want to do it.

  She had to.

  The early journal entries dated back over a year. They were none of her business. Cut to the chase, she told herself.

  The chase began in the entry dated October third.

  And ended right in her lap.

  “Goddam you!” Katie shut the journal and collapsed back onto the couch. No sooner than you think that you’ve finally gotten on with your life then the door creaks open and the skeletons come crashing out to remind you that there’s no hope and no help and no answers, not then, not now, not ev
er. “It’s not fair, dammit, it’s just not fair…”

  She kicked at the pile of manuscripts, sent a cascade of ivory bond spilling out across the floor. There was no comfort in it. She wanted to scream, she wanted to cry until it felt better to stop. But she didn’t.

  She wouldn’t.

  “I’m not gonna cry for you anymore, Jack Rowan,” she said out loud, to herself and the world. “I cried myself out on your behalf a long, long time ago. And it’s over now. You hear me?”

  She was still waiting for an answer when the door creaked open.

  And Meryl walked in…

  … and it was her, he couldn’t believe it but there she was, in all her glory: his Katie-girl, his one true love, big as life and twice as sweet, so fine it fucking made him crazy, ignited a bonfire around his heart…

  … and she was rising up to greet him, rising up with a face so full of warmth and concern and relief at his return that his knees felt weak as he moved toward her…

  … and then he was locked in her embrace, engulfing her tightly with his own as she whispered oh god, I’m so glad you’re here and he brought his lips hungrily up to hers…

  … and Katie was stunned, but the kiss was hot: a silken-soft steamroller press of lips and teeth and sweet wild darting tongue that filled her mouth, cutting off all words as it lured her in, wearing down all thought of resistance for one elongated fire-breathing moment…

  .. . but something was wrong here. To say the least.

  She tried to pull away. Meryl didn’t seem so inclined. She kissed Katie again.

  Katie resisted this time. “Mmmpgh… Mermpgh… Jesus!” She pulled away. “Damn, girl, what’s gotten into you?”

  “Nothing that hasn’t been there for a long time.”

  She kissed Katie again. Katie pulled away. “Meryl… listen,” she gasped. “There’s something we gotta… Meryl … whoa, listen… Meryl, dammit, we gotta talk!”

  “Yeah, we sure do,” Meryl agreed wholeheartedly, her brown eyes aglow with what struck Katie as molten desire. She was still holding Katie by the waist, and one hand was actually sliding down to caress her butt, which wasn’t a bad feeling by any stretch if you overlooked the fact that the whole damned universe had just been stood on its head and it was about as un-Meryl-like a thing as could possibly be and Katie thought she might just pass out from the shock.

  “We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Meryl said. “But nothing that can’t wait.”

  She tried to kiss her again.

  “Meryl, would you back off!” Katie broke free and was backing away from her now, reeling from the table-turning absurdity of the situation. Meryl meanwhile walked into the living room, sliding out of her coat and dropping her daypack to the floor, then continued walking, arcing in a broad circle around the couch and the sprawling spill of manuscript paper, never taking her eyes off of Katie, watching her in a way that somehow reminded Katie of Wild Kingdom outtakes of some predatory cat stalking its intended prey.

  “You found the book,” Meryl said.

  “Yes, I found the book, how could I miss the book,” Katie replied. “I found your journal, too.”

  “You read my journal?” Her voice sounded carefully neutral. She continued the arc. Katie kept backing up.

  “I’m sorry, Meryl,” Katie said, feeling scared and sick and weirded out. “I had to.”

  “Mmmmmm…” Still circling. “Well, we all do what we have to do.”

  “Meryl, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “About the book!” she cried. “About Jack, about the dreams, about all of this shit!”

  Meryl smiled slyly; she was getting closer. Katie suddenly realized that she couldn’t back up anymore, that she had backed clear across the room until she had butted up against the wall next to her bedroom door. She also came to a crazy realization about why Meryl’s movement was reminding her so much of Wild Kingdom reruns: it was a classic technique, highly regarded by predators of every species.

  Herding.

  Meryl drew closer. Katie pulled back. The bedroom door beckoned.

  “Meryl, please,” Katie asked. “What the hell is going on here?”

  Meryl smiled, moving closer.

  “It’s a secret,” she said.

  And started to unbutton her shirt.

  “GYAHH!!” Katie rolled around the door and into her bedroom. Meryl followed her. It was a much smaller space; not as much room to maneuver, not as much opportunity to maintain a comfortable distance. Katie started speaking as fast as she could.

  “Meryl we have to talk but we can’t if you keep pushing at me like this so would you please fucking back off so I can TALK TO YOU!!”

  Meryl stopped, put two soft-palmed hands up, made a grand display of her restraint. It struck Katie as strangely familiar.

  “So talk.”

  “Thank you.” She paused to catch her breath. “Meryl, I just wanted to talk with you about why I left…”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does. It’s very important. What you wrote in your journal, I’ve been through it before…”

  “Through what before?”

  “… being sucked in by his stories, and falling in love.”

  Meryl smiled. “And?”

  “I just wish you would’ve talked with me about it before. I..Her thoughts were racing now. “I would have tried to warn you off.”

  “Why? So you could keep him all for yourself?”

  Katie would have laughed, under any other circumstances. “Honey, I think it’s a little late for that…”

  “I know.”

  That stopped her cold. “You do?”

  “Yes. But that doesn’t change a thing.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Why should it?”

  “Meryl, stop it!” Katie was pissed now. “I’m not playing games here. I’m scared. Jack killed himself in this apartment not six months ago and I think he’s still here!”

  Meryl smiled and drummed her fingers patiently on her biceps.

  “You think that’s funny? I’ll tell you, girl, it’s no laughing matter. I left here because he was coming to me in my dreams, and it brought back memories that I have to live with, but I don’t like having ‘em ground in my face because, bottom line, the man was dangerous! When I was in love with him, I was scared of him; if you’re in love with him you ought to be damn scared, too.”

  The drumming stopped. He didn’t say anything.

  “I met Jack a little over a year ago,” Katie said quietly, filling in the blank, “maybe six or seven months before I moved in here. I saw him at a party…” she smiled a little. “I think he struck me as just about the sweetest man I ever saw. We hit it off right away.

  “Anyway, he wanted to be a writer, and god, was he determined. I never saw anybody burn for something like that. Half the stories in that box out there he wrote in the four months we were together, plus about a dozen others that he just ended up throwing away. Just throwing away! Said they weren’t good enough.”

  He smiled.

  “That was just the way he was: intense about everything. You know he never sold any of those stories? You wanna know why? There was only one way those were gonna come out, and that was in a book that was handled exactly the way he wanted it. He wouldn’t let anybody touch a comma, he didn’t want to hear what they had to say. He figured nobody knew how to handle his work as good as he did. I mean, he was this close, a coupla times…” She pinched an inch of thin air with her fingers.

  He watched.

  “… but every time, he shot it down! I never saw anybody build such beautiful sand castles, then kick cm over every time. He used to say it made him crazy that nobody could appreciate how fucking good he really was, and why wouldn’t they just leave his work in peace.

  “The only problem was, he was right.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. He could feel the anger starting to build. The anger he knew so well.

 
; She shrugged. “It made him crazy. It literally drove him right over the bend. It got to the point where he was just so goddamned bitter, you could barely stand to be around him. I mean, he would just fly off into a rage over the tiniest things; I mean, stupid things! A waiter would bring him his toast too dark, and he’d scream right in his face. I couldn’t deal with it, after a while.”

  That wasn’t how it was. His fingers clenched, unclenched again. That wasn’t how it was at all.

  “But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it happened when we were home alone. He would talk to me, he would tell me things, and this whole black side of him started coming out.

  “He would talk to me about hope. He liked to tell the story of Pandora’s Box: how when she opened it up, all the evils flew out and populated the world. And he’d say, ‘everybody knows about your basic evils: your hatred, and greed, and dishonesty, and jealousy. Everybody just seems to take those for granted.

  ” But everybody seems to forget about the last one, the worst one, down at the bottom of the box. You know what that one was?’”

  “Hope,” he said.

  “That’s right!” she said. “He said that hope was the worst evil there was. Because when you looked around at the state of the world, with all the suffering and agony and rage, and you looked at the direction that the missiles were pointing, and you looked in the stupid piggy eyes of the average person on the street, you knew that you had to be fucking kidding if you thought that there was ever gonna be any such thing as a hope in hell for any of us.

  Katie shook her head. “This was pretty hard to live with. I was starting to get just as crazy as he was. And I couldn’t let that happen.

  “But then, wouldn’t you know it, I had to go get pregnant. I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. I’d been just about ready to tell him I was leaving, and all of a sudden… bang! Knocked up. Suddenly I’m waking up every morning and the first thing I do is run to the bathroom and toss my cookies.