The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  You’d not have done that before. You’ve changed. You’ll take back your life. Everybody will make way for you now. You’ll have an evil look. You’ll frown. People will step off the sidewalk to let you go by.

  I want for us to live as we did but you’ll set traps. I’ll trip on trip wires. Fall down the stairs in the middle of the night. There won’t be any more quarters lying around. You’ll put a deadbolt on the crawl space door. Or better yet you’ll barricade it shut with a dresser. Nobody will even know there’s a door there.

  I made you what you are today, grand and real, but you’ll lock me up up here with nothing but your mousy clothes. Your old trunks. Your dust and dark.

  I dress in the worn out clothes I wore when I came. I pack the nightgown, the black underwear. I grab a handful of quarters. I don’t touch your secret stash of twenties. I pet the cat. I leave your credit cards and keys on the hall table. I don’t steal.

  PETER ATKINS

  The Cubist’s Attorney

  PETER ATKINS IS A NATIVE of Liverpool, but has lived in Los Angeles for fourteen years now. However, he still prefers his tea made with water that has actually boiled.

  He is the author of the novels Morningstar and Big Thunder and the collection Wishmaster and Other Stories. His work has appeared in Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance and several award-winning anthologies. He has also written for television and the stage, but is probably best known for his work in the cinema, where he has scripted three of the Hellraiser movies and created the Wishmaster franchise.

  Atkins has recently contributed essays to the non-fiction studies Horror: Another 100 Best Books and Cinema Macabre, and he has just completed a screenplay for Oscar-winning director Errol Morris.

  Along with Glen Hirshberg and Dennis Etchison, he co-founded The Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual Halloween reading tour. “The Cubist’s Attorney” was written for the Revue’s 2005 outing and first appeared in Darkness Rising, a chapbook published to accompany the tour by Earthling Publications.

  “I’ve never had a whole story come to me in a dream,” recalls Atkins, “but I did get the title for this one while sleeping. The dream was very ordinary – but at one point in it I was walking past a pub and looked up at its sign, which read THE CUBIST’S ATTORNEY.

  “In the dream the phrase didn’t strike me as unusual at all, but when I woke up I found it intriguing enough to lead me to the story.”

  THING IS, HE HADN’T EVEN LIKED the guy. Only met him once. Fifteen years ago, and the little prick must have been over eighty then. He’d been one of the other guests at a soiree of Doug Gordon’s and, even for Doug’s crowd of narcissistic mediacrats, Gabriel Anzullar had seemed to be more than somewhat full of himself.

  Demanding attention and delivering aphorisms that sounded not only rehearsed but dusty with long service, he’d monopolized several party conversations – which God knows were dull enough in the first place – with cobwebbed stories of his time in the sun. He’d been a minor painter in a time of giants and, his more talented and more famous colleagues having done him the kindness of dying before him, he could command center stage now simply because he’d survived them all. And that seemed to be a perfectly sufficient reason for many of the other guests at the party to hover around him adoringly. To spend time with him wasn’t a brush with greatness exactly, but it was at least a brush with one who had brushed.

  Jackson himself, spectacularly uninterested in Anzullar’s tales of post-war Paris and nineteen-fifties New York, had exchanged maybe three sentences with the old man. Nothing significant – Paté’s good, huh?, Yes, have you tried the squab?, shit like that – and, after the third, Anzullar had turned to their hostess – Doug’s third wife, the anorexic blonde – and asked her, as if teasing out some special secret, “And what does our young friend here do for a living?”

  The wife – Margaret, was it? Some piss-elegant version of that anyway. Margaux, that was it – had paused for a second and looked at Jackson as if trying to remember. He took pity on her and answered for himself.

  “I’m a lawyer,” he said.

  “Oh!” Anzullar said, “A lawyer.”

  He’d stressed the word into a ridiculous burlesque of a man overwhelmingly impressed. It was like Jackson had told him he was the guy who’d invented water or gravity or something.

  “Do you have a card?” he’d asked as if both the possibility was slim and the audacity of the request breathtaking. Jackson had handed one over and then the tides of the party had taken them both elsewhere.

  He hadn’t thought about him at all in the decade and a half since then. Hadn’t even read past the first paragraph of the Times obituary last week.

  But now the widow had called and asked him in his capacity as her late husband’s attorney to contact the heirs and read the will. Jackson’s attempts to tell her that he’d never actually become Anzullar’s lawyer were met with a somewhat offended directness. “Well, he gave me your card,” she’d said, as if that was that.

  And apparently it was, because Jackson had found himself agreeing to take receipt of the will. He wasn’t sure exactly what had prompted his why-the-hell-not response. Maybe it was a slow day. Maybe he hadn’t wished to upset a recently-bereaved woman, however pissy she was. Maybe he just figured it would make for a fine dinner-party story, one that needed the third act of the actual reading of the will to make its little drama complete. All he knew was that now, with the document actually lying on his desk in front of him, he wished he hadn’t been so stupidly amenable. He took another quick glance at it.

  Christ, he had to read this shit with a straight face?

  It wasn’t a will. Not in any sense other than the formal and the clumsy layman’s attempt at legalese that opened it. It was more like Anzullar had decided to make this document his last work of art, albeit literary rather than pictorial. Perhaps he thought it was clever. Jackson begged to differ. It was precious and twee and would stand up to any legal challenge about as long as a hard-on in the proximity of a straight razor.

  He glanced at his desk-clock.

  Three twenty-nine.

  The recipients of Anzullar’s largesse would be here any moment. He hoped they were bringing their senses of humor.

  As if prompted by his very thought of them, the beneficiaries entered his office and sat down. There were three of them and they were absolutely identical.

  Jackson had met twins before and knew of course that triplets existed, but there was something really disturbing about staring across his desk at what appeared to be three editions of exactly the same person. It might conceivably have been less disconcerting if the person in question had been – what? An ugly middle-aged guy running to fat and losing his hair? – but what was sitting in triplicate in his room was a stunningly beautiful young woman.

  They were the daughters, or so the widow – who was not herself named in the will and was thus not herself present – had told him. Jackson realized now, with a rush of reluctant admiration for the recently departed old bugger, that Anzullar must not only have scored himself quite the hot young chick for his second wife but also have managed to impregnate her sometime in his mid-seventies, because these girls – girl? girl cubed? – couldn’t have been more than twenty-one years old.

  And gorgeous. Absolutely drop-dead gorgeous.

  The three sisters each tipped their head a little to the side in a gesture of inquiry and gentle puzzlement and Jackson realized that he’d been staring at them for several seconds without saying a word.

  Gathering his professionalism as best he could, he spoke up, his voice polite and clear and mercifully free of overt lust.

  “Thank you all for coming,” he said. “My sincere condolences for your loss. I’m Isaac Jackson.”

  “Chinchilla,” said the first daughter.

  “Diamante,” said the second.

  “Sam,” said the third.

  Hmm. Perhaps Anzullar’s copy of The Poseur’s Guide to Naming One
’s Children had been missing the entries for “S”. Whatever. Jackson gave them all a respectable smile and then picked up their father’s will.

  A whole page was devoted to the single phrase Clause the First written in magenta ink by a spidery hand that was presumably the deceased’s own. The following page contained said clause, and Jackson read it aloud just as if it had been written by someone less full of shit.

  “To the worms of the earth and other agents of decay I leave all my worldly goods. May their desiccation, liquefaction, ossification, and putrefaction be found sportive to those with eyes to see.”

  Chinchilla gave a brief musical laugh.

  Sam clapped her hands once in delight.

  “Oh, Daddy,” said Diamante, in that tone of disapproving affection that people use for their mischievous but beloved children or outrageous but adored friends.

  Jackson felt an obligation to clarify things for them. “We can assume your father means to let his house and possessions stand and rot,” he said. “While that may be his wish, it’s certainly something you could seek to overturn on the grounds of—”

  Chinchilla interrupted him. “You mean claim his house?” she said.

  “His things?” said Sam. “I don’t want them. Do you want them?” she asked her sisters.

  “No,” said Diamante, and Chinchilla shook her head.

  “All right,” said Jackson. “I’ll move on.”

  Clause the Second, equally cavalier in its generous waste of paper, was the first of the bequests to the girls.

  “To my precious Diamante,” Jackson read aloud, “I give the following observation. May she use it wisely.

  “When the philosopher-poet Bob Marley said Don’ worry ’bout a t’ing. Every little t’ing’s gwine be a’right, do you honestly think he was lying?”

  That was it. Jackson looked up apologetically at Diamante and was astonished to see that her eyes had misted with tears.

  Sam reached her hand over and squeezed her sister’s.

  “I’m so happy for you,” Chinchilla said, as Diamante nodded her thanks.

  Jackson did his best to keep his face benignly blank as he looked at them. Jesus Christ. All three of them. Beautiful. Arousing. And as barking mad as their fucking father. He turned his attention back to the will.

  “To my adored Sam,” he read, “I leave the afternoon of September the seventh, Nineteen-sixty-three, as it appeared in New Brighton, England between the hours of two and five. I also grant her full custody of the adjectives crepuscular and antediluvian. I trust to her generosity of spirit that she will not unnecessarily withhold their fair usage by others.”

  Sam seemed as delighted by her inheritance as Diamante had been with hers, whispering her adjectives repeatedly under her breath as Jackson turned to Clause the Third.

  “To my beloved Chinchilla, I bequeath the following air:”

  Jackson paused there. That single sentence at the top of the page was followed only by a hand-drawn musical staff which contained the notes of a melody spread out over eight measures. The rest of the page was blank.

  “I’m afraid I can’t read music,” Jackson said, and held the page out uncertainly to Chinchilla. She took it eagerly and, holding it to her face, seemed to smell it. No, more than that, really. Seemed almost to breathe it in. After a moment, she held the loose leaf out so that her sisters could see.

  “How generous!” said Sam, with a pleasure apparently untainted by envy.

  “Do you . . . do you know the tune?” Jackson asked, feeling like an idiot.

  Chinchilla nodded. “It’s a melody from the Italian,” she said. “The words tell of how Harlequin came to the shores of a great salt lake and burned the still-beating heart of his lost love.”

  There was a suitably impressed silence for a moment, which was broken by a braying snort from Diamante. “No it’s not,” she said. “It was written on Daddy’s piano by that awful little man from Cedar Rapids. It was a jingle. For a product. Metamucil or something equally banal.”

  “Diamante, you are so fucking literal,” Chinchilla said. “I’m not sure you’re my sister at all. I’m really not.”

  Chinchilla laid the piece of paper back down on Jackson’s desk and looked at him.

  “Thank you for your time, Mister Jackson,” she said. “Are we done here?”

  Jackson hesitated for a second. “Um . . . No. Not quite. This is a little awkward.” He glanced down at the final page of the will. “I’ll just read the last Clause, shall I?”

  “Please,” said Sam, encouragingly.

  Jackson cleared his throat. “To Isaac Jackson, for services rendered, I leave a gift which will be given to him at a time and place of my daughters’ choosing.”

  The girls were silent for a moment. A look passed between Chinchilla and Sam, and then Chinchilla looked back at Jackson.

  “Oh, yes. Yes,” she said. “I know about that. I’ll be in touch.” Her mood seemed to have been ruined a little by her earlier disagreement with Diamante. Not sad or annoyed, really. More distracted. She stood up, gesturing to her sisters to do the same.

  Jackson stood too, sweeping the pages of Anzullar’s will back together and putting them in a file folder. Sam shook his hand. Diamante did the same. They headed for the door, leaving Chinchilla standing by Jackson’s desk. After she too had shaken his hand and repeated her thanks, he nodded down at the file.

  “Technically, the page with the melody on it is your inheritance,” he said. “Your physical property. If you’ll let me Xerox a copy for the files, you could take it now.”

  “No need,” she said.

  “Alright,” he said. “If you’re sure. I should point out, by the way, that if your sister is correct, you own only the piece of paper. You can’t really do anything with the tune. Commercially, I mean. The copyright remains with the composer or his publisher.”

  Chinchilla smiled at him.

  “You misunderstand,” she said. “My father hasn’t left me the copyright. Nor that piece of paper. He has left me the melody itself.”

  She leaned in and whispered in his ear. “And with it I can unlock the world.”

  Jackson eased the Maserati up to 70 and flicked on the cruise control. The road was so straight and so uncongested that he felt he could probably even prop the Times against the steering wheel and take another crack at the crossword but he resisted the temptation. Instead, he pushed the radio pre-sets until he found something he remembered from his college days and then sat back and let Tom Petty explain how American girls were raised on promises.

  Over to the west, the sun was setting. Jackson turned off the AC and cracked the windows a little to let in the evening’s gathering breeze. The odometer said he’d been traveling thirteen miles since he’d turned off the county road onto the state highway. Shouldn’t be far now.

  He hadn’t expected to ever hear from Chinchilla or her sisters again, and had given little thought to the unspecified gift that he was supposed to receive. What was it likely to be anyway? Custody of all oblique angles found in geometry textbooks published between 1921 and 1934? Part-ownership of the color green? Gimme a fucking break.

  But a few days after their first meeting Chinchilla had called. Her voice on the phone had been warm and inviting and Jackson had found himself inevitably wondering while she spoke if there was any possibility at all that the gift she was to give him would involve her being naked and pliant. He was way too old to be led by his pants anymore but he’d nevertheless found himself writing down certain coordinates and travel instructions and agreeing to meet.

  And now here he was. On the road. Like a hormone-drenched high-schooler kicked into gear by a kiss and a whisper.

  He’d thought he was familiar with this stretch of highway but the lines of strip malls and outlet stores that he’d expected to run all the way to the merge with the Interstate had long since disappeared behind him and all that was visible now on either side of the road was flat grassland, its colors already fading into a unif
orm deep purple as the sun finally dipped out of sight beyond the low and distant western hills.

  A black limousine hurtled past on the other side of the divider line heading back to civilization. Jackson watched its tail-lights disappear in his rear-view and realized it was the only other vehicle he’d seen in either direction for several minutes. He also realized that the breeze coming in through his windows had dropped several degrees once the sun had vanished. He didn’t need to put the heater on yet but he rolled up the windows and wondered again why the hell he was doing this.

  Chinchilla’s instructions, needless to say, had kept up the family tradition. Why use street names or freeway numbers when there was a whole world of latitudes, longitudes, north-by-northwests, and Evening Stars to play with? And the meeting point hadn’t been specified so much as poetically alluded to. He’d managed to translate it down to this highway at least and ask her if he’d reach the Interstate. She’d said no and, when he’d asked where he turned off, added that he needn’t turn off, that he’d stop when it was appropriate, and that she’d be there. He took that to mean that somewhere between here and the Interstate – theoretically just a mile or so ahead, though he could see no sign of it yet despite the flat ribbon of highway running straight in front of him to the horizon – she’d be parked on the side of the road and would flag him down. Provided it wasn’t beneath her dignity to do anything so mundane or rational.

  Night had fallen properly now and his headlights were the only illumination on the road. Where the hell was everybody? He’d been driving less than an hour but he was as alone as if he were on some back road in the middle of the Mojave. And the road itself, and the land around it, didn’t seem to jibe with what Jackson knew to be the geography of the area. This straight? This empty? This dark? It was as if he were driving through a vast flat midnight desert bounded to right and left at the limits of his vision by long low hills scarcely distinct in the darkness from the sky above or the ground below.

  Paul Simon had just finished assuring him that, though the day was strange and mournful, the mother and child reunion was only a moment away when the radio cut off completely.