Tonight his wire mistress would provide for him, in so many ways.
Lee returns to his basement, thinking about Claudia, thinking about himself. Thinking about the last date he had, two years ago, with a comic book store clerk. Her name was Vicky; they’d dated twice, then she’d been busy and had stopped taking his calls. They’d never even kissed; worst of all, he couldn’t go to that store again.
Lee thinks about the first time he’d been laid, when a college roommate had set him up with the stripper at a party. Fifty bucks had got him fifteen minutes in a hotel linen closet. The stripper had been in her forties, with skin like a worn leather bookbinding and hair like dead leaves; at the time he hadn’t minded - he’d finished the instant he slid into her - but later the thought of her made him nauseous.
Now there is Claudia, the first woman who has shown interest in him in a very long time. She doesn’t seem to mind that he’s slightly paunchy, with rumpled clothes, fraying at the cuffs; that his hair is, at twenty-eight, prematurely receding. She likes him for his work. She’s intrigued by him. That makes her sexy.
Lee begins to imagine their relationship going further, and sees potential problems: he doesn’t work, and usually has very little extra money. He lives in a friend’s basement; although his friend wouldn’t mind seeing Lee with a woman (in fact, he’d probably kneel and shout for joy), there’s the matter of Lee’s pride. He doesn’t even have a car.
But maybe Claudia won’t care about these things. Maybe she’ll be so taken by him that she’ll overlook these small shortcomings. Maybe she’ll become his muse, exciting both his body and his mind. Maybe she’ll think he’s great in bed.
He changes into his best shirt and the heavy boots he bought in a garage sale; they’re a size too big and usually give him blisters, but he likes the way they look: rugged; slightly menacing.
He takes the bus to the address she’s given him. It’s not a great section of town; in fact, it looks like an urban war zone. He feels reluctance when the bus pulls away, stranding him in front of a grocery store with signs in a language he doesn’t even recognise and rusted bars across the windows. He checks the directions he’s printed out from the online map, and sees it’s only three blocks or so…three blocks down a street where most of the streetlamps have been shot out, and the graffiti is in layers. Half a block ahead of him are two six-foot-tall teenagers with net shirts and tattoos, watching him in amusement. He tries to keep his head down as he passes them, and drops his feet heavily with each step, emphasising the sheer heft of his boots. They ignore him, but he can feel their eyes on his back and he finds himself walking faster.
At last he’s at the address, which turns out to be a hole-in-the-wall Thai cafe. It can’t have more than half a dozen tables inside, lit by bare bulbs overhead. In the back is a dusty altar, with food and drink set inside a red alcove. There’s a dead fly in one window.
Claudia’s inside, waiting for him.
He enters and takes a seat, smiling.
‘You’re late.’
He smiles a sheepish apology, and tries not to stare. Stare at her leather vest, small and formfitting, with nothing on beneath it.
A middle-aged Asian man in a stained apron mutely hands him a menu. He takes it and glances down the single page that looks as if it was done on a typewriter sometime in the 1970s. He snickers at the name ‘Prik King’. Claudia tells him it’s the best thing here, if he doesn’t mind spicy. He assures her he doesn’t, even though he knows that he’ll pay for that boast later in the night.
The meal is uneventful, with very little Smalltalk exchanged. The food is adequate; Lee’s not that familiar with Thai, and thinks it’s all too spicy. He’s pleased that she offers to pay for herself, since it saves either his wallet or his pathetic explanations. Afterwards, they exit into the asphalt desolation. Lee asks her how she found this place, and she tells him she used to come to this neighbourhood to buy crystal.
‘For a friend,’ she adds.
They reach her car, an older-model sedan, free of bumper stickers or other unnecessary decorations. She tells him she has to get up early in the morning, so she’ll say good night here. He’s disappointed, until she hands him a piece of paper with her phone number written on it.
‘Call me,’ she says, ‘and next time I promise it won’t be so early.’
He briefly considers asking her for a ride, then decides to maintain that illusion for a while longer. He tells her he’ll call. He means it, too.
She pulls out, leaving him to find his own way back to the bus stop, his feelings a clash of optimism and anxiety. She expected more, he’s sure of it. He should have offered to buy her dinner. He should have tried to get her to talk more. About herself. About his work. He should have tried to kiss her goodnight.
But he hoped she just thought he was mysterious, maybe wary of his own passions. After all, he was the author who Darkrealm magazine had once called ‘the splatterest and punkest of the splatterpunks’. He’d have to make sure she saw that quote.
Suddenly the neighbourhood didn’t scare him any more.
Geek loved the buzz he got off the hunt. In many ways, he preferred the hunt to the actual kill. The final spurt was good, oh yeah, but it didn’t last as long as this. He didn’t think anything in the world could feel as good as watching the girl from across a street, following her, knowing that she was already his.
In fact, he felt like God.
He calls her the next day, in the early evening. He asks what’d be a good night for her, and is pleased when she says tonight - but this time he has to choose what they’ll do, and it needs to be good.
He has an idea as soon as he hangs up. His friend is home now, upstairs, and Lee asks to borrow his car. His friend smiles and hands him the keys when Lee tells him he has a date.
He logs onto the web and heads for the local newspaper site, where he soon finds the article he wants. He makes a few notes, straightens up and heads for her place.
She lives in a small duplex in an ordinary, slightly lower-middle-class area. Not nearly as bad as where they ate last night, a fact he’s thankful for, especially since the car is not his.
She’s waiting outside and as she climbs in she asks where they’re going.
‘No, no, that’d spoil it.’
She smiles, apparently satisfied with this answer.
He drives to a large shopping mall across town. It’s late for the stores by now, so die parking lot is largely empty.
‘A mall?’ she asks dubiously.
‘Not the mall. We’ll start in die parking lot, though.’
He drives to the edge of the lot. A few feet away is a small road encircling the mall; beyond that is undeveloped woodland, dark and thick. He parks, grabs a flashlight and gets out; Claudia follows.
He allows a dramatic pause.
‘So?’ she says.
‘Remember that story from about three weeks back? The girl’s body they found in those woods?’
Claudia nods.
Lee goes on: ‘They found her car right about here. They figure she was forced into the woods, where her assailant raped and then killed her. He really tore her up.’
Claudia looks around. ‘How do you know this is where the car was?’
‘I have a friend on the force.’
Of course he doesn’t; but he figures she’ll buy into it. Most people seem to think every writer these days has ‘a friend on the force’.
He shines the flashlight towards the woods. ‘Want to see where it happened?’
‘What do you think?’ she says, grinning.
He leads them across the small frontage road and finds what looks like a small, seldom-used trail in the brush. They follow it silently until it opens into a small clearing, surrounded by two fallen and half-rotted logs. It’s fall, and the ground is thick with mulchy leaves, damp and springy underfoot. He circles the light around the open space.
‘This is where it happened. Where he brought her, raped her and killed her. Righ
t here.’
Claudia follows the light beam forward, examining the area intently, as though hoping to find a missed clue, a drop of blood. When she turns to him, her eyes glitter, caught in the ray of light.
‘Did you do it?’
Lee’s jaw drops for a second. It didn’t occur to him that she might get that idea. ‘So, what, you think that just because of what I write …?’
‘Why else would you bring me here?’
‘Ahh,’ he stumbles for a beat, then, ‘I guess we’re thinking alike, because I thought if you liked my books you might like something like this.’
It works; she laughs and nods.
‘Okay, so you didn’t do it.’ She almost sounds disappointed, then looks at the brush again. ‘So how do you think it happened?’
He considers for a moment, then steps backwards, the way they’ve just come. He mimics pushing someone before him. ‘They figure he had a gun or knife. He made her walk ahead of him, until they came about here. Then he—’
‘No,’ she cuts him off. ‘No more tell - it’s time for show. I mean, you don’t have to actually kill me.’
Lee utters one nervous bark before he catches himself. ‘You want me to … ah … hurt you.’
‘C’mon, that doesn’t sound like the Lee Denny who wrote Slit Thing.’
‘Oh, you’ve read that one too?’
‘I’ve read all of them.’
Lee begins to think she’s lying. She could be trying to trap him. Hell, she could even be with the police. Christ, he thinks to himself, am I suspect?
She picks up a long, mouldering branch, so rotted it can barely support its own weight. ‘Do you think she struggled? I do.’
She suddenly swings the branch.
Lee reacts by reflex, turning, drawing back, and the branch impacts on his left shoulder. It disintegrates instantly into a pulpy mess, but the pain is still enough to make both his fear and anger flare.
‘Maybe she left her mark on him—’
She raises her hand, with its long plum-coloured and filed nails. The hand comes down, and this time Lee does more than flinch - he catches the hand, stopping her, pushing her back roughly. She stumbles on the mulch underfoot, but doesn’t fall.
‘What would have happened if she’d screamed, do you think?’
She inhales deeply, opens her mouth - and Lee panics. He scrabbles at her, clumsily, and they both go down, tangled in the thorns and mulch. Lee is as dazed as she is; it takes him a moment to realise that he’s on top of her, and that she’s laughing at him.
‘Gee, Lee,’ she begins sarcastically, ‘do you think the real rapist was a stumbling idiot too?’
‘Fuck—’ Lee tries to push away from her.
‘You can’t leave now, Lee. I haven’t even screamed yet.’
This time he clamps his hand over her mouth first. She twists her head and bites him, leaving three red crescents in his fingers. He cries out in pain and shock, then reacts without thinking, striking out. The slap leaves her breathless and dazed.
When she can talk again, she looks at him and tells him, ‘I’m still not afraid of you yet.’
Lee understands the game now, and he begins to claw at her. He tears the buttons on her blouse, and nearly apologises.
She stays silent, but goads him on in other ways. Once she bites his ear, hard and painful; once her hand comes up and tears at his hair.
The sex is awkward but quick. When it’s over, Claudia picks herself up and silently walks back to his borrowed car. He drives her home; she goes back into her duplex without ever looking at him. ,
When Lee gets home, he’s surprised to see he’s got her blood on his shirt. Not a great deal of blood, just a splotch the size of a quarter -but her blood, nonetheless. From when he hit her. When he raped her.
Lee struggles to think the situation through, to understand if this was entrapment or manipulation. But those questions bother him less than the dull, sick sense of disgust which has engulfed him. Disgust so strong it’s a physical sensation knotting in his stomach, disgust at both her and himself.
Anxiety, dread, disgust, whenever he thinks about it. And it’s all he can think about.
The slit thing had been fun to kill.
Jed had knocked it half out with one punch, then taken it into the woods, down by the river. There he’d torn its clothes off, feeling his long cock harden with each rip. The slit thing had regained consciousness while he was thrusting into it. The look on its face had been priceless; Jed had laughed when he’d seen it. Then he’d had to knock out three teeth when it screamed.
He thought he’d probably near killed it by blowing his wad, but just to be sure, after he’d finished he’d smashed its brains out with a big river rock. Then he’d gone home to a big meal of home-cooked ham and eggs. He’d eaten an entire carton of eggs, washed down with a six-pack of long-necks.
He lay back on his single coy, and stared at the wood ceiling, feeling warm and sated and pleased with himself. Yessiree, he thought, the world seems mighty fine tonight.
Lee doesn’t leave the basement for the next two days. He doesn’t write, he doesn’t drink or listen to music; the television’s on, but he doesn’t watch it. The sound is turned down so low that it becomes a light babble, a string of noise to keep the silence from completely deafening him.
Instead, he tries to decide what to do. At first he thinks about calling her, but as one day passes, and he’s two days past that night, and there are no police at his door, he realises she’s not out to see him land in jail. Plus he’s terrified to call her. What if she tells him she’s been badly hurt, maybe even wants him to pay for her medical bills? What if she tells him she has AIDS? Worst of all, what if she tells him she’s had better?
At some point he realises it’s now Saturday morning and he’s scheduled for a signing at a local science fiction bookstore today. In a few hours he’s supposed to smile and chat up fans and sign copies of Wire Mistress and play the part of hip envelope-pusher. Instead, he’s so unnerved at the idea that she might show that he almost calls and cancels.
A half-hour before the scheduled time he decides to go; maybe it’ll be good for him to get out, to see other people, to see readers who will remind him of his passion and vocation.
He shaves, drags a comb through his hair (and winces when he passes over a small spot where a few strands have been yanked out), throws on a leather jacket and walks out the door. He’s fifteen minutes late to the store, but they expect that from authors, especially the ones with reputations to maintain.
He scans the line of thirty or so, queasy with anticipation, but she’s not there. Relieved, he takes his place at the folding table behind stacks of his books and gets out his favourite signing pen, the one with a little skull face sculpted onto the top.
The third or fourth in line passes Lee a rolled copy of Stumpfuckers and asks the dreaded question: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’
For the first time, Lee almost tells the truth: that he’s really not very good at characters or plots, but as long as he pushes the gore and perversion nobody will notice. Instead, he falls back on the rote answer he uses for interviews, about how he’s just reflecting mankind’s every-increasing capacity for horror. The fan looks impressed and clutches his signed paperback as if it were a holy relic.
Normally Lee loves signings; in fact, the sense of appreciation, even of adulation, is probably the reason he writes. He knows these people think of him as an iconoclast, an artist, a pathfinder through the fields of feel-good meta-fiction.
But today he notices, for the first time, things about them that annoy him. For one thing they’re all young, much younger than him, several even sporting unresolved acne conditions. For another thing, they’re all dressed like him, a uniform of black leather and denim. But worst is the way their eyes gleam when they talk about his books. Their voices drop, becoming slightly huskier; some of them sweat or shake. They’d probably like to think the look is feral, but now it just looks somehow needy,
like a penniless junkie.
At some point he knows he hates them.
Lee signs the books dutifully, but leaves the instant the allotted time is complete. He knows the store personnel will think him rude, or snobbish, but he doesn’t care. He has to escape from these fans, these outsized children who devour impossible paperbound bloodshed in order to call themselves rebels.
He has to escape - but has nowhere to go.
Our interview with Lee Denny was scheduled to last for just one hour during the recent Splatter2001 convention, but actually took three hours because the ever-generous Mr Denny continued to sign books for fans during our poolside chat. Denny has only been writing professionally for four years, but during that time has produced an amazing six novels and a dozen short stories. Fans have bags of books, and invariably mention their favourite Lee Denny-penned scene of death or mutilation (I hear the murder-by-corkscrew scene from Blood Kin mentioned several times). Lee’s relationship with his fans seems a natural place, then, to begin our conversation.
Q: You seem to have a real connection with your readers.
A: I’m giving them something they don’t get anywhere else: release for their rage. Rage is something our society creates, but refuses to acknowledge; if we experience it, we think we must be freaks, there’s something wrong with us. Twenty years ago punk music provided an outlet; now it’s extremist fiction.
Q: Then do you think of yourself as a horror writer? Or as a writer of ‘extremist’ fiction?
A: I don’t think of myself as anything but a writer. I write what I feel. I’m lucky that a lot of other people feel the same way; I’m also lucky that they can’t write!
Q: Aren’t there a lot of imitations of your style appearing online now?
A: So I’ve heard, but I haven’t read any of it.
Q: You haven’t? Don’t you read other horror books?
A: I’m usually too busy writing!
Q: Okay, let’s try a tough one: How would you react if one of your books was found in the possessions of a mass murderer?
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 26
